by Paris Pompor
Despite the meltdowns, fallouts and dangerous clowns with fingers poised over activate buttons, nuclear power and despotically-run nuclear powers remain a reality. Filmmakers Smriti Keshari and Eric Schlosser’s multimedia installation The Bomb arrives for the Sydney Festival with a live soundtrack by DJ Adam Freeland’s group The Acid.
“Recently, The Bomb and The Acid were invited to celebrate the Nobel Peace Prize award to ICAN,” says Indian-American filmmaker Smriti Keshari about her involvement with The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. “Being in Oslo, at this profound and memorable commemoration made me quite optimistic of a world without nuclear weapons.”
Yet when asked what the most powerful or shocking quote/image used in her film is, Keshari offers this: “There’s a moment at the end of the film where we have a quote by Ronald Reagan at the Second Inaugural Address [in] January 1985. The line is: ‘We seek the total elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth.’”
That was over 30 years ago!
Now instead of a cowboy actor in the White House, the citizens of the world’s leading nuclear power have voted for a reality TV star to man the button.
“The Bomb was made to deliberately ignite an emotional and visceral understanding of the nuclear reality we are living in right now,” says Keshari.
Some of the visuals in the film are hypnotically beautiful and public artworks are also designed to be “enjoyed” on some level by an audience. Did that create any artistic dilemmas, given that you’re dealing with a subject that is so obviously abhorrent? Is there a conflict between the documentarian portraying the horrors and the artist creating something visually appealing?
Keshari: It always struck me how nuclear weapons could be terrifying and haunting, or beautiful and seductive, at the same time. They certainly have a mesmerising quality to them, that is deeply rooted to an attraction to machines and their universal significance as symbols of power.
We live in a world with almost 15,000 nuclear weapons. These weapons are buried underground, they are out of sight and out of consciousness. The idea of nuclear war is abstract and unfathomable. The human imagination is incapable of encompassing all the psychological variants of this reality. And it’s really hard for an individual to have an emotional connection to something that they can’t see or feel. We really wanted to create a deeper, visceral experience of nuclear weapons, so people could feel the gravity and reality of living with these weapons. There’s an entire system, processes, timing, reasoning that led us to this reality. In order to understand how we’ve gotten to this reality, we must first recognise the emotions nuclear weapons evoke – their allure, their beauty, their construct, and the ultimate death wish at the heart of them.
How did the connection with Adam Freeland’s The Acid group come about and did they have free reign to create the soundtrack or did you have strong ideas about the direction of the music?
Keshari: Adam Freeland and I had met many moons ago, during his DJ set in a three-story Los Angeles venue. Fast forward to a couple years ago, I was telling a good friend about The Bomb and playing through some of the music references and he recommended that I listen to The Acid’s Liminal album which had just been released. I had an immediate, visceral connection to it. Through a powerful underlying simplicity, The Acid propel the listener into an emotional journey. In early creative conversations with Adam while hiking in Griffith Park, he often spoke of the art of a good DJ set in terms of building and releasing tension and then building again. The Acid are adept at creating space, magnitude and depth by holding back where others might want to go bigger.
Silence was certainly a favourite topic of mine that we discussed. Silence can sometimes be viewed as the antithesis of sound, but silence needs to exist for one to experience sound. It consists of it, you need one to experience the other. Kind of like dark matter in the universe. So, we would often debate what silence sounds like.
As a filmmaker, before thinking of any scene I often think first of the music that would help convey the emotion. In the process of making the film and the original score, Eric, Kevin [Ford, the third co-director] and I often discussed with [The Acid] how nuclear weapons tapped into different emotions – adrenaline, fear, celebration, chaos, sadness, etc – and how the music can heighten those feelings.
Given what’s going on with North Korea and the American president’s propensity for undiplomatic outbursts, nuclear war seems as real an imminent threat as it did when I was a teenager in the 1980s, when it was one of the “hottest” issues for political activists and one that caused many people my age a lot of angst and shaped our psyches. What’s your own personal experience/associations with the threat of nuclear war and how has it impacted your views?
Schlosser: William J. Perry – a man whom I greatly admire, who served as Secretary of Defence during the Clinton administration – believes that the risk of a nuclear catastrophe is greater today than it was during the Cold War. Perry is a mathematician and an engineer, about as calm, rational and level-headed as anyone you’ll ever meet. So, if he’s worried, we should be, too. I went to university during the 1980s, and everyone thought about nuclear weapons then, and there was a sense that the world might be destroyed any day in a nuclear war. Thank God, it wasn’t. After the Cold War ended, everyone assumed that the nuclear threat vanished along with the Berlin Wall. But it didn’t. And the lack of public awareness about the threat made the danger even greater. About a decade ago, I began to worry that the lack of public discourse about nuclear weapons was a dangerous thing. I spent six years researching and writing a book about the subject, Command and Control. I later co-wrote and produced a documentary based on the book. And then I worked with Smriti Keshari to create The Bomb. My aim has never been to tell people what to think. With all my work, I’m just trying to open people’s eyes and get them to think.
I couldn’t help but think of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Obviously that film has a very different tone to yours, but do you remember seeing Kubrick’s film for the first time?
Schlosser: Dr. Strangelove is one of my favourite films, brilliantly written, acted, and directed. Sheer genius: ‘Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here – this is the war room.” Ken Adam’s set designs were absolutely incredible. But perhaps the most incredible thing about Dr. Strangelove is how accurately it depicted the nuclear command-and-control system of those days. Kubrick did an insane amount of research. Crazy as it may seem, Strangelove was much closer to the truth than anything you could have read in the mainstream media of 1964.
It looks as though the audience will be standing at the Sydney Festival, as if at a concert rather than the regular, seated, live-scoring film events we often see. Was this just a logistics decision, or is this always how you stage The Bomb and how you want audiences to experience it?
Keshari: The Bomb certainly feels like something that happens to you, versus something you passively watch. If you think about it, we spend a lot of time moving through simultaneous open windows in our computer. All of us live in this new kind of space – a space that provides a fixed view of the world, a space that has become more controlled and seemingly more isolated. And The Bomb breaks away from that, and invites you into this strong, shared experience without the traditional roles and cues of being an audience member.
In New York and Glastonbury, [audiences] were inside the film; it was haunting and unsettling. In Berlin, we had the film inside the grand Haus der Berliner Festipiele Theatre with The Acid performing a live score. In Sydney, we’re quite excited to bring it in dual screens for the first time. At every step of the way, each part of The Bomb – whether it’s the film, the music or the 360 live build – it was created so it could, individually and collectively, be bold and poetic – and could convey a sense of contained chaos.
The Bomb has been described as both a “plea for nuclear disarmament” and a “crash course in all things atomic”. Does it make a distinction between nuclear weapons/war and nuclear power-stations, which despite some major catastrophes are still touted by some as a viable source of non-coal power?
Schlosser: We don’t deal with nuclear power at all in The Bomb. But I think the same sort of technological arrogance applies. We’re much better at creating complex systems than at controlling them – or at knowing what to do about them when something goes wrong. The meltdown at Chernobyl occurred during a safety drill. Seven years after Fukushima, we still don’t know exactly what’s happening inside the cores of those reactors. Machines will always go wrong. And so maybe we shouldn’t build any that can go wrong catastrophically and kill millions of people and contaminate the earth with radioactive poisons for tens of thousands of years.
The Bomb is staged at Carriage Works for the Sydney Festival on January 23 and 24. For more info/tickets head to https://www.sydneyfestival.org.au/2018/the-acid-the-bomb
