Hiroshima, mon amour: a new film coincides with the rebirth of the nuclear age

Cross Currents, Spring, 2004 by Carey Monserrate

August 6th of next year will mark a date of tragic distinction: the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. Along with the incineration of Nagasaki, the United States' decision to develop and deploy history's most efficient "weapons of mass destruction"--effectively ending World War II and inaugurating the nuclear age--resulted in over 200,000 deaths upon impact, and an estimated 125,000 subsequent fatalities from radiation exposure and related ailments, almost all of them civilian casualties.

Attempts to grapple with the frightening legacy of the bomb in this country have produced a number of memorable works in print, television, and film, most notably John Hersey's Hiroshima (1946), Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964), the Oscar-nominated documentary The Day After Trinity (1980), The Atomic Cafe (1982), War Games (1983) and ABC's chilling prime time post-nuclear dramatization, The Day After (1983).

Taken together, their release dates read like an electrocardiogram of Cold War anxiety, with spikes roughly corresponding to the milestone events of the post-nuclear era: the end of the World War II; the Cuban missile crisis; and the election of Ronald Reagan, whose pro-military and defense policies, centered on an exponential build-up of our nuclear arsenal, are popularly credited with the collapse of the Soviet Union (a development which has created an equally grave security threat through the exposure of enormous stockpiles of nuclear weapons and fissile material to potential criminal and terrorist access at non-secured sites throughout the former Soviet Union).

The anniversary of Hiroshima may produce yet another spike in collective anxiety and cultural reflection upon the nuclear threat: after an interval of relative complacency following the end of the Cold War, the issues of nuclear warfare and proliferation have returned to center stage in international affairs, prompted by the twin specters of global terrorism and the uncontrolled dissemination of nuclear technologies and fissile material to formerly non-nuclear states with anti-Western political ideologies (see below). If so, South African director Carey Schonegevel's Original Child Bomb, produced by Holly Becker and premiering at this year's Tribeca Film Festival (May 1-9), serves as an eloquent harbinger of works to come.

Crafted in the style of montage, Schonegevel's visually engaging, rhetorically forceful hour-long documentary unleashes a battery of cinematic modes and techniques--from dramatization, straight narrative, and interviews to animation and archival footage--to recount and interrogate in evocative terms the events surrounding the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the current landscape of nuclear proliferation, and their implications for our collective future.

In certain respects, Original Child Bomb operates squarely within the tradition of American "anti-nuke" protest documents, presenting a kaleidoscopic synthesis of many of its predecessors' approaches to the subject: Hersey's accounts of the infernal suffering visited upon Hiroshima's citizen-targets, told from the perspective of surviving witnesses, or hibakusha, find echoes here, along with Atomic Cafe's canny use of stock footage to cast American officialdom's triumphalist attitude towards nuclear arms in a darkly sardonic light.

But this film is articulated in a thoroughly contemporary visual idiom, its aesthetic elegantly poised between experimental/avant-garde cinema on the one hand and educational/activist documentary on the other. Editor Mako Kamitsuna--a Hiroshima native--displays a keen sense of rhythm and pacing, apportioning the flow of imagery and information in carefully calibrated segments that occasionally challenge but never overwhelm the viewer (unless so intended). The result is a visual orchestration integrating quick-edit intensity and contemplative, elegiac tranquility--a threnody in the key of vexed moral reflection.

The film's moral pedigree derives from an authoritative source: Thomas Merton (1915-1968), the influential American Trappist monk, mystic, author, and poet. Original Child Bomb borrows its title and various narrative and thematic elements from Merton's 1962 prose poem of the same name--a synoptic evocation of the events leading up to the bombings, which he termed "points for meditation to be scratched on a cave wall." Becker and Schonegevel successfully reprise the dominant notes of ironic indictment in his spare poetic diction.

Their selection of this particular work as a source text for the film is inspired, resonating with several enigmatic parallels in the trajectory of Merton's life and thought and Japan's involvement in the war. Merton entered the order at the Abbey of Gesthemani outside Louisville, Kentucky a few days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Although a Catholic by affiliation, he was powerfully drawn at the end of his life to the religions of the East, and especially to Zen, writing extensively on the subject (see his Mystics and Zen Masters [Noonday Press: November 1999] and Zen and the Birds of Appetite [New Directions: 1998]). He died in a tragic accident during a pilgrimage through Asia, a final journey movingly recorded in The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (New Directions: 1998). Finally--and most strangely--one of the airmen aboard the plane that dropped the bomb on Japan would enter Merton's Abbey several years after the war's end.