My heartfelt/headfelt thanks to those who I shared the seminar experience at AWE with and whose wonderful creativities the film draws upon: Kye Askins, Phil Johnstone, Lotte Reimer, Angie Zelter, Cat McNeil, Andy Pilsbury, and Zoe Broughton for photos.
My twenty minute film explores the UK’s decision to replace its Trident nuclear weapons system. The narration draws upon an existentialist ethics to critique a politics and culture of nuclear weapons, Mutually Assured Destruction and deterrence. The film records an academic seminar intervention at the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Burghfield in Berkshire in June 2016. Thematically linking ‘war’ and (global) ‘warming’, the seminar explored nuclear weapons and energy as, literally, signature technologies of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is the geological age in which human influence on planet Earth is the most significant impact and ‘will leave a long-term signature in the strata record’. The Anthropocene and the nuclear age start simultaneously, and part of this signature will be the global dispersal of artificial radionuclides from the testing and, perhaps, use of nuclear weapons. In making the film, a particular phenomenological approach drawn from Barry Lopez's work employs close observation and social participation in place as an ‘incandescence’ to illuminate wider geographies and diverse temporalities. Physically inhabiting space made visible these ‘ghosts’ and highlighted the inextricability of emotion and reason. The film argues that deterrence is antithetic to the key existentialist tenet of transcendence. Deterrence is immoral not (only) because it is defined by abominable revenge rather than justice, but because it shapes an oppressive politics and culture that preclude the attainment of freedom and the acceptance of a concomitant personal responsibility. Owning one’s radical freedom and responsibility is Sartre’s definition of ‘authenticity’, living the truth about ourselves.
My heartfelt/headfelt thanks to those who I shared the seminar experience at AWE with and whose wonderful creativities the film draws upon: Kye Askins, Phil Johnstone, Lotte Reimer, Angie Zelter, Cat McNeil, Andy Pilsbury, and Zoe Broughton for photos.
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December 2022
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