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Business News/ Opinion / Blogs/  CINEMA CURRENT: Bombs away, but we’re okay
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CINEMA CURRENT: Bombs away, but we’re okay

Nuclear disarmament excites filmmakers as much as peaceniks

A still from the movie Gojira. (A still from the movie Gojira.)Premium
A still from the movie Gojira.

(A still from the movie Gojira.)

Bulgarians queued up on 28 January to vote in a referendum on the country’s nuclear programme. The referendum had to be scrapped because of a low turnout---around 20 %---but at least the Bulgarian public got the opportunity to voice their opinion. There doesn’t seem to a similar exercise in sight for the under-construction Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant in Tamil Nadu, even as protests against the project continue. A documentary in support of the protests is available on NDTV’s YouTube channel.

Meanwhile, we are days away from the second anniversary of the nuclear reactor disaster in Fukushima in Japan, which continues to send ripples through the region. The series of meltdowns at the plant followed an earthquake and tsunami on 11 March, 2011. Japan has lived with the flip side of nuclear technology ever since the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Among Japanese cinema’s timely and timeless response to the horrors of the bombings is Ishiro Honda’s Gojira (Godzilla in English).

The special effects will seem rudimentary to modern eyes, but Honda achieves a lot with little. The monster is quite obviously a giant puppet playing with cardboard models, but Honda convincingly conveys the scale of the destruction, especially in the scene in which a train runs right into the creature’s feet.

Takashi Shimura, best known outside Japan for his lengthy association with Akira Kurosawa, closes the films with words that were more prophetic than Honda probably realised. “I don’t think that was the only Godzilla," he says. “If they keep experimenting with deadly weapons, another Godzilla may appear somewhere in the world." It did – apart from close to 30 remakes in Japan, Godzilla travelled to Hollywood a few times, and was the subject of an expensive and noisy Roland Emmerich vehicle in 1998. Stick to the original.

The world’s pursuit of the bomb inspired trans-continental melancholy (Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour) and farce (Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove or: How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb). Resnais’s French New Wave gem is about the second world war as experienced by a French woman shamed for being in love with a German soldier and a Japanese army recruit whose family is from Hiroshima. In Kubrick’s brilliant comedy, a nutcase American general trains nuclear warheads on the former Soviet Union for no apparent reason, memorably skewers the Cold War arms race.

Ralph Meeker’s Hammer picks up a blonde on the run who is clad in nothing more than an overcoat one night, leading him into a maze that winds through the rich and poor quarters of Los Angeles. The dialogue is snappy, the characters, many of them shot in wide-angle close-ups, compete in the twisted stakes (the brilliant expressionist cinematography is by Ernest Laszlo), and the plotting is endlessly intriguing without being confusing. What is a noir doing in a list of nuke-themed films? Spillane aptly called it the Great Whatsit.

Films about the Indian nuclear programme and the effects of radiation on ordinary people are few and far between. There are documentaries, as always, such as Anand Patwardhan’s War and Peace and Shri Prakash’s Buddha Weeps in Jadugoda.

This weekly series, which appears on Fridays, looks at how the cinema of the past helps us make sense of the present.

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Published: 01 Feb 2013, 04:45 PM IST
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