The Omniscient Narrator and the Unreliable Narrator: The Caseof Atomic Café

Wiener, Jon.

Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies,Volume 37.1 (Spring 2007), pp. 73-76 (Article)

Published by Center for the Study of Film and HistoryDOI: 10.1353/flm.2007.0037

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The Omniscient Narrator and the Unreliable Narrator: The Case of Atomic Café

Jon Wiener - University of California-Irvine

The form of the historical documentary today is familiar—painfully familiar: the narrator, the talking head-experts and witnesses, and the historical footage that illustrates the points the speakers are making. The narrator is required and often the star—From Ken Burns’s Civil War on PBS, narrated by David McCullogh, to Eyes on the Prize, narrated by Julian Bond, to the new series on The History Channel, Ten Days that Unexpectedly Changed America, where Jeffrey Wright narrarates “Antietam,” and Martin Sheen does “The Homestead Strike”—the narrator is the indispensable voice of meaning, and the explainer of the significance of the visual materials.

The presence of the narrator in historical documentaries often reveals a lack of confidence in the visual. Meaning in all these documentaries is communicated through the words in the script. The visual material in a documentary may be glorious and powerful, but the reliance on the narrator reduces the finished work to the level of an illustrated lecture.

But one historical documentary demonstrates that, in some cases at least, the omniscient narrator is unnecessary. Meaning can be conveyed solely through the editing and juxtaposition of film images. The meanings thus conveyed can be more powerful, more compelling, and more memorable than the verbal information in the script read by film narrators. That film is Atomic Café, a feature-length documentary released in 1982, produced, directed, and edited by Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty and Pierce Rafferty.1

Obviously some historical documentaries require an omniscient narrator because the available visual documentation is inadequate, or because the analysis or interpretation is too complex to be presented through images. But in some cases, for some issues, reliance on the narrator is a weakness that can be avoided.

Atomic Café presents a critique of official government policy regarding the threat of atomic war and nuclear radiation in the 1950s—the world of “duck and cover” drills in school and backyard fallout shelters. The filmmakers collected a wide variety of visual archival materials from that era – military training films, educational films, news broadcasts, public service spots, TV and radio comedies and dramas. Some of them were official government documents; many others were unofficial. Many of these films were shown to captive audiences in schools and military units; others were standard

broadcast fare on radio and TV. So the film is a montage of found footage.2 It is also hilarious.

Instead of an omniscient narrator, Atomic Café has dozens of narrators – all problematic: the narrators of the different news clips, educational films, and military training films. These voices speak with all the trappings of authority, but each represents a kind of “unreliable narrator.”3 The point of the film is precisely to critique the statements of these narrators, to expose these narrators as purveyors of lies.

This is the brilliant thing about Atomic Café: the only voices on the soundtrack, the only narrators in the film, are not telling the truth. The truth is found not in any spoken words, but rather exclusively in the filmmakers’ juxtapositions of visual documents.

Thus in Atomic Café there is no omniscient voice to tell viewers what to think. Some writers have argued that the absence of a narrator “lets the viewers come to their own conclusions.”4 But this is wrong. This film has a message, presented clearly and forcefully; it is an expose about government propaganda. The message is that

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School children were trained to protect themselves from nuclear blasts.

Jon Wiener | Special Film Review Essay

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the government lied about the dangers of nuclear radiation and nuclear war. The message is: do not believe what the government says about nuclear war being winnable.

The filmmakers convey meaning through the classic devices of cinema: editing and juxtaposition. You could call it roughly “Eisensteinian”—a rapid montage, juxtaposing images by film editing, that creates ideas not found in the original images, ideas that moreover have a strong emotional impact. At least you could call the style of Atomic Café “montage-based” – it is a film that produces ideas through juxtaposition.

For example: The most powerful sequence involves “Troop Test Smoky,” the 1957 military exercise at the Nevada Test Site where US marines were posted just outside ground zero during an atmospheric test of an atomic bomb—and then ordered to march, in battle gear, under the mushroom cloud. It was an “experiment” involving human subjects. The Atomic Café filmmakers found in the army film archives footage shot by a cameraman on the ground with the soldiers at Troop Test Smoky.

First we see footage of a briefing officer explaining what will happen at Troop Test Smoky. He says the sight of the atom bomb exploding “is one of the most beautiful sights ever seen by man.” As for the danger, he says, “radiation is the LEAST important” of the bomb effects, and tells the men, “don’t worry about yourselves. As far as the test is concerned, you’ll be okay.”

The next clip is a military training film with pathetically poor acting. A chaplain explains to soldiers who are worried about being close to ground zero that “you look up and you see the fireball as it ascends up into the heavens. It’s a wonderful sight to behold.”

Next is an animated instructional film that says radiation is a hazard only when radioactive particles “get into the body through breaks in the skin or through the nose or mouth.”

Next comes the newsreel-type footage shot on the ground during Troop Test Smoky, first showing the soldiers waiting in trenches, then the blast, and then they climb out and walk across the Nevada desert directly under the mushroom cloud – this is the incredible and horrifying footage the filmmakers found in the army film archives.

Next come news interviews with the marines:

q. “Did you keep your mouth shut, or did you get a mouthful of dirt?”

a: “I got a mouthful and a face full of dirt.”

The next shot is crucial: newsreel footage that shows dust clouds hitting the Marines in the face.

We have heard earlier, in the briefing film, that film badges will be worn to determine the amount of individuals’ radiation exposure, and “you’ll be moved out in time to avoid sickness.”

Another shot from the news interview:

q. “We see pinned on your lapels here this white badge. Can you

tell me what that is?”a: “That’s film badge to determine, to detect the amount of

radiation you’ve received in the area.”q: “And they can tell from that if you’ve received a lethal dose?a: “That’s right. They can.”5

The sequence clearly implies that these Marines did receive a lethal dose. And indeed many of them did. It was subsequently documented that many of these soldiers died of leukemia as a result of radiation exposure, so the film is documenting the events that would cause the eventual death of many of these men.

We see here several different kinds of source documents: army training films, animated educational films, some type of news broadcast, and the “live” footage from the military archives of the test itself. We have several different narrators, all voices of authority: the Marine briefing officer, the unseen omniscient narrator of the animated educational film, the onscreen news interviewer holding a microphone in front of Marines. None of them has the whole story; we learn that only through the editing and juxtaposition of clips.

What does this kind of filmmaking accomplish for the historian? As a study of Cold War ideology, as a critique of what Americans were told about the dangers their country faced, this kind of montage-based historical documentary provides a significantly richer and deeper argument. It shows not only the official claims of government spokesmen, but the way those claims were disseminated in an astoundingly wide range of media – including sources historians rarely examine, such as educational films and training films. Thus it provides the kind of immersion in primary sources that historians love – and that makes for compelling and memorable history.

What does this kind of filmmaking leave out? In this sequence, viewers are left uncertain about the implication that the Troop Test Smoky Marines received “a lethal dose” of radiation. Nowhere in Atomic Café is there any “where are they now” information – because the filmmakers’ rule was to use only documents from the period. (Jayne Loader in recent interviews says they shot many interviews providing updates, but decided not to use any of their new material.) So at the end of the film, viewers might well ask, “whatever happened to those guys from Troop Test Smoky?”6 Indeed they might ask the same question about everything in the film – “whatever happened with that bomb shelter campaign – how many people actually built backyard bomb shelters?” “What’s the real story on the Rosenbergs – weren’t they eventually shown to have been guilty?” And so on. The film does not answer those questions – to do so would require another film.

The film received rave reviews when it came out in 1982 – Vincent Canby of the New York Times called it “a devastating film” that “deserves national attention.”7 The Washington Post named it as “the most important film of 1982.”8 But none of the reviewers noted the most remarkable thing about the film – the absence of the omniscient narrator.

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The filmmakers however knew exactly what they were doing. As Jayne Loader explained in a 2004 interview, “we had certain formal principles that we chose to adhere to to make what we called a “compilation verite” – a compilation film with no Voice of God narration and no new footage created by us, the filmmakers.”9

Although Atomic Café represented what one reviewer called “an entirely new kind of documentary,”10 it was not without predecessors or influences. Jayne Loader mentioned Emile de Antonio, who developed what he called “the theater of fact.” His first film, released in 1964, was about Joseph McCarthy, titled Point of Order, and it had no narrator. It is a carefully edited selection from 200 hours of kinescopes of the televised Army-McCarthy hearings in which the only voices and the only footage involves McCarthy, opposing counsel Joseph Welsh, other senators, and other witnesses at the hearings. The film gives the appearance of “neutrality,” of “letting reality speak for itself,” but it is edited to produce a devastating portrait of the McCarthy, his arrogant tactics, his sinister ideas, his ugly face and his unbearable voice. Unlike Atomic Café, however, Point of Order is based on a single visual document, so there is no juxtaposition.11

A related style of documentary without a narrator can be found in the style developed in the early 1960s by Richard Drew. His film Primary was about the 1960 Democratic primary in Wisconsin, where John F. Kennedy was running against Hubert Humphrey. The filmmakers shot the candidates in action and then assembled their film without narration. He called it “direct cinema.”12 His team included Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, and Albert Maysles. The greatest filmmaker who made cinema verite documentaries without a narrator is of course Frederick Weisman, whose started in 1967 with Titicut Follies, an exposé about the Bridgewater State Hospital, in Massachusetts; his 1968 film High School has been cited by the National Archives as an official “National Treasure.” Weisman calls his films “reality fictions,” to emphasize the role of the filmmaker in shaping the film.13 A more recent example of the cinema verite documentary is The War Room made by D.A. Pennebaker about Clinton’s 1992 campaign. The difference here is that all of these filmmakers shot their own footage in the “present,” whereas Atomic Café uses found footage exclusively.

Other documentary filmmakers have wanted to avoid the convention of the omniscient narrator and make explicit their own role in shaping the material. Thus we have the first-person documentary, in which the filmmaker himself appears onscreen explaining what he is doing and why. Key examples can be found in Marcel Ophuls film The Sorrow and the Pity, on the Occupation in France, and in the Claude Lanzmann film Shoah. Here the strategy is to renounce the omniscient narrator and instead film the filmmaker addressing the audience directly, saying these are MY ideas; here is my point of view, here is my argument, I am trying to persuade you to agree with me. Michael Moore represents the best-known example of this strategy of personal documentary work (although the real glory of Fahrenheit 9-11 is the found footage,

especially Bush continuing to read “My Pet Goat” to schoolchildren in Florida after being told that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center on 9-11).14

Atomic Café is the product of a particular political moment in America. Does this context make the film irrelevant or obsolete today? When it was released, early in the Reagan era, the film presented a critique of the revival of the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union and the Republican campaign for an anti-missile defense system, a campaign with some striking similarities to the arguments in the 1950s that the US could survive a Soviet nuclear attack. As Canby explained in 1982, “the film could not be more timely,” because of “the continuation of what might be called nuclear-war optimist today – the improvable assumption that nuclear wars can be fought on a limited scale without making the planet uninhabitable.” The “No Nukes” movement of the early eighties provided a political context for the filmmakers to work in, and later it provided an audience.

I do not think the film’s appeal today is limited by its place in the political context of 1982. Of course we are once again involved in a “war” – the war on terrorism—fought against an enemy which, we are told, threatens us everywhere and requires the strongest measures. But the film also remains compelling today because the issue of government lying, the critique of official propaganda, remains relevant. The documents in Atomic Café all come from the late 1940s and 1950s, but the implications are clear for our world today: the government does not tell the truth about the most important threats facing the country, and the media tend to echo the government.

Some viewers see Atomic Café as documenting the gullibility or stupidity of Americans in the 1950s. These viewers assume that Americans accepted the claims and arguments in the visual

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Soldiers were checked for radiation exposure after atom bomb tests were completed.

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documents quoted in the film; that they believed what they were told. But that is an erroneous interpretation of the film, I think. The film says nothing about whether the official and semi-official statements about atomic war were believed or accepted – it says only, “here’s what the government and the media told people about the dangers of atomic war.” The film documents what people were told, but not how they responded.

Atomic Café has been criticized for taking “cheap shots” at its targets – for making official Cold War spokesmen look foolish or stupid by the careful selection of images. So we see Truman laughing before he goes on the radio to announce in somber tones the dropping of the atom bomb, and we see the terrible acting and poor production in the army training films, and we see that the Girl Scouts demonstrating bomb shelter meal preparation are unattractive and fat. As Louis Menand argued in a recent essay on documentaries, this is indeed the logic of the visual: if it looks bad, it probably is bad.15 These are cheap shots, in that they are not refuting the best arguments on the other side in a thorough and serious way – but they are one of the ways of making a convincing and enjoyable film.

In conclusion, today’s historical documentaries rely on an omniscient narrator reading a script. That, in the words of Jayne Loader of Atomic Café, “is insulting to the audience. If you believe in the intelligence of your audience” – and we might add, if you believe in the power of your visual material, and if you believe in your own ability to edit that material in a meaningful and compelling way – then “you don’t need to tell them what to think.”16 Reliance on the omniscient narrator betrays a lack of confidence in both the power of the visual and the ability of the audience. The documentary can be more than an illustrated lecture. “Show it, don’t tell it” is a basic rule of fiction filmmaking. It is much harder to do that in a historical documentary. But it is a rule that makers of historical documentaries should follow more often. Atomic Café shows one of the ways it can be done.

NotesPrepared for delivery at the Anuual Meeting of the American Historical

Association, Philadelphia, Jan. 7, 2005

1 Atomic Café for some reason has been mostly neglected by scholars

of documentary film: The authoritative book by Erik Barnouw,

Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (New York: Oxford

Univ. Press, 1983), devotes five sentences to the film in a 350-page

book; it gets four lines in Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues

and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Press,

1991), and it is completely missing from Brian Winston, Claiming the

Real: The Documentary Film Revisited (London: British Film Institute,

1995)¸ Michael Renov, Theorizing Documentary (New York: Routledge,

1993), and Charles Warren, Beyond Document: Essays on Nonfiction Film

(Hanover, NH: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1996). It is also missing from the

Film & History online Guide to Documentary Films—it belongs in the

section “Wars: hot, cold and intelligence” – www.h-net.org/~filmhis/

documentary_films/war_hot_cold_and_intelligence.htm.

2 The term “found footage” originally referred to film “found in

the bins outside film labs, and on the cutting room floor,” which

experimental filmmakers “manipulated . . . to produce statements both

humorous and political.” www.luxonline.org.uk/themes/filmasfilm/

foundfootage.html

3 The notion of the “unreliable narrator” was introduced in Wayne Booth,

The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961).

4 See for example Jhana Germano, “Visiting the Atomic Café,”

www.janagermano.com/Interior%20Pages/Writing%20Links/Essays/

Visiting%20The%20Atomic%20Cafe.pdf

5 Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader and Pierce Rafferty, The Atomic Café: The

Book of the Film (New York, Bantam Books, 1982), 71-76.

6 For the subsequent story of the “Atomic veterans,” see Carole Gallagher,

American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War (Cambridge MA: MIT

Press, 1993).

7 Vincent Canby, “Documentary on Views about Atom Bomb,” New York

Times, 17 March 1982, http://movies2.nytimes.com/mem/movies/review.

html?title1=&title2=Atomic%20Cafe%2c%20The%20%28Movie%29

&reviewer=VINCENT%20CANBY&pdate=19820317&v_id=3241

8 Richard Harrington, “Atomic Filmmakers: Trio with a Point of View.”

Washington Post, 14 May 1982. For a full list of reviews, including

excerpts, see the compilation by John S. Lawrence at www.publicshelter.

com/main/tacrev.html

9 CONELRAD interview with Jayne Loader, “Atomic Café: History Done

Right,” at www.conelrad.com/jayne_loader.html

10 CONELRAD interview.

11 Christopher Long, review of “Point of Order,” www.dvdtown.com/

review/pointoforder!/17480/3296/

12 On Primary see Stephen Mamber, Cinema Verite in America: Studies in

Uncontrolled Documentary (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974), 30-41.

13 On Weisman and Titicut Follies, see Mamber, 217-220; also Ira

Halberstadt, “An Interview with Fred Wiseman,” in Richard Meran

Barsam (ed.), Nonfiction Film Theory and Criticism (New York: Dutton,

1976), 296-309, and David Denby, “Documenting America,” Atlantic

Monthly 225 (March, 1970, 139-142).

14 See Louis Menand, “Nanook and Me: ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ and the

Documentary Tradition,” The New Yorker, 9 & 16 August 2004, www.

newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/040809crat_atlarge.

15 Menand.

16 Jane Loader, “The Atomic Café: The Cult Movie Up Close and Personal,”

www.publicshelter.com/main/tac.html, p. 7.

Wiener | the omniscient Narrator and the unreliable Narrator: the Case of Atomic Café