DARK Movies at the museum - The Day After Trinity (Else, 1981) - APOCALYPSE
GUM FILMBOX
DARK movie nights at the museum! GUM and Ghent based horror & cult collective KURU treat you to several scientifically (ir)responsible movie nights around the themes of Conflict, Apocalypse and Death. An aftertalk follows each film.
On Friday evening, October 25, we will serve the definitive documentary on the development of the atomic bomb by Robert J. Oppenheimer and his pioneering team of scientists.
in collaboration with Ghent based horror & cult collective KURU
Friday October 27 / 8pm - 10.30 pm
pay what you can: € 5 & € 7
with intro & aftertalk
“The godfather of the atomic bomb” Robert J. Oppenheimer is ubiquitous, thanks to Christopher Nolan's blockbuster. Documentary The Day After Trinity (Jon Else, 1981, USA) provides a non-fiction counterweight to 'the story' of Oppenheimer, the creation of the atomic bomb, using archival footage and interviews with him and then colleagues.
For the Manhattan Project, the world's best physicists, chemists and mathematicians were brought together in the desolate desert of Los Alamos (New Mexico, USA). The charismatic Oppenheimer coordinated them through political pressure and scientific admiration. What was a major prestige project that led to new scientific insights, however, resulted in large-scale destruction and death. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 instantly killed an estimated 200,000 people —and even more in the aftermath, due to radiation.
The Day After Trinity shows that involved scientists were not left untouched. Their initially optimistic spirit came down: what had been their "controlled experiment" for years at their Los Alamos Laboratory, had unprecedented destructive effects on the other side of the world. They had given humanity a weapon with which it could destroy itself, argued Oppenheimer, who would long oppose the further development and use of nuclear weapons.
What drove Oppenheimer and his colleagues to work on a weapon of mass destruction? Was the development of the atomic bomb 'inevitable'? Why was there no (sufficient) resistance after the first detonation test — code name Trinity ? Were people overcome by the power of their 'creation'? The Day After Trinity highlights one of the darkest pages in history, with many ethical issues that clearly concern us to this day.
