Watch The Atomic Cafe For Free

best movie i've ever seen.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Blistering performances.

No pun intended but this film is a blast. I only recently became aware of it and promptly decided to order it up via my local library. For someone like myself who lived through most of the era represented in these archival clips, it's a wistful, melancholy trip down memory lane. Like so many others growing up in the Fifties I remember quite vividly how we'd practice those duck and cover drills and stockpile canned goods in a secure room at school in case we found ourselves under attack by those pesky Russkies. The film instructively takes us on a chronological journey from the end of World War II through the Cold War paranoia of the Fifties and Sixties showing how the threat of nuclear war was to be taken seriously, or at least as seriously as the government would have us believe. You know, even as a kid I had a pretty good idea that kneeling next to a wall and covering my head with my hands would make me a goner if the real thing ever happened.One of the more surreal moments offered here was that near rabid clergyman exhorting families with a fallout shelter to deny access to outsiders lest they imperil their own safety. It brought to mind that 1961 Twilight Zone episode 'The Shelter' which pretty much laid out the same scenario with some modification. In the story, a family man who built and supplied his own fallout shelter was besieged by his neighbors to allow them entry when the dreaded siren heralded a nuclear attack. The story demonstrated just how ugly people can become when faced with their own mortality; it was one of Rod Serling's better scripts.In terms of sheer absurdity (and there were numerous examples), the suggestion that doubled me over had to do with providing a bottle of tranquilizers for an extended period in a bomb shelter. How else to contend with the paranoia and boredom of being cooped up while waiting for an emergency to be over. Which would be good advice if you had the foresight to locate your shelter at least twelve miles away from ground zero because otherwise you'd be toast. By the way, a bottle of a hundred would be about right.For those of you interested in this type of stuff, the copy of "The Atomic Cafe" I watched came in a two DVD set from Docurama Films. The bonus disc features yet another eight government propaganda shorts from the era including 1951's 'Duck and Cover' with Bert the Turtle, and what looks like a must see - 'Self Preservation in an Atomic Attack'. For a more in depth treatment of the Bikini Atoll nuclear test, I'd recommend the 1988 documentary "Radio Bikini".

Compilation films rest somewhere flanked by documentary and experimental, comprised entirely of newsreels, training films, home movies and other archive footage. The general intent is to displace archive materials from their initial circumstances so as to redefine what they show, which frequently trusts the logical overlap between the inborn standpoint of the initial excerpts and its revolutionary reprocessing, a bringing of political character to concealed connotations. The result is what many consider a black comedy, but the humor is largely incidental, Much of it coming from we the modern audience's reaction to the footage from decades ago, not to mention the use of obviously party-line songs from the time to complement the ideas on screen.This scandalous, sobering and shrewd work of "compilation verite" is directed, or edited rather, by Jamie Loader and Kevin and Pierce Rafferty, and is a dark lampoon of the disturbing propaganda bounding the government's attainment, enhancement and trial of both the atomic and hydrogen bombs. The film is an craftily marshaled patchwork of authorized madness, hauled from a wide-ranging collection of propaganda films initially made to placate the American people by deflating the ramifications of nuclear consequences.Despite the independent and tutorial intentions behind such government films as The Magic of the Atom, other films like Duck and Cover were made to comfort the people that they could be protected in a nuclear holocaust, that the resilient and prepared would endure. Some of the most tragic scenes in the movie watch grade- and high-school kids taking part in civil defense programs. Girls in home ec show their canned goods intended for post-nuclear survival, and it's plain on their faces that they've no inkling of how they'd endure nuclear war, and not much expectation of doing so. Kids are instructed by adults in shots from educational films, and it must scarcely have been comforting to hear about your "chances" in a nuclear war.By assembling all these archive resources the filmmakers take us on an excursion so despicable and mirthful that it'd only have been made feasible via misinformation. This half-decade collaborative effort from the three directors opens with the atomic explosion that consummates the Trinity Test, and which paves the road for the bombs released over Japan. The film interlaces transitions without the aid of any voice-over narration. Instead, it adjusts in and out of radios and TV programs, poetically mingling events together through associative cutting. One such edit cuts from what seems like a Navy periscope lens to the square tube of a television screen in an American home. The correlation incites us to ponder the impression of being watched, subconsciously underlining the filmmaker's observation that those in control cannot be believed. Such edits take the audience through the crucial moments and scenes that shape the increasing phobia of communism, reaching a pinnacle with the start of the Korean War, and Truman's warning he'll use the atomic bomb afresh.The annotations of a cartoon clip illustrating a small man being enveloped by mixed hands maintains when people are mystified they'll heed any voice that can identify their problem and advise a treatment. What seems like an induction of communism seamlessly transitions into footage of Eisenhower being elected into office. The suggestion that America is governed by totalitarians is involved when Eisenhower's speech about America's godly wealth coincides with a montage showing the growth of consumerism from tube tooth-paste to TV dinners. This inspired sequence fittingly frames the United States' whole case for the atomic bomb as its single defense against a Soviet menace to fries and hamburgers.As in Stone's JFK, Eisenhower again cautions the people about the relocation of power from the simple, modest musket and canon all the way to the hydrogen bomb in one life span, apparently contending how the developments in science have surpassed the sensory and scholarly aptitude of most Americans. However spoken certainties feel vulnerable to the far-reaching bombardment of visual propaganda this cult classic hurls at us. This just shows the film's genius for discarding academic "certainty" to emphasize the incongruity and skepticism needed to manufacture "counter-propaganda", evading "filters" with the purpose of taking on beliefs.The candid or verite moments the film shows partiality towards are hinted by the insertion of such upfront moments as Truman caught smiling before the news cameras before giving a grim address about the A-bomb. Such flickers of reality or moments caught live, like footage showing the trouble a man has saying "stethoscope" while reporting Ethel Rosenberg's execution, are conflicting with the impression of government as a foolproof establishment impervious to censure.Maybe the film's declining the people any facets besides the truth of their unwariness is more connected with The Atomic Café's deduction of the public from its philosophical recipe. But to justify the filmmakers, one must understand that the distress of the materials they've assembled occupies the concern and standing of the atomic bomb itself, which, unlike other civic matters, has turned a 180 in the last 50 years.By amassing misinformation or fabrications renouncing the truth of nuclear war, this, one of the most incisive, embittered and horrifying looks at propaganda, McCarthyism, American paranoia or the self-induced threat of annihilation, exposes our deficiency of challenge to the apprehension produced by political propaganda and the party-line discord that followed. Whether Americans of the era didn't have the capability to challenge or rebuff this propaganda is a contentious fact.

(To counter the comment which plays this film off against Atomic Cafe and deems this title 'pointless')Radio Bikini documents, using some of the 18 tons of film shipped to Bikini by the US Navy to record Operation Crossroads, or as we know it, the Bombing of Bikini Atoll by air and undersea atomic bombs explosions.The remarkable lengths the navy went to capture the exercise is impressive. The direct gaze into the event via full Technicolour all seems counter to the half truths and mixed messages deliberately put out to the American public as the experiment preceded.Perhaps the single most disturbing issue which is not explicitly presented but alluded to in the final moments of the film, is that 22.000 navy sailors were deliberately sailed into ground zero and directly exposed to strong doses of radiation for a good number of days. This was despite public announcements expressing an interest in preserving the health of the US navy subjects and the issuing of protective clothing only to a few scientists. Meanwhile the sailors swam, sunbathed, hung out in the highly radio active wreckage and unforgivably used ground zero sea water to replenish their on-board drinking water converters. Sailors who became sick in ground zero were experimented on in hospital back in San Fransico and after discharge many 1000s must have died horrendous and disturbing deaths later on in their lives in the manner of the interviewee used in the film. The film is about the Bikini operation from beginning to end. Unlike Atomic Cafe, it's sticks to a specific subject and story and it's approach is sober and historically rooted rather than general, absurdest and scatter gun. It needs to remain focused because history must yet establish the culpability & intent to cause harm to 22.000 navy sailors by their own US Navy command and this is the main outstanding question of the film.

With the current regime threatening the nuclear option in the middle east, I hope that this documentary sees a new audience. I remember finding a pamphlet showing what would happen if LA was bombed. In our circle, we would have experienced some physical affects, but not immediate death. As a 6 year old reading that I thought of my grandparents who lived in the inner circle. The stilted, self-satisfied voice-over readers, and the juxtaposition of real bomb footage and stranger than fiction instructional films is surreal. The duck and cover segment, well, we had to do that at school. Surely we are not operating under the same misconceptions that a nuclear strike is sanitary. This is really a historic document.