Publication Laka-library:
“We Don’t Wanna Be Radiated”: Documentary Film and the Evolving Rhetoric of Nuclear Energy Activism (2012)
| Author | Lisa Lynch |
 | - |
| Date | 2012 |
| Classification | 3.01.2.19/21 (UNITED STATES - ANTI NUCLEAR MOVEMENT / ACTIONS / REPRESSION) |
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From the publication:
Lisa Lynch “We Don’t Wanna Be Radiated”: Documentary Film and the Evolving Rhetoric of Nuclear Energy Activism American Literature, Volume 84, Number 2, June 2012 © 2012 by Duke University Press In what follows, I attempt to unpack the divergence between the symbolic imaginary of nuclear power and the imaginative terrain of environmentalism through a look at documentary i lm about the civilian nuclear industry. I first analyze several films about US anti- reactor activism produced in the 1970s and 1980s, showing how they manifest the codependence of antireactor activism and environmentalism. I then turn to recent films that look more broadly at the industrial processes involved in nuclear power creation. Drawing on disparate strands of scholarly inquiry—including ecocriticism, documentary theory, and science studies—I read these newer documentaries to illuminate how changing political, material, and economic realities have reshaped how opponents of nuclear energy imagine the relationships between body, place, and planet. The primary intention of this essay is thus to expand the horizons of ecocriticism while also providing a fresh consideration of the relationship between environmentalism and the antireactor movement. That being said, it is my hope that this essay will serve to rescue several films from critical obscurity. Although i ctional i lms about nuclear warfare and nuclear power have been studied by media scholars and nuclear critics,7 documentaries about the antinuclear movement have received little attention. This is in large part because they are classed as realist political documentaries, a i lm genre long ignored by the academy.
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