Description
This paper explores how cut-out poetry - a hybrid method between collage and creative writing - can be used to interrogate the cultural politics of nuclear apocalypse as represented in popular film. Drawing on cinematic texts that end with the end of the world, the paper examines how poetic fragmentation disrupts linear narratives of inevitable nuclear use and renders visible the framing devices that shape nuclear imaginaries. Themes of nothingness, love, faith, and childhood recur across these films, each reproducing particular political consequences such as apathy or catharsis. Engaging Akira Mizuta Lippit’s notion of “violent invisibility” and Banco’s reading of Hiroshima’s shadows as “present yet absent”, the paper situates nuclear nothingness as a politically active condition. Cut-out poetry makes tangible the silences and ruptures that structure nuclear representation, offering a mode of creative and aesthetic inquiry that presses against the limits of what can be seen, felt, and imagined in nuclear politics.
