A film publication with a Geiger counter

Radiation Cinema examines the atomic age at the movies: the giant-insect cycle, the post-bomb picture, the science the studios mangled on the way to the screen, and the government footage the studios borrowed.

Everything here is written as film criticism and film history. The films are real, the studios and directors are named where they made the picture being discussed, and no title, year or credit on this site is invented. Where a claim is disputed, the piece says so in the body rather than in the headline.

The history is not the entertainment

The events behind this genre — Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the test programmes, the people downwind of them — are written about as history: factually, without relish, and never as spectacle. We do not publish atrocity photography, we do not invent or round casualty figures for effect, and we do not carry anything operational about weapons. The subject of this site is how cinema imagined the bomb, not how the bomb works.

Pictures

Every image on the site is presented as a frame on a proof sheet: an enlarger-stamped number, a one-line caption, a credit. That is not decoration. It is the argument — the visual record of this genre is evidence, and it should be examined as evidence rather than used as wallpaper.

Corrections

If a date, a credit or a runtime here is wrong, we want to know, and we will correct it in place. Write to the desk via the contact page.

Bylines

Pieces are filed under the House Critic, the desk name this publication writes under. We do not profile living filmmakers or performers, and we do not publish quotations we cannot source.