MATERIA OSCURA

Salto di Quirra, in Sardinia: since the 1950s, these mountains have not only been used as a NATO aviation and missile test centre, but also by different corps of the Italian army and even by the arms industry. A geological survey on the pollution linked to military trials, research in the Army’s film archives and the daily life of a local animal breeder and his son: if the three parts of Materia oscura first seem tightly sealed off from each other, it is because this compartmentalisation serves as a metaphor for the authorities’ determined refusal to acknowledge the evidence. In this nightmarish “Larzac”, the fact that land, men, animals and plants are ravaged by military testing is felt by all but seems doomed to invisibility. It needs the choral editing, the mixing of a host of almost comical test weapons and a variety of animal health problems to remind us of a cause-effect relationship that is carefully blanked out by bureaucracy. On one side, a deadly pollution that cannot be filmed. On the other, a luxurious institutional archive repository that conserves on film the soundand- light shows of nocturnal explosions. (Charlotte Garson)