Hacker Cinema
Crossroads
1976 · Film · documentary · 36 min
Directed by Bruce Conner
The 1945 atomic-bomb explosion at Bikini Atoll becomes a thing of terrible beauty and haunting visual poetry when shown in extreme slow motion, shown from 27 different angles, and accompanied by avant-garde Western classical music composed for electric organ by Terry Riley. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with Pacific Film Archive in 1995.
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You might appreciate the film Crossroads by the artist Bruce Conner. It's a montage of unmanipulated high-speed film of a nuclear test at Bikini Atoll. The soundtrack is synthesized, partly realistic noises, partly minimalist drone music, one section being by Terry Riley.
Of course it's meant to be troubling. Conner was inspired (according to http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/library/WMConnerFallout.htm ) by this book: "Bombs at Bikini: The Official Report of Operation Crossroads" (Available here: https://archive.org/details/bombsatbikinioff00unit )
Here's a recent review of the film: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jun/15/bruce-conner-crossroads-1976-nuclear-test-film-rapture
And an evocative, kind of Lovecraftian, extract from the official report:
"Things happened so fast in the next five seconds that few eyewitnesses could afterwards recall the full scope and sequence of the phenomena. By studying slow-motion films...the scientists eventually pieced together the full story. Without question one reason why observers had so much trouble in retaining a clear impression of the explosion phenomena was the lack of appropriate words and concepts. The explosion phenomena abounded in absolutely unprecedented inventions in solid geometry. No adequate vocabulary existed for these novelies. The vocabulary bottleneck continued for months even among scientific groups. Finally after two months of verbal groping, a conference was held and over thirty special terms, with carefully drawn definitions, were agreed upon. Among these terms were the following: dome, fillet, side jets, bright tracks, cauliflower cloud, fallout, air shock disc, water shock disc, base surge, water mound, uprush, aftercloud."