Plutonium Blonde Radioactive Contamination

by Julia Knight

Plutonium Blonde, a video about nuclear power, is being screened at this year’s Bracknell video festival. Julia Knight talked to its producer, Sandra Lahire.

The origins of Plutonium Blonde are slightly strange to say the least. In 1986 Sandra Lahire was working on a production called Terminals. At the suggestion of its funders she sent the only print she had of the film for striping in France. Somewhere along the way, however, it got lost. Unable to obtain funding to have another print made, Sandra decided to apply for funding to finance a new production. The result was Plutonium Blonde.

In broad terms Plutonium Blonde is about nuclear power in Great Britain. In the wake of the Chernobyl disaster and in view of the innumerable media representations of nuclear power that exist, ranging from more mainstream films such as The China Syndrome and Silkwood, through the multitude of spine chilling drama-documentaries to various independent products like Tina Keane’s In Our Hands, Greenham and Dennis O’Rourke’s Half Life, one could be forgiven for thinking there could be nothing new to be said about nuclear power. However, through a reworking of footage from promotional films produced by the CEGB and the Atomic Energy Authority, combined with her own secretly filmed footage of the nuclear reactor at Winfrith, Sandra Lahire has produced an impressionistic kaleidoscope of images and voices that act as a highly thought-provoking reminder of the realities of nuclear power and point towards the radioactive legacy we have bequeathed future generations.

Plutonium Blonde revolves around the image of a woman, a nuclear worker, watching a bank of plutonium-decanning monitors. She can be viewed as performing a political function  —  that of monitoring nuclear power, in much the same way as the women at Greenham Common have  —  but the video is also an exploration of what such a worker might think about, faced as she is day-in-day-out with plutonium. The concern that dominates the video, however, is to do with the extent of the radioactive contamination of our environment and the difficulty of understanding the full implications and long term effects of such contamination due to both its invisibility and the sparklingly clean image the industry presents of itself.

This concern with nuclear power and radioactive contamination is a long-standing interest of Sandra Lahire’s and was sparked off by the high level of cancer cases among people she knew, which she felt could not be attributable purely to smoking. However, she locates her interest in these issues within a broader context  —  that of power in general, i.e. social, economic and political, and in fact questions of such power are central to all her film and video work. One of her earlier productions, Arrows, for instance, is about anorexia in women, which she views very much as one way in which women deal with their lack of power, i.e. since they are not in control of the representation of their own bodies, they try to efface themselves by not eating. In Plutonium Blonde it is a question of the power structures that have developed and actively promote an industry that is doing untold damage to our environment, despite the lessons to be learnt from such catastrophes as Chernobyl. As if to underline the pervasiveness of such power structures Sandra is continuing to pursue her interest in this area. Her current project is about the uranium mining that goes on in Canada and the pollution it is causing, with those affected powerless to get anything done about it. Hopefully, we can look forward to seeing it at next year’s festival!

Published in Independent Media, November 1987.