The Case of the A-Bomb Footage

The Case of the A-Bomb Footage

It was in 1970, a quarter of a century after the footage was shot, that the documentary film Hiroshima-Nagasaki, August 1945 had its premiere and won an audience, an international one, as it turned out. In recounting the origin and history of this film I want to emphasize the extraordinary 25-year hiatus. It seems to me to have implications for filmmakers and film scholars and perhaps for the democratic process.1

I became involved in this story in its later stages, as producer of the 1970 compilation documentary, and this involvement came about almost by accident. Before I explain how this happened, let me go back to the beginning of the story, as I have been able to piece it together over the years.

In August 1945, after the two atom bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a Japanese film unit named Nippon Eiga Sha was commissioned by its government to make a film record of the effects of the devastating new weapon. Nippon Eiga Sha was a wartime amalgamation of the several newsreel and documentary units that had existed before the war. They had been nationalized for war purposes.

The man entrusted with the making of the film was Akira Iwasaki, a film critic, historian, and occasional producer. The choice of Iwasaki for the assignment was significant. During the 1930s he had been the leader of a leftist film group called Prokino or Proletarian Film League, similar to the Workers Film and Photo Leagues in the United States. Being antimilitarist, Prokino had been outlawed shortly before the war, and some of its members had been jailed under a preventive-detention law. Iwasaki himself had spent part of the war in prison. The fact that [Page 122]he had regained standing and was given the film assignment reflected the turbulent situation in the final days of the war, and the extent to which the military had already lost status.2

Because of the breakdown of transport and the difficulty of obtaining adequate supplies, it took the Nippon Eiga Sha film crews some time to reach their locations, but they were at work in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the American occupation forces arrived. What happened then has been described by Iwasaki. “In the middle of the shooting one of my cameramen was arrested in Nagasaki by American military police. … I was summoned to the GHQ and told to discontinue the shooting.” The filming was halted, but Iwasaki says he remonstrated, and “made arguments” with the occupation authorities. “Then” he writes,

During the following weeks, under close U.S. control, much additional footage was shot. All was in black and white; there was no color film in Japan at this time. As the shooting progressed, the material was edited into sequences under the overall title “Effects of the Atomic Bomb.” There were sequences showing effects on concrete, effects on wood, effects on vegetation, and so on. The emphasis was on detailed scientific observation. Effects on human beings were included, but sparsely. Survivors on the outer fringes of the havoc were photographed in improvised treatment centers, but here too the guiding supervisory principle was scientific data gathering rather than human interest. The interests of the camera teams were to some extent at variance with this.

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