Snake Dance

When the words “Cold War”, “the War Against Terror”, “never-ending war” are spoken, accompanied by images of a lush, green meadow, these phrases seem strangely abstract. Similarly, photographs of barren hills in New Mexico emanate a calm beauty. But this is where Robert Oppenheimer conceived the plan for the first weapon of mass destruction. The result of the Manhattan Project was tested in the desert in Los Alamos in 1942, finished in 1945 and in August of the same year, it was dropped on Nagasaki. 60 years previously, the art historian Aby Warburg had studied the culture of the Hopi Indians in Los Alamos and had discovered the Rattlesnake Dance. The Hopis used to dance it to confront their fears. Manu Riche and Patrick Marnham follow in Warburg and Oppenheimer’s footsteps in their film “Snake Dance”, in which they document Belgian King Leopold II’s search for uranium mines in the Congo where illegalised miners nowadays dig for cobalt in the mud. The film-makers cross the plains of Mexico to Kreuzlingen, where Warburg was treated for mental health problems, on to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and finally to the nuclear winter of Fukushima. The invention of the atom bomb, says Manu Riche, was the equivalent to opening Pandora’s box. And with it, human innocence was lost forever.