Beeban Kidron: The shared wonder of film

Beeban Kidron talks about how films can be used as a cautionary tale. She uses the examples of 'Schindler's List' and 'Hotel Rwanda' when talking about human massacres. Kidron states that if audiences do not remember history it will forever repeat itself. This could be a reason why in the years after the attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan saw a rise in films exploring the subject of nuclear war. The events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still in the public consciousness and another strike was widely feared. Filmmakers played out the various 'what if?' scenarios of aftermaths of nuclear weaponry, Tomoyuki Tanaka's Godzilla being a blatant example of this. He said of his film the following; "In those days, Japanese had a real horror of radiation, and that horror is what made Godzilla so huge. From the beginning he has symbolized nature's revenge on mankind."As the effects of radiation was only just being discovered, films like Godzilla installed an innate fear in the Japanese people of what could be repeated in the event of another attack with nuclear weaponry.