Refraining from any use of contemporary voiceover, the documentary skillfully employs a host of pointed juxtapositions to draw out the contradictions marking its time period. Still from The Atomic Cafe (courtesy Kino Lorber) There is nothing America cannot commodify. Many selections showcase the flippancy with which popular culture approached the bomb. In one scene, a man at a town hall assures the audience that atomic explosions are easily survivable from the proper distance. Of course, as multiple clips demonstrate, a great deal of citizens at the time didn’t seem to fully comprehend that threat. Loader and the Rafferty brothers combined newsreel footage, propaganda films, candid and news photos, cartoons, public service announcements, songs, and other materials from the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, all dealing with nuclear weapons and their looming threat to human civilization. Inducted into the National Film Registry in 2016, the documentary has undergone a 4K restoration by IndieCollect, currently being released in theaters across the country by Kino Lorber.
Culling from hundreds of different sources, Jayne Loader and Kevin and Pierce Rafferty assembled 1982’s The Atomic Cafe, a morbid scrapbook of the USA’s nuclear heyday.
As a counterpoint, a trio of filmmakers dredged up artifacts from the last time atomic bombs were a serious, publicly felt issue. In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan was beginning to ramp up American military production and renew emphasis on nuclear warfare. Poster for the re-release of The Atomic Cafe (courtesy Kino Lorber)
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