This article is about something that was in the movie, though.
The closer we get to the bomb’s completion, the more marbles go into the bowl. But there’s no mention in the film of where two-thirds of that uranium came from: a mine 24 stories deep, now in Congo’s Katanga, a mineral-rich area in the southeast.
As the marbles steadily filled the bowl onscreen, I kept seeing what was missing: Black miners hauling earth and stone to sort piles of radioactive ore by hand.
It was a stylistic choice, as the author confirmed with Nolan at the premiere. Compare with, say, the opening of Uncut Gems where the stylistic choice was to show the conditions in which it was mined.
Personally I think this article is well worth reading. In the West, a lot of the general public’s knowledge about colonial activities in DRC is sort of frozen somewhere around the 19th century.
This article doesn’t read to me like a complaint about the film, though?
The tone seems to me to be more, I went to a film about A+B, now I’m sharing my experience that C was a big part of that which wasn’t shown, even though it was symbolised by marbles.
To me, that’s always worth pointing out, especially when so many people seem to get a lot of their views about history from moving image media.
And maybe one day when someone does make something that touches a bit on the historical conditions behind “Great Man” style history, it might be more welcomed than it would be in the current climate, if articles like this one help people know a bit more.
I’m remembering when Patricia Rozema’s adaptation of Mansfield Park came out. The Jane Austen novel is about people living in a house that was literally owned by a slave owner with plantations in the West Indies, but that stuff had never been shown before. Some people were really scandalised but I thought it was quite interesting. Understanding about how Western history intersects with, say, African history is helpful in understanding the world we live in now.
This article is about something that was in the movie, though.
It was a stylistic choice, as the author confirmed with Nolan at the premiere. Compare with, say, the opening of Uncut Gems where the stylistic choice was to show the conditions in which it was mined.
Personally I think this article is well worth reading. In the West, a lot of the general public’s knowledge about colonial activities in DRC is sort of frozen somewhere around the 19th century.
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This article doesn’t read to me like a complaint about the film, though?
The tone seems to me to be more, I went to a film about A+B, now I’m sharing my experience that C was a big part of that which wasn’t shown, even though it was symbolised by marbles.
To me, that’s always worth pointing out, especially when so many people seem to get a lot of their views about history from moving image media.
And maybe one day when someone does make something that touches a bit on the historical conditions behind “Great Man” style history, it might be more welcomed than it would be in the current climate, if articles like this one help people know a bit more.
I’m remembering when Patricia Rozema’s adaptation of Mansfield Park came out. The Jane Austen novel is about people living in a house that was literally owned by a slave owner with plantations in the West Indies, but that stuff had never been shown before. Some people were really scandalised but I thought it was quite interesting. Understanding about how Western history intersects with, say, African history is helpful in understanding the world we live in now.
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