Abstract

The first feature film made about the design and deployment of the atomic bomb, The Beginning or the End (1947), begins with fake newsreel footage depicting the burial in a time capsule of a copy of the film and a projector to show it on. The scene, with its funereal overtones yet grim optimism that, even in the face of catastrophic destruction, the germ of civilization will endure, recalls the ceremonies surrounding the interment of the Westinghouse time capsule at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. Time capsules, this article argues, stand in a complex relation to war and temporality, seeking to at once anticipate and work through the challenge posed to futurity by the threat of global conflict. As a container, the capsule attempts to deliver and control the reception of a legible inventory of the present, yet the principle of selection and the impossibility of predicting how information might be received in the deep future – if it is received at all – threatens this aim. The dilemma faced by time capsule curators is, we argue with reference to William Burroughs’ and Brion Gysin’s so-called cut-up method of writing, one of control. By reading the time capsule through the cut-up, anticipated catastrophe can be seen to be functioning proleptically in the present and already active as a challenge to the capsule as proof against disaster.

Highlights

  • The first feature film made about the design and deployment of the atomic bomb, The Beginning or the End (1947), begins with fake newsreel footage depicting the burial in a time capsule of a copy of the film and a projector to show it on

  • The scene is recorded on newsreel footage, the voiceover explaining that ‘Among the many items and records sealed in the time capsule were a movie projector with instructions for its use engraved on copper and a print of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer motion picture dramatization The Beginning or the End, a title expressing the fear of people today that a future atomic war may destroy all humanity.’

  • The first viewers had no reason to suspect that the newsreel was anything other than a report on the present in the present, yet the announcement that the film is the one sealed in the time capsule opens the possibility of a 500 year leap into the future

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Summary

Introduction

The first feature film made about the design and deployment of the atomic bomb, The Beginning or the End (1947), begins with fake newsreel footage depicting the burial in a time capsule of a copy of the film and a projector to show it on. Cold War, cut-up, future, heterotopia, temporality, time capsule, World’s Fair

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Conclusion

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