THE RADIANT

Far-removed from a reportage on the aftermath of Japan’s 2011 nuclear disaster, The Radiant has a striking semantic and rhythmic sensitivity to the interplay between sound and image. Directed by an artists’ collective, it is also genuinely plural in its editing: the mix of fiction, institutional film excerpts, testimonies and shots filmed in the Seismic Centre in Tokyo reveals an infatuation with science that is partly discredited by the disaster. Worse still, a barely expressed but powerful hypothesis emerges: as the journalist May Shigenobu suggests, what if Japan had been deliberately chosen at the planetary level to serve as an experimental radiation laboratory? The removal of waste from the power station to various places in Japan impacts, for instance, the crucial notion of an uncontaminated “benchmark-zone” and seriously distorts measures. As the filmmakers have chosen to focus on the form of their film rather than fact-finding, The Radiant takes on a more subtly political dimension. Its images of a earth and grass that look like any other piece of healthy land, although doubtless irradiated, suggest that the invisibility of radioactivity is to the advantage of the authorities’ discourse. (Charlotte Garson)