Kristen Whissel | Atomic Modernity, the Cultural Technique of Filtering, and Doom Town 3D

This paper investigates 3D cinema’s variable capacities for mediating the broader conditions of possibility for perceptual experience and environmental existence in the years following World War II. I focus on Doom Town (Alan H. Miner, 1953), an independent 3D documentary that represented the Federal Civil Defense Agency’s mass-mediated “Operation Doorstep,” which subjected two “typical” family homes to the violence of the Upshot-Knothole Annie nuclear test shot. While much of the coverage of “Operation Doorstep” focused on the visible violence of the blast, Doom Town instead displayed haunting images of the phenomenal world’s relative openness to the invisible violence of weaponized radiation by experimenting with 3D cinema’s tendency to give, as André Bazin described it, the “effective impression that the objects are in space, but in the form of impalpable phantoms.”

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Bazin’s formulation offers insight into how 3D cinema in general, and Doom Town in particular, mediated the experience of atomic modernity for postwar audiences. Through 3D’s “impalpable phantoms,” the very idea of the impermeable surface haunts Doom Town as a thing of the past. This haunting extends to 3D cinema’s newly porous screen (an illusion created by negative parallax’s emergence effects), for Doom Town transforms this component of the dispositif into a tool for testing the limits of the longstanding cinematic metaphor of the screen-as-shield, thereby engaging the spectator in a Cold War politics of the surface. Exploiting the affordances of 3D cinema’s technical assemblage—particularly the filtering operation of 3D glasses and their incorporation of the spectator’s perceptual faculties into the dispositif—Doom Town visualizes the radical continuum of the atomic environment from which there is no escape. In this respect, Doom Town stands as a singular departure from the broader Cold War discourse of survivability promoted by civil defense films, such as the FCDA’s documentary short, Operation Doorstep (1953), which promoted the basement fallout shelter as a new form of protective interiority that might shield the individual from nuclear annihilation. In contrast, Doom Town exploits 3D cinema’s intensification of the film spectator’s enclosure within what Francesco Casetti calls cinema’s “protection/projection complex” only to bring into focus the shelterlessness of the atomic age.

About the Speaker

Kristen Whissel is a Professor in the Department of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Picturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology, and Silent Cinema (Duke UP, 2008) and Spectacular Digital Effects: CGI and Contemporary Cinema (Duke UP, 2014). Her articles on film, technology, and modernity have appeared in Camera Obscura, Screen, Cinema Journal (JCMS), Film Quarterly, Film Criticism, and the New Review of Film and Television Studies, among others. She is currently completing a book titled Hollywood’s “Impalpable Phantoms”: 3D Cinema and Cold War Modernity.