The Atomic Café – Collector’s Edition (1982/Docurama Films DVD)
Picture:
C+ Sound: C+ Extras: B Documentary: B
Before
documentaries become hits and now fill a huge hole the lack of solid journalism
has left behind in the mainstream media, documentaries were written off as
boring and usually not worth your time, when in reality the best ones had great
points to make. Michael Moore’s commercial
successes have fortunately changed that, but there are many great documentaries
that have been made in the past and one of the best endures after a quarter
century. Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader
and Pierce Rafferty created The Atomic
Café back in 1982 and it holds up as well now as ever.
The film
is a remarkable, incredible and exceptionally edited pieces of footage of all
kinds that show the dawn of the nuclear age, how the U.S. Government decided to
handle the awesome & deadly new power and how a combination of
inexperience, lack of knowledge, ignorance and even outright lying created a
dangerous school of thought that treated radiation as harmless, as well as gave
the worst possible advice on what to do about nuclear and hydrogen weapons and
their fallout.
The
naïveté is horrifying as the more you watch and the more you know and realize
what is going on, the more people you realize are being poisoned and more or
less killed by begin treated as disposable.
This is not to say that there was an outright move on some unnamed
higher-ups to ignore the effects, but that a whole storm of factors made this a
disaster for those trusting their government.
Needless to say, this makes for an excellent companion to Stanley
Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, but
seeing Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe
would also be a good idea.
Besides
the amazing research and thorough look at footage and events you may have only
seen in passing, even in other documentaries, your eyes will be opened wider
and wider to what happened over the years of open testing. Then there is the amazing find of songs that reveled
and jumped on the nuclear bandwagon, as well as footage of how “atomic” and
“nuclear” become pop culture catch phrases just in time for the prefabricated
1950s.
But there
is so much more here and it adds up to a stunning portrait of a time and place
that ironically made the U.S. (after oil) the world superpower, but the impact
is one you don’t want to miss and it is great Docurama is reissuing this as a
double DVD set. More on that below.
The 1.33
x 1 image varies in quality along with the authentic film footage (both 35mm
and some 16mm) but it is pretty good looking here and is as good as this is
going to look on DVD. The Dolby Digital
2.0 sound is usually monophonic from its original sources, but has some stereo
separation from audio added or even manipulated for effect. Extras include trailers for more Docurama
DVDs, text on Docurama on the first DVD, while the second includes the full
length versions of these classic short U.S. Government propaganda films:
1)
Duck
& Cover (1951)
2)
Our
Cities Must Fight (1951)
3)
House
In The Middle (1954)
4)
Self-Preservation
In An Atomic Attack (1950)
5)
Operation
Crossroads (1946)
6)
Operation
Cue (1955)
7)
Survival
Under Atomic Attack (1951)
8)
Birth
Of the B-29 (1945)
They are
all must-see films, but only after you see Atomic
Café, but they all add up to a portrait of mass media insanity you will
never forget.
- Nicholas Sheffo
