The 60th anniversary of the atomic bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Japan is covered by a movie on the propaganda channel Sundance

The footage is most startling at first because it’s in color — unusual for 1945 — and because of its rarity. Filmed images from Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the days after the bombings (Nagasaki was hit Aug. 9) are almost nonexistent. The sky is a lovely blue. The knoblike mountains around town are a delicious green. In the destroyed zones, the valley where Nagasaki lay, the trees are leafless and shorn off. Everything appears a lifeless brown, just dirt, concrete and rubble. Factories are reduced to nests of collapsed steel girders. There are wide shots of sections of town, where everything is just gone.

Later on the film, when a trolley car jammed with people trundles past the camera, the instinct is to jump, to suddenly realize that, in the aftermath of the most destructive force ever unleashed, cable cars in outlying parts of town kept working. People woke up, got dressed, went to some sort of work each day. Life, horrid as it was, went on.

In fact, hour after hour, as the military filmmakers traveled across Japan to capture images of sumo wrestlers, children playing, open-air markets doing business, a family eating a formal dinner at home, you have to keep reminding yourself that this is post- A-bomb Japan. It looks so normal that in “Original Child Bomb,” filmmakers used the postwar footage to depict the pre -bomb days.

Why is it propaganda? Re-read the last sentence of the quote. They are using post bomb footage as pre-bomb footage. I’m sorry, but no matter how important your film may be, this fact means that the entire film is now a complete lie.
The filmmakers could have worked around it. But changing reality to meet preconceived political notions is always wrong.

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