The first feature film screening of the semester is Hideo Sekigawa’s Hiroshima, from 1953, which depicts the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima which happened in 1945, 8 years before the feature was released. The film recreates the horrors of the nuclear bomb, depicting life before, during, and after the attack. The film focuses on different characters from all ages, but there is an emphasis on how school children and their teachers are affected throughout the bombing. Before the attack the audience explicitly sees how children are taught about the war and how they are trained under the beliefs of the Japanese imperial government. There are multiple scenes where this influence is emphasized-when the audience sees the young school children lined up in a yard, responding to commands from their school master like trained militants. The audience also sees it in the scene where the school children are made to listen to a radio broadcasting in their classroom that describes the explicit effects of being exposed to radiation and burning-one girl wails out in the middle of the broadcasting for the teacher to stop the radio. There is a clear emphasis on how a population living through war influences their children and how that influence is implied. Although the movie is violent and shows the horrid pictures of the Japanese living through the bombing, I thought the cinematography was beautifully intense, especially the scenes immediately following the aftermath of the bombing where the audience sees the Japanese move out of the rubble after the bombing. The  Mise-en-scène of these scenes reminds me of many films of the 50s and 60s that depict war through scenography. Although widely different in terms of content, these scenes reminded me of Orpheus from 1950, where in dream-like sequences they have sets that depict World War 2.