Introduction
The footage in this case is from the 1945 Trinity test in New Mexico - the world's first atomic detonation. The blast sound here, however, is as artificial as the narration and dramatic music. Despite the presence of countless data recording instruments at this test, we have no sound recordings of this historic moment – nor of most any atomic test. The sounds you associate with nuclear explosions come from other sources - rocket launches perhaps, more traditional explosives, or altogether synthesized sound. For comparison, watch some of this same footage as it exists in archival form (here digitized by filmmaker Peter Kuran, a Hollywood special effects technician who has devoted his life to preservation of nuclear films):
If you are a hearing person, watching the silent footage likely pushes you further out of the action, but also invites your closer looking. Staring into the inferno, we realize that no human could safely behold this scene. The camera is a proxy, allowing those behind the creation of such previously unknown destruction to catch a glimpse of things that would be over in a literal flash for anyone caught in the bomb's intended blast zone.
The addition of sound creates the illusion that one could actually stand and experience such a thing in its specific and proximate horror. Sound in this case creates the illusion of not just any kind of presence - but of impossible, terrifying presence. Sound in nuclear test films is key, in other words, to their achievement of the sublime.
Maybe it's strange or even abhorrent to think of depictions of nuclear destruction as sublime. You're used to feelings of the sublime as taking place in nature, and its depiction through art. The sublime happens for you in the drama of a thunderstorm barreling across a sunny sea or prairie, the thrill of staring down into the spray of a powerful waterfall from a precipice above. But for some time now, historians, artists and poets have observed how often experiences of the technological have taken up this same role. To watch the controlled demolition of a building, or the awesome power of an ascending Saturn V rocket is to feel a smallness before the universe, perhaps the same sense of one's mortality, while remaining safely free of actual threat. The experience of the sublime is a feint, a trick – a way to face mortality that keeps you in control.
Likewise, many have pointed to the role of the sublime in the human fascination with images of nuclear weapons in action, and indeed in the very choice of where to detonate them. Why else would we see images and sequences of the first underwater nuclear test repeated over and over again in popular culture, foregrounded by palm trees and an apparently deserted island? If we must live with the threat of total destruction these images pose, why not choose to experience our fear in the context of a situation that assures us - and especially Americans – that we are far away from their effects? Staged as such, maybe it even turns an ugly and violent despoiling of a place – and, less visibly, a people – into a marvel, a source of pride at human accomplishment in producing something that rivals the wonders of nature.
From a cropped photo in a domestic scene to a wide-format immersive still image, the picture's very format mediates our distance from the event. Likewise the placement of palms and abandoned human habitation in the foreground, or even the camera's location high above the scene. We may be more apt to view it as a marvel and not a threat when we are distanced from it. As we'll see through a number of examples, the addition of sound to silent film footage of nuclear blasts plays a similar role, and may even offer more opportunities for re-orienting us to these images than working with still images. As we go in search of the role of sound in our experience of nuclear blasts, we'll look to many different examples, but will eventually return to this 1946 test in Bikini Atoll. To prepare you for the journey, we'll next view two versions of a typical example of an edited sequence from Crossroads Baker – one with sound effects added by an unknown contemporary editor, and another silent.
