The Atomic Cafe (1982), a work directed by Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty and Pierce Rafferty, is undoubtedly one of the most interesting works of documentary cinema of the 1980s. What the archives (collected over the years and coming from very different sources: military training films, materials commissioned by the US government, television reports, newsreels, street surveys, etc.) have in common is the fact that they constitute a unique testimony of a historical moment. In a broader sense: they document the beginnings of the Cold War. In a narrower sense: the archives are about American propaganda in the context of the atomic bomb – the „our” American bomb (which is – the materials suggest – useful and almost of divine provenance), and the „foreign” Soviet bomb (which is – again, as the archives indicate – destructive and atrocious). In this paper, I examine how the directors of The Atomic Cafe reconstructed this – necessarily internally fractured – narrative about the nuclear weapons.The Atomic Cafe (1982), a work directed by Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty and Pierce Rafferty, is undoubtedly one of the most interesting works of documentary cinema of the 1980s. What the archives (collected over the years and coming from very different sources: military training films, materials commissioned by the US government, television reports, newsreels, street surveys, etc.) have in common is the fact that they constitute a unique testimony of a historical moment. In a broader sense: they document the beginnings of the Cold War. In a narrower sense: the archives are about American propaganda in the context of the atomic bomb – the „our” American bomb (which is – the materials suggest – useful and almost of divine provenance), and the „foreign” Soviet bomb (which is – again, as the archives indicate – destructive and atrocious). In this paper, I examine how the directors of The Atomic Cafe reconstructed this – necessarily internally fractured – narrative about the nuclear weapons
