The Omniscient Narrator and the Unreliable Narrator: The Case of Atomic Café

The form of the historical documentary today is familiar—painfully familiar: the narrator, the talking head-experts and witnesses, and the historical footage that illustrates the points the speakers are making. The narrator is required and often the star—From Ken Burns's Civil War on PBS, narrated by David McCullogh, to Eyes on the Prize, narrated by Julian Bond, to the new series on The History Channel, Ten Days that Unexpectedly Changed America, where Jeffrey Wright narrarates "Antietam," and Martin Sheen does "The Homestead Strike"—the narrator is the indispensable voice of meaning, and the explainer of the significance of the visual materials.

Figure 1.

School children were trained to protect themselves from nuclear blasts. Courtesy of the Truman Library

The presence of the narrator in historical documentaries often reveals a lack of confidence in the visual. Meaning in all these documentaries is communicated through the words in the script. The visual material in a documentary may be glorious and powerful, but the reliance on the narrator reduces the finished work to the level of an illustrated lecture.

But one historical documentary demonstrates that, in some cases at least, the omniscient narrator is unnecessary. Meaning can be conveyed solely through the editing and juxtaposition of film images. The meanings thus conveyed can be more powerful, more compelling, and more memorable than the verbal information in the script read by film narrators. That film is Atomic Café, a feature-length documentary released in 1982, produced, directed, and edited by Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty and Pierce Rafferty.¹

Obviously some historical documentaries require an omniscient narrator because the available visual documentation is inadequate, or because the analysis or interpretation is too complex to be presented through images. But in some cases, for some issues, reliance on the narrator is a weakness that can be avoided.

Atomic Café presents a critique of official government policy regarding the threat of atomic war and nuclear radiation in the 1950s—the world of "duck and cover" drills in school and backyard fallout shelters. The filmmakers collected a wide variety of visual archival materials from that era – military training films, educational films, news broadcasts, public service spots, TV and radio comedies and dramas. Some of them were official government documents; many others were unofficial. Many of these films were shown to captive audiences in schools and military units; others were standard broadcast fare on radio and TV. So the film is a montage of found footage.² It is also hilarious.

Instead of an omniscient narrator, Atomic Café has dozens of narrators – all problematic: the narrators of the different news clips, educational films, and military training films. These voices speak with all the trappings of authority, but each represents a kind of "unreliable narrator."³ The point of the film is precisely to critique the statements of these narrators, to expose these narrators as purveyors of lies.

This is the brilliant thing about Atomic Café: the only voices on the soundtrack, the only narrators in the film, are not telling the truth. The truth is found not in any spoken words, but rather exclusively in the filmmakers' juxtapositions of visual documents.

Thus in Atomic Café there is no omniscient voice to tell viewers what to think. Some writers have argued that the absence of a narrator "lets the viewers come to their own conclusions."⁴ But this is wrong. This film has a message, presented clearly and forcefully; it is an expose about government propaganda. The message is that the government lied about the dangers of nuclear radiation and nuclear war. The message is: do not believe what the government says about nuclear war being winnable.

The filmmakers convey meaning through the classic devices of cinema: editing and juxtaposition. You could call it roughly "Eisensteinian"—a rapid montage, juxtaposing images by film editing, that creates ideas not found in the original images, ideas that moreover have a strong emotional impact. At least you could call the style of Atomic Café "montage-based" – it is a film that produces ideas through juxtaposition.

For...