MICHAEL H. PRICE: From ‘Barefoot Gen’ to ‘White Light/Black Rain’
Steven Okazaki’s documentary feature White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will arrive August 6 over the HBO premium-cable network, marking the 62nd anniversary of the arrival of thermonuclear warfare. The film’s harrowing impact has been a matter of record since its in-competition run during last January’s Sundance Film Festival in Utah.
Though hardly the first of its kind, White Light/Black Rain proves a timely and emphatic reminder. It possesses a sharp consistency with the pioneering Barefoot Gen manga-turned-anime tales of Keiji Nakazawa, and with Masuji Ibuse’s novel Black Rain, as filmed in 1989 by Shohei Imamura. Okazaki’s film brings full-circle, East-meets-West, a persistent question raised by one history-in-the-making Hollywood epic of 1947, The Beginning or the End, which traces the Manhattan Project to a climax at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (In its very title, The Beginning or the End had declared thermonuclear weaponry a topic of perpetual relevance. Further outcroppings since then have included 1982’s The Atomic Café, a pageant of A-bomb boosterism propaganda; and 1995’s The Plutonium Circus, concerning the Texas town most thoroughly identified with nuclear “preparedness” as a tax base.)
White Light/Black Rain finds its more persuasive voice in interviews with survivors of the bombings, illuminated by a gauntlet of harrowing archival footage. Its appreciation requires context, lest White Light/Black Rain be mistaken for an unprecedented re-examination. Its nearer origins lie in the graphic novels of Nakazawa, whose first-hand account of Hiroshima – he professes to have noticed the approach, followed by “a million flashbulbs going off at once” – yielded two Barefoot Gen animated movies of the 1980s. Nakazawa has aligned himself with Steven Okazaki since the 2005 documentary The Mushroom Club, a short-film stage-setter for White Light/Black Rain.
The bombings have amounted to fodder, both imaginative and factual, for the American motion-picture industry since well before that turning-point of World War II. In a time of reciprocal hostilities, the U.S. entertainment industry felt a duty to commit propaganda as a function of advocating an any-means-necessary end to the war.
WWII, of course, no more ended with the bombings than it can be said to have begun at any absolute moment. One war bleeds into another, like the ocean ignoring its explorers’ charted boundaries, over the greater sweep of history. It is a simpler matter to cinch the moment at which Hollywood – itself an occupied territory at the time, given the influential presence of the armed forces’ motion-picture production bureaucracy at studios large and small – began anticipating a bombing run over Japan as a matter of meeting the Axis powers’ aggression in decisive terms. (more…)
Ah, August. The birds are singing. The bees are buzzing. The barbecues are cooking. And that means it’s time for — <a href=”
