"Owning Hiroshima": A talk with Markus Nornes November 8, 2007

In the wake of atomic warfare, crews of filmmakers were dispatched to the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. American troops stumbled on the Nagasaki crew, promptly seizing their footage and stopping the production. The project was restarted under the aegis of the Strategic Bombing Survey, the end product of which was The Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This film is the only moving image record of the atomic bombings, and thus has been deposited in the imaginations of nearly every person on the planet. However, it came close to oblivion on more than one occasion. Before the film was even completed, it was subject to a series of power struggles and suppressions. The film was simply missing for several decades. Although a print was discovered and is preserved at several archives, it is rarely screened and has yet to be released on video. The struggles over the film continue struggles over meaning, responsibility and ownership. Parts of the film will be shown to illustrate the lecture, however, it will not be shown in entirety.

Markus Nornes is an associate professor in both the Department of Screen Arts and Cultures and the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of "Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary Film" (Minnesota UP) and "Japanese Documentary Film: From the Meiji Era to Hiroshima" (Minnesota UP) as well as many articles in edited volumes and journals such as Cinema Journal and Film Quarterly. He is currently working on "Traffic: The Translator's Cinema," is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press . A reception will immediately follow his presentation.

Sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study, the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the Consortium for the Study of the Asias, the Department of History and the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum.