The release in France of the film Oppenheimer, by Christopher Nolan, on Wednesday July 19, revived interest in the American scientist Julius Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) who, within the framework of the National Laboratory of Los Alamos, in New Mexico ( United States), developed, with a brilliant team that he led with charisma, the first atomic bomb, tested in situ on July 16, 1945. The documentary Oppenheimer, the man and the bomb, by Christopher Cassel, does not is not the first of its kind. There are many films portraying the fascinating and paradoxical researcher and great intellectual, especially those produced by North American television.

There are some on the Web, like Oppenheimer. The Decision to Drop the Bomb (1965), by Fred Freed, in which the scientist appears, already diminished by throat cancer which would kill him two years later, or The Day After Trinity (1981), by Jon Else . In July, the National Security Research Center (NSRC) and the still-active Los Alamos National Laboratory offered another film composed of declassified archives, Oppenheimer. Science, Mission, Legacy.

Christopher Nolan is one of the speakers in Christopher Cassel’s documentary, without his remarks having any particular interest in this context. It would have been more beneficial to hear from director and librettist Peter Sellars and composer John Adams about their opera Doctor Atomic (2005), which had Robert Oppenheimer as its main character.

This impressive lyrical work breathlessly narrates the long wait and the countdown before the first test of the A-bomb is triggered, and sets out to paint an intimate and artistic portrait of Oppenheimer as well as that of his wife. The couple were multilingual and sometimes even conversed in coded language or through literary quotations. The famous sonnet by John Donne (1572-1631) that the scholar loved so much, Batter my Heart, three-person’d God, evoked by the documentary, is moreover a moment of dramatic acme of the opera which characterized on the other hand by the avoidance of the long-awaited explosion.

Testimonials from specialists

Oppenheimer, the man and the bomb, in which many scientists and specialists on the subject testify, is particularly valid for archive images where we see and hear Oppenheimer. Especially when he understood that his invention intended to end a world conflict was less a shield than a sword with devastating and murderous effects.

Another important moment in Oppenheimer’s personal and professional history was the series of hearings that the scientist, due to ties to communism, had to submit to, at the height of the witch-hunting period of McCarthyism. The subject is developed much more extensively in The Trials of J.Robert Oppenheimer (2008), by David Grubin, for the BBC, also available on YouTube.

The curious will be able to complete their information by viewing an interview in French given by Robert Oppenheimer to Pierre Desgraupes during a program broadcast live by French television on June 5, 1958. The scientist speaks in a faint voice, with this clear but lost look that strikes on almost all the images we keep of him.