ARTUR AUGUSTO ABDALLA RENZO

Released in 1964, "Dr. Strangelove" hit home in a country eager to purge Cold War rhetoric and anxieties, and which had just seen the possibility of a nuclear war pass before its eyes. The euphoria of the military victory over World War Two was met with the invention and detonation of the Atomic Bomb, and the nuclear race that had gone hand in hand with the post-war cycle of prosperity had condemned “every man, woman and child” to live permanently under a “nuclear sword of Damocles,” in Kennedy’s terms. With an irreverent sensibility in line with the wave of political and cultural unrest that would culminate in 1968, the film elaborates a set of open and still unresolved ambivalences in this period of intense upheavals. These are ambivalences that traverse the entire work, including the very conditions of film production, marked by a situation in which the possibility of new creative freedoms coexisted with an unprecedented centralisation of economic power.