Educational materials.
Apr. 20th, 2002 10:57 amThis is all
geekchick's fault.
She directed me to the Internet Moving Images Archive, source of a bewildering number of short public domain films. These are the movies you probably watched in elementary school - ten or twenty minutes long, showcasing the glories of corn production or how bread is made... or how to achieve social conformity, or why nuclear war is survivable.
They're strangely hypnotic. I've been mostly watching two kinds of movies: the social guidance kind, of which the most entertaining example so far has been 1947's Are You Popular? ("No. Girls who park in cars are not popular."), and the civil defense kind, in which we learn that we'll be just fine in a nuclear attack as long as we follow proper procedure.
The eeriest nuclear attack movie I've seen so far is the 1951 film Atomic Alert, aimed at elementary school children. "Everyone is in on this. Strangers will understand... if you can't get into a house, get behind a wall - on the side away from the city." "Stretch out. Cover your eyes and neck. Do not look at the blast. In about one minute, the immediate danger is past. Then head for safer cover. Get indoors if you can. Shed your outer garments - they may have radioactive particles."
The most surreal aspect of this movie is that adults barely appear. We see children closing the living room drapes to protect against fallout and retreating under a table in the basement, rows of apartment house children filing into an inside hallway and covering their heads with their jackets, children outside falling to the ground with their hands over the backs of their necks as a brilliant flash fills the sky. At the very end, the children under the basement table answer the door to a couple of Civil Defense adults, who assure them that their parents are fine and that the radiation levels in their home are safe. Otherwise it's as if we're in a science fictional world in which the blast has killed off all the grown-ups.
The longer movie About Fallout, from 1963, is aimed at adults. It reassures us that radiation is nothing new - we've always been in contact with radiation from space. Happy people at a beach, bathed in radiation, underscore the essential innocuous nature of it all. In a nuclear attack, we are cautioned, we'll be exposed to dangerous radioactive fallout - but the radioactivity will quickly diminish and everything will be all right. We just need to build a fallout shelter and spend two weeks there. "Fallout accidentally swallowed with water or food will do you no immediate harm, but it is still wiser to wash, wipe, or peel foods to remove fallout particles." "If you were to be caught outside, ordinary clothing would keep fallout particles from touching your skin. Fallout particles can then be brushed off." (image of a man removing his overcoat and shoes before entering the fallout shelter.)
I'm wondering now if the people making these movies really believed them.
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She directed me to the Internet Moving Images Archive, source of a bewildering number of short public domain films. These are the movies you probably watched in elementary school - ten or twenty minutes long, showcasing the glories of corn production or how bread is made... or how to achieve social conformity, or why nuclear war is survivable.
They're strangely hypnotic. I've been mostly watching two kinds of movies: the social guidance kind, of which the most entertaining example so far has been 1947's Are You Popular? ("No. Girls who park in cars are not popular."), and the civil defense kind, in which we learn that we'll be just fine in a nuclear attack as long as we follow proper procedure.
The eeriest nuclear attack movie I've seen so far is the 1951 film Atomic Alert, aimed at elementary school children. "Everyone is in on this. Strangers will understand... if you can't get into a house, get behind a wall - on the side away from the city." "Stretch out. Cover your eyes and neck. Do not look at the blast. In about one minute, the immediate danger is past. Then head for safer cover. Get indoors if you can. Shed your outer garments - they may have radioactive particles."
The most surreal aspect of this movie is that adults barely appear. We see children closing the living room drapes to protect against fallout and retreating under a table in the basement, rows of apartment house children filing into an inside hallway and covering their heads with their jackets, children outside falling to the ground with their hands over the backs of their necks as a brilliant flash fills the sky. At the very end, the children under the basement table answer the door to a couple of Civil Defense adults, who assure them that their parents are fine and that the radiation levels in their home are safe. Otherwise it's as if we're in a science fictional world in which the blast has killed off all the grown-ups.
The longer movie About Fallout, from 1963, is aimed at adults. It reassures us that radiation is nothing new - we've always been in contact with radiation from space. Happy people at a beach, bathed in radiation, underscore the essential innocuous nature of it all. In a nuclear attack, we are cautioned, we'll be exposed to dangerous radioactive fallout - but the radioactivity will quickly diminish and everything will be all right. We just need to build a fallout shelter and spend two weeks there. "Fallout accidentally swallowed with water or food will do you no immediate harm, but it is still wiser to wash, wipe, or peel foods to remove fallout particles." "If you were to be caught outside, ordinary clothing would keep fallout particles from touching your skin. Fallout particles can then be brushed off." (image of a man removing his overcoat and shoes before entering the fallout shelter.)
I'm wondering now if the people making these movies really believed them.