USA,
1987, 56 min
Shown in 1988
CREDITS
- dir
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Robert Stone
- gga award
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Best of Category, Film & Video: Historical and Political Issues
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COMMENTS
Robert Stone in person.
OTHER
Radio Bikini is the story of the first postwar atomic weapons tests conducted by the United States at the remote Central Pacific atoll of Bikini. Director Robert Stone obtained access to declassified archival footage of the 1946 testing. The U.S. government planned to use the footage to make what Stone calls a “major propaganda film on the scale of Triumph of the Will about America and the Nuclear Age.” That film was never made. What Stone has done with the footage and other material—including live radio broadcasts from Bikini at the time of the testing and interviews with participants in the tests is chilling. The naiveté of the media presentations, the optimism of the speeches to the islanders, the lack of safety precautions for 42,000 servicemen brought to the atoll for the tests, all are quite shocking from the perspective of 1988. “The government obviously didn’t want this story to get out,” Stone writes. “In fact, they wished it hadn’t happened and tried to erase the event from people’s memories.” Radio Bikini is a brilliant cautionary tale.
—Walter V. Addiego
FACTOID #75
Italian screen siren and ’60s sex symbol Sophia Loren appeared in two films screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival: Ettore Scola’s A Special Day in 1977 and Francesco Rosi’s More Than a Miracle in 1981.
