CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Marilyn Monroe is poolside in a lawn chair, wearing a bathing suit and sipping a cocktail. She sets her drink down, turns toward the camera, and says, “I always hated careless men.” Thus ends an obscure Air Force training film, one of several that conclude with the actress encouraging military recruits to keep working, and to keep their work under wraps.
Kevin Hamilton, a U. of I. professor of art and design, stumbled across this sexy bit of cinematography at the National Archives at College Park, Md., where he and Ned O’Gorman, a U. of I. professor of communication, were researching government films about atomic bombs.
“That was in no way our greatest scholarly find,” Hamilton says, “but it was a thrill.”
Hamilton and O’Gorman are coordinators of “Atomic Light in the Public Light,” a series of lectures and film screenings beginning Tuesday (Feb. 15) sponsored by the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. The series examines the use of film as a tool of science and propaganda in national efforts to develop and justify the world’s most powerful nuclear weapons. “The bottom line many of these films propose is that this stuff is safe, clean, and inevitable,” Hamilton said.
Hamilton and O’Gorman have collected about 200 films in their research into Lookout Mountain Laboratory, a Los Angeles studio established by the military in 1947.
Between 1947 and 1962, studio personnel filmed all sorts of weapons tests, including more than 200 atmospheric atom bomb blasts. The films vary in length, content and tone depending on the target audience.
“Sometimes they were made for someone totally new to the science, such as a member of the presidential cabinet,” Hamilton says. “Other times, they were made for the lowest-on-the-rung contractor or workers doing the grunt work on the test site. The story got told differently for different audiences.”
One common thread through many of the movies is the stunning beauty of the bomb blasts.
“Clearly, the filmmakers understood that aesthetic beauty might help soften the impact of the bomb’s terrifying moral and ethical questions,” Hamilton says. “That’s what propaganda does sometimes.”
The series will open with a 30-minute montage of mushroom cloud imagery, followed by a discussion led by Jonathan Fineberg, a professor of art history; Brett Kaplan, a professor of comparative and world literature; Dianne Harris, director of IPRH; and Julie Turnock, a professor of media and cinema studies.
On March 1, Megan Prelinger, the author of a book about the imagery of a different government project, “Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957-1962,” will present a lecture, following the showing of a montage of hand-drawn images used in the Lookout Mountain films. The event will begin at 7 p.m. in Room 62 at Krannert Art Museum, 500 E. Peabody Drive, Champaign.
The focus will shift to the Lookout Studios, with a showing of the documentary “Hollywood’s Top Secret Film Studio” in Room 66 of the Library, 1408 W. Gregory Drive, Urbana.
Byron Ristvet, academic dean of the Department of Defense Nuclear Weapons School in New Mexico, and Peter Kuran, who has worked as an animator for George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic and now has his own company, Visual Concept Entertainment, will be guest speakers.
More information, including a complete schedule of events, is online.
