Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016

Bruce Conner’s CROSSROADS is a montage of declassified military film footage of the U.S. government’s underwater test explosion of an atomic bomb at Bikini atoll in the Marshall Islands in July 1946, as part of Operation Crossroads. Conner draws out the immersive spectacle of the sudden, terrifying unleashing of cataclysmic power by splicing together twenty-three unaltered shots of the explosion and its aftermath, filmed at different speeds and from different angles and heights. Conner’s extended repetition of the event stretches time almost to a standstill, suspending the viewer between dread and contemplation, and reconstructing the sense of arrested time that caused a witness to observe that “in that moment hung eternity.”

The soundtrack divides the film in two. 

The simulated thunderous rumble, crash, and roar of explosions in Patrick Gleeson’s Moog-synthesizer composition gives way, in the second half, to a hypnotic electronic composition by Terry Riley that shifts us from an immersion in the explosion’s extended moment to a reflection on technology’s catastrophic sublime.