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Film Screening: Containment

Where
Oak Room, Dumbarton Oaks Fellowship House
When
March 23, 2016
05:30 PM to 08:00 PM
Fully Booked
The Mellon Initiative in Urban Landscape Studies and Garden and Landscape Studies, in collaboration with the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital

Nuclear waste forces us to think about the distant future: the radioactive trail from our bombs and power plants will last 400 generations. Repeat: 400 generations! So we need a “deep time” contingency plan. How can we mark off toxic land to safeguard our descendants 10,000 years from now, when so little feels truly permanent? Part wake-up call, part observational documentary, part sci-fi graphic novel, Containment tracks our most imaginative attempts to plan for our radioactive future and reveals the startling failure to manage waste in the present, epitomized by the Fukushima disaster.

One of the directors, Peter Galison, will be present and will take questions after the film.

The Mellon Initiative in Urban Landscape Studies and Garden and Landscape Studies have collaborated with the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital to screen this film. The film and lecture are free and open to the public, but reservations are required. To reserve a seat, please click on the "Registration" button below. A brief reception to follow.

About the Filmmakers

Peter Galison is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. He is a physicist and culturally minded historian whose work involves filmmaking—Ultimate Weapon (2000, with Pamela Hogan) and Secrecy (2008, with Robb Moss)—artistic collaboration, most recently The Refusal of Time with William Kentridge. Galison has written extensively on nuclear matters, from weapons and secrecy to waste and wilderness; among his books are Picturing Science, Producing Art (1998, with Caroline A. Jones); Einstein’s Clocks and Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Dreams (2003); and Objectivity (2007, with Lorraine J. Daston). He received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1997 and the Max Planck Prize in 1999.

Robb Moss is a filmmaker, professor and chair of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University and has taught film for twenty-five years. Previous films Secrecy (2008, with Galison) and The Same River Twice (2003) premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and showed in over fifty festivals and one hundred theaters. The Same River Twice was nominated for a 2004 Independent Spirit Award and won awards in Nashville, Chicago, New England, and Alabama; the Chicago Reader selected it as Best Documentary (and Cinematography) of 2003. Moss has served as a festival juror at Sundance, San Francisco, Denver, Camden, Seattle, Chicago, New England, and Ann Arbor, and is on the Board of Directors for the Independent Television Service (ITVS).