Film: Into Eternity
Release date: 17th January 2011
Certificate: E
Running time: 75 mins
Director: Michael Madsen
Starring: Timo Äikäs, Carl Reinhold Bråkenhjelm, Mikael Jensen, Berit Lundqvist, Wendla Paile
Genre: Documentary
Studio: Dogwoof
Format: DVD
Country: Denmark/Finland/Sweden/Italy
This is an English-Language release.
Nuclear menace is a topos of 20th century cinema. Catalyst of mutation and apocalypse, the spectre of the mushroom cloud haunts the 1950s b-movie, and emanates far beyond. The initial symptoms were metaphorical, fantastically inflamed. Bugs blew up, men miniaturised, THEY attacked, and galactic visitors delivered sonorous warnings against proliferation. As weapon and technology, the movies enjoy a duplicitous love affair with the nuke; simultaneously fetishising the gleaming accruements of science, whilst despairing their malign fallout. Dwelling on that horrific what if, later productions such as The War Game, Failsafe and The China Syndrome abandoned metaphor, depicting atomic menace in explicit, realist contexts that made the nightmare ever more palpable. Michael Madsen’s provocative new documentary is a potent addition to this cautionary canon.
With fairytale portent, Michael Madsen’s flat voiceover reproaches the trespass of the camera. Deep beneath a frozen forest lays a long, dark tunnel: an illicit realm. “You are now in a place where we have buried something to protect you,” he intones. Unheeding, the curious camera eye presses deeper and deeper into the mysterious recess. Another warning. “You should not have come here.” Too late. We have strayed into to the Onkalo; or ‘hiding place’. A vast bunker corkscrewing into the frigid wilds, the facility is to be the final resting place for Finland’s radioactive junk. Scheduled for completion next century, this 4.2 km long cement intestine will envelop the poison until safe – a mere 100,000 years hence. Madsen explores the implications of this potentially lethal bequest, a lethal time capsule future generations may unknowingly inherit. Interviewing the plan’s architects, it becomes clear that art and myth – rather than science – may be the project’s final sentinels.
Wary audiences may fear this sombre topic proffers the entertainment value of watching uranium deplete. But Madsen’s elegant cinematography renders this an understated, chilly mood piece. Much of the film’s weight is derived from its interviewees, but talking heads comprise only part of a sensuous, imaginative narrative…
Unusually, the scenario Into Eternity presents is one of safety last. Forgoing the clichés of sweaty meltdown scenarios and rogue missiles, Madsen skips to the end of the cycle, and the less visceral, enduring hazard posed by nuclear waste. Eschewing titillating alarmism, the film offers an atmospheric mediation on the consequences of Europe’s power dependency. Billed as “a film for the future,” this grim science faction documents what may be mankind’s ultimate legacy – and, ironically, his most fatal folly.
Rhapsodising bone-white control rooms, mercurial pools and gleaming laboratories, interiors assume a nostalgic, futurist glamour. Peopled by uniformly lab-coated technicians, this flattering montage evokes utopian documentaries of the 1950s, which promised limitless, clean energy. Enthralled by electrified grace, the lens accompanies apparatus as it glides across the polished surfaces of the plant, a silvered cathedral of physics. Kraftwerk’s ambivalent techno hymn, Radioactivity, ebbs from the soundtrack in fittingly ethereal accompaniment. It’s an eerily idyllic vision that subtly decays. Slo-mo camerawork finally estranges the white coated boffins from their creation, rendering them mere ghosts eclipsed by an awesome machine.
Contrasted with this stainless steel utopia is the deserted landscape above the pit. Icy stillness – disturbed only by a grazing reindeer – provides an intense, almost surreal counterpoint. Madsen refers to “forbidden zones” in his voiceover – a reference to Tarkovsky’s Stalker. With a lyricism reminiscent of that work, the wilderness occupies an uncanny role here, hinting at nature’s timelessness – and mankind’s ephemerality.
Beneath ground, the film sensuously explores the interplay of light and darkness, arranging a chiaroscuro of gloom and incandescence. Though corporate video graphics pixellate it into a lurid spiral – something like a Hot-Wheels racetrack – Madsen mines a wealth of visual riches from the forbidding caverns. Worshipfully lingering over imposing drilling gear, the camera virtually caresses the coarse texture of the tunnels, equally captivated by the rock itself. Like the wan scientists and vacant forest, this sooty Hades emphasises human vulnerability, posing workmen against enfolding darkness in a series of stark tableaux. This stylish dialectic is particularly apt, since it embodies another fundamental, and indeed mythic theme at work here – ignorance versus enlightenment.
Madsen’s documentary proves unusually resonant, as his investigations gradually evolve along unexpectedly profound tangents. Rather than assume a purist ‘green’ position, his free-wheeling inquisition also poses head-scratching philosophical questions. Though considered a ‘final solution’, his exposition observes that, for humankind, the 100,000 year lifespan of the Onkalo is an unintelligible duration. We have no way of comprehending how our culture – if it exists – will interpret the site. Comparable in grandeur to a Pharoah’s tomb, could it ultimately be excavated, or regarded as an ancient monument? Whilst the project’s designers seek to preserve its integrity for aeons, might their ‘infallible’ security be breached? A lethal Pandora’s Box, this nuclear graveyard may prove an irresistible lure to inquisitive humans who threaten its sanctity. This is implicit in the design of the film itself – since its initial lines seem addressed to some future intruder.
Invoking the legend of Prometheus, Madsen considers nuclear energy as a dangerous knowledge which imperils those who seize it. Damned by their boundless curiosity, our scientists now seek to deny others their awareness. Ironically, the paternal duty of these learned men is to bestow ignorance on future generations; maintenance of a benign obliviousness: “to remember forever to forget.” The architects face a bleak choice – to ritually mark the pit, erecting obelisks and menacing art as warning signals – or, fearing this would entice, to erase it from history altogether. Perhaps, they muse, the Onkalo might yet endure through folk tales – translated into a fearful cultural memory. The film (and mankind) seems to have travelled full circle: from myth, to science – and back again.
Prying deep, Madsen excavates – and eviscerates – the premises of the Onkalo. Leaving his interviewees with adequate rope to lynch themselves, it gradually becomes clear that, as one scientist announces, “Nobody knows anything at all.”
Mythic allusions detract from the film’s urgency, but elevate it to a grim parable. Offering no resolution, this provocative documentary shatters expedient ‘logic’. Primed with a rhetorical warhead, its grim analysis inflicts an unnerving critique. Regrettably, with a best-before date of 102011, this is one film unlikely to lose its relevance as quickly as one would like. DJO
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