(This relevant part of the above clip -a cartoon about how to survive a nuclear attack- is about 5:20 into it).
Frank loaned me the absolutely amazing The Atomic Cafe, a movie which -because a nuclear holocaust did not come to pass in the Cold War- veers wildly from dark comedy to terrible tragedy. Like any movie or novel worth a damn, it resists synopsis or encapsulation, and I’m loathe to post a clip at all because no ten-minute segment can convey how skillfully assembled, how humorous, how frightening, or how sad the total work is.
However, reading A Canticle for Leibowtiz and now revisiting Solzhenitsyn’s work has brought the Cold War to mind, and not merely in a historical sense. Like any historical situation, the Cold War tells us as much about the future and about our nature as it does about the past.
The filmmakers, while obviously capable of seeing the comedy in profiteers outfitting tract homes with dubiously useful fallout shelters and the ubiquitous cartoons advising children and soldiers what to do if they should suddenly see the flash of an atomic blast, also show the serious and moral preoccupations of the leaders of the US and the USSR, and the effects that their decisions had on the national psyche.
I highly recommend it; it’s both funny and quite sobering. The entirety of the film can be viewed on YouTube, although this leaves much to be desired; here is the complete film in segments.
Some other good excerpts are here and here, but I’d recommend watching it seriously on DVD.
