If the Radiance of a Thousand Suns: The Hiroshima Project
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Nearly 50 years to the day after the devastation of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, the topic remains highly charged and explosively political, as op-ed writers and opponents of museum exhibits furiously debate whether the use of the bomb was a necessary evil or a gratuitous show of force, whether the Japanese emperor was ready to surrender or the atomic bomb was the only thing he could understand, or whether we who were born after 1945, as New York Times columnist Russell Baker suggests, have no business discussing it at all. But the fury that surrounds the debate over the end of World War II has seldom been matched in dramatic treatments of it. Eyewitness accounts of the dropping of the atomic bomb and its aftermath, like those of John Hersey and Ota Yoko, remain immeasurably shocking. But the sheer magnitude of the incident’s horror has thwarted those who have tried to weave that horror into a traditional dramatic framework.
The ill-fated love affair between a Japanese businessman and a French actress in Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras’ haunting elegy, Hiroshima, mon amour, serves only to point up the infinitesimal nature of individual tragedies in the face of global ones. Said Duras in an interview concerning the film, “The only thing you can talk about is the impossibility of talking about [Hiroshima].” Portraying simple human interactions in the wake of Nagasaki likewise proved too daunting for legendary Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa, whose patchwork story of Japanese children vacationing with their grandmother who’d survived the blast in his 1991 Rhapsody in August pales beside the profoundly silent images he uses to represent memories of the atomic bomb.
Struggling nobly to create a complete picture out of the mismatched parts, David Zak tosses in insightful quotations from the likes of H.G. Wells and Jean Toomer and mood-setting songs like “Amazing Grace.” Though he directs smoothly, his editorial approach comes straight out of the lecture hall. What he feels needs emphasis, he repeats. J. Robert Oppenheimer’s moving but oft-repeated “I am become Death, destroyer of Worlds” is said twice here, as is Patricca’s physicist’s observation about Dante’s quest for self-knowledge. And lest anyone forget who Oppenheimer is, virtually every time his name is brought up he’s referred to in school-report fashion as “father of the atomic bomb.”
