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The Documentary About Hiroshima and Nagasaki The U.S. Didn’t Want Us to See

No critic has ever put The Effects of the Atomic Bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on their list of the greatest documentaries ever made, but this has something to do with how critics define greatness. It would mostly likely make the top of anyone’s list of films that people should see at least once in their lifetime—particularly if they come from a country armed with nuclear weaponry. From a certain perspective, this is a mind-numbingly boring science film; from another, it is a horror film that leaves one speechless and trembling. Most filmmakers trying to represent events as extreme as the holocaust or the atomic bombings run up against the specter of the unprepresentable. The strange thing about this film is that the filmmakers never make this effort to begin with. They simply describe the two events in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the dry language of hard science. Nothing could be more unnerving.

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