The Bomb

This fifty five minute film is about the culture built up around nuclear weapons. Archive footage, promotional films, test recordings and animation follow one another; the credits list musicians rather than experts, because the account moves through image and music instead of speech. Footage of nuclear tests, civil defence films and military parades pass one after another in the same stream. That is also what makes it uncomfortable: rather than hiding the fascination these weapons still hold, it shows it directly and leaves the viewer alone with that pull. Instead of giving a history lesson it sets the whole spectacle built around the weapon in front of us as it is. The production put together by Kevin Ford, Smriti Keshari and Eric Schlosser was completed in 2017.