Nuclear Family

The road trip taken by the Wilkerson family is anything but tourism. Their chosen destinations delineate a cartography of annihilation: all the landscapes are linked to the 5,800 nuclear warheads currently scattered throughout the United States. Yet they also evoke the history of a country whose massacres ravaged the first settlers of the United States in the 19th Century, heralding a militaristic culture that was honed to perfection over a century, in particular in the year 1945. Travis Willkerson’s dramatic voiceover commands this tale, using fixed, geometric shots of different regions that contain nuclear weapon silos, nearly always beautiful geographies that have become the scene of explosions, genocides and suicides. To this cinematographic archaeology, the Wilkersons add a genealogy of nuclear warmongering in which the political conditions by which the first two nuclear bombs were perversely detonated are specified.
Songs by SunRa, Radar Bros and Lorkin O’Reilly set archival material of past explosions to music, an indication of just how well the Wilkersons conceive sound and the importance it has in their poetics. The atmospheric information that arrives from the film’s sonic layers is a marvel and a demonstration of the distributive intelligence that governs the mise en scène. (Roger Koza)

Erin Wilkerson: MACHINE GUN OR TYPEWRITER? (2015), THE SCENTS THAT CARRY THROUGH WALLS (2020, K), THE SMOKE RIDES ON THE WIND (2022, K)

Travis Wilkerson: ACCELERATED UNDER-DEVELOPMENT (1999), AN INJURY TO ONE (2002), WHO KILLED COCK ROBIN? (2005), PROVING GROUND (2009), DISTINGUISHED FLYING CROSS (2011), MACHINE GUN OR TYPEWRITER? (2015), DID YOU WONDER WHO FIRED THE GUN? (2017)