A Short Vision Review (Short Film, 1956) The Archives
Content warning: “A Short Vision” is a graphic animated film about what happens during the explosion of a nuclear weapon. Adults, children, and animals are shown in the destruction.
The year is 1956. The memories of WWII still linger as the Cold War ramps up. A quiet little town is undisturbed at night when a strange, silent, massive flying machine approaches with great speed. By the time the witnesses realize what’s happening, it is too late to stop; they are destroyed in a massive nuclear explosion that leaves no survivors.
“A Short Vision” is an experimental animated film from husband and wife directing team Peter and Joan Foldes. They received financing from the British Film Institute Experimental Film division to create an unsettling horror short focused on the actual effects of nuclear warfare.
The first thing you encounter in the film is Matyas Seiber’s original score. It is unnerving, maybe even unhinged. The theremin is a screeching beacon of destruction rising in pitch and intensity as the bomber comes closer and closer. Even as the style changes to wilderness scoring and lullabies, the electronic siren of the theremin is lying in wait to attack again. There is no escaping its piercing screech as there is no escaping the explosion in this quiet little town.
The animation style of “A Short Vision” is quite catching. The art is a mix of oil painting, oil pastel, and heavy inking that goes against contemporary trends in animation. Then, the animation itself is pan and scan and stop motion. Many of the scenes are created by zooming in or out on a dark landscape as the plane approaches in the distance. It’s simple and very effective.
More impressive is the stop motion style. These beautiful illustrations of wildlife and people about to be evaporated are animated with articulated hinges. The frames are not drawn one by one, but created by slowly rotating the heads, limbs, and bodies on fulcrum points. It’s just the right unnatural approach to make the all-too-recent devastation of Hiroshimi and Nagasaki (only 11 years before) watchable. It doesn’t look as real as those images, but it reflects the actual power of the atomic bomb.
The Foldes refuse to let you ignore the details of destruction caused by this class of weaponry. The somber narrator clearly states that anyone who saw the explosion died instantly. The animation slows down to show the flesh catch fire, melt away, and turn to dust. It does this over and over for the second half of the film. The human witnesses die; the animal witnesses die; the sleeping people die; the landscape dies; everything dies. All that’s left by the end is a flame that engulfs the bomber, too.
“A Short Vision” is a sharp piece of social commentary told with a healthy dose of horror. If nuclear arms were never deployed, no one would believe a single weapon could do this. Because we know what happened when the bombs actually dropped, “A Short Vision” exists as a grim reminder of what would happen if they dropped again.
