Hiroshima at 75

For his latest film, Yoshida turned once more to melodrama as a means of sensitively engaging a difficult political issue, here the devastating legacy of the Hiroshima bombing. Mariko Okada stars, in her 154th film, as the eldest of three women trying to uncover the hidden family ties that may or may not bind them together. A shared memory of the Hiroshima disaster draws the three generations together in a search back to the very site of the atomic trauma that unites them, with Hiroshima standing in as a figure for the limit point of the national imagination. Among Yoshida’s more classical films, Women in the Mirror is an assuredly stylish late work that carefully balances the three women’s stories as interlocking pieces of a complex psychological and historiographic puzzle.Read More »

The complicated relationship between physicist Leo Szilard, scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves. Assigned to oversee the project, Groves chooses Oppenheimer to build the historic bomb. However, when World War II inspires the government to use the weapon, Szilard reconsiders his opinions about atomic warfare.Read More »

Summary:
Ryuich, the survivor when bombing in Nagasaki has the amazing document of those tragic at the order, it is record of explosion of an atomic bomb on August 9, 1945 11:02. He has made this record at five-year age on the tape recorder of the father. The sound of a bomb injures mentality of the young man, causes him almost physical pain, but gradually he finds in is mute also a consolation. Over time Ryuichi becomes we will gain the idea to recreate this awful sound that his mind and its life threatens.Read More »

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A somber, visually distilled, and deeply affecting portrait of the human toll and uncalculated tragedy of nuclear holocaust. In contrast to Shohei Imamura’s characteristically unrefined, primitivistic, and subversively bawdy cinema, the film is shot in high contrast black and white, creating a spare and tonally muted chronicle of dignity, survival, community, and human resilience. Through recurring literal and figurative images of regression, Imamura conveys a dual meaning, not only in the community’s noble attempt to rebuild Hiroshima and return to a semblance of normal life after the annihilating bombing but also in their collective gradual and systematic erasure from Japanese society through long-term effects of radiation sickness, infertility, cultural (and geographic) isolation, and social stigmatization.Read More »

Synopsis:
Seventeen years after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a newspaper reporter looks for the bomb’s effects, but everyone seems to have forgotten. He meets a woman who was there when it happened but when they fall in love she isn’t able to move on.Read More »

In 1946, shortly after the atomic bombings, an American army team shot a documentary about ‘defeated Japan’. Reel 11004 concerning Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be classified top secret for 36 years. Mirabelle Fréville has found it and edited it to denounce the first censorship in nuclear history.Read More »

From Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art:
The explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their aftereffects are among the most widely photographed and most thoroughly suppressed events in history. While hundreds of thousands of feet were shot by scientific, military, and medical personnel, most of this material remains secreted in official archives. Significantly, this first official record (released only on a restricted basis) is confined to structural damage, and completely omits visual evidence of human casualties. The initially routine interview with a survivor (a Jesuit priest, also described in John Hersey’s book) becomes a horrifying reliving of the event when he recounts the actual bombing.Read More »

The history of nuclear weapons between 1945 until 1963.

“Trinity and Beyond” is an unsettling yet visually fascinating documentary presenting the history of nuclear weapons development and testing between 1945-1963. Narrated by William Shatner and featuring an original score performed by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, this award-winning documentary reveals previously unreleased and classified government footage from several countries.Read More »

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When the United States, the world’s biggest military power, decided that China, the second largest economic power, was a threat to its imperial dominance, two-thirds of US naval forces were transferred to Asia and the Pacific. This was the ‘pivot to Asia’, announced by President Barack Obama in 2011. China, which in the space of a generation had risen from the chaos of Mao Zedong’s ‘Cultural Revolution’ to an economic prosperity that has seen more than 500 million people lifted out of poverty, was suddenly the United States’s new enemy.Read More »