Tracing the aesthetics of nuclear (in)visibility: a comparative study of European audiovisual material from the mid-20th and 21st centuries

Nuclear production, for both military and civilian purposes, entails a common, continuous, contradictory aesthetics of visibility and invisibility. This thesis examines European audio-visual representations in which a hidden or displaced nuclear trace resurfaces from, and fuses with, violent and traumatic events (namely, the Holocaust, the Second World War, the Algerian war, Soviet imperialism, and the Cold War), which are temporally and spatially diverse.

In this study, I engage in a series of close readings, starting from the recent Netflix series Dark (2017-2020), then discussing the post-war French films Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and La Jetée (1962), before circling back to the present via the Danish documentary and the Lithuanian art film Into Eternity (2010) and Burial (2022). Across all these texts, I argue that the (in)visibility of the nuclear threat was a representational concern already in post-war visual culture, and has continued to be challenged, re-conceptualised, and re-contextualised into the present. I recover the ongoing tension between erasure and revelation through critical conceptions of cultural memory, forgetting, and time itself. The tension of (in)visibility becomes manifest in the aesthetic concepts of the palimpsest, nuclear sublime, and nuclear uncanny. The palimpsest enables me to map out stories re-materialising from the past. The nuclear sublime and the nuclear uncanny in turn construct, paradoxically, the identity of invisibility that is central to the nuclear aesthetic, framed within the broader visual and verbal framework of the nuclear in military and industrial senses. That is to say, representations of atomic explosions and even nuclear power plants are awe-inspiring spectacles placed outside of discursivity. Conversely, but complementarily, the nuclear uncanny enables imperceptible yet pervasive entities, such as radioactivity and buried nuclear waste, to enter into and colonise everyday life, occupying an ambiguous space between life and death, reality and hallucination. With a broad timespan and multilingual corpus, this study of nuclear aesthetics calls into question and explores the scholarly tendency towards highly differentiated, though in fact surface-level periodisations of European nuclear - and indeed memory – cultures.