Into Eternity (2009).

Van Riper, A. Bowdoin

Into Eternity (2009) Directed by Michael Madsen Distributed by Magic Hour Films www.magichourfilms.dk 75 minutes

Nuclear fission generates a substantial fraction of the electricity consumed by the nations of the industrialized world. In a handful of nations--notably France and Japan--nuclear power plants are the principal source of electricity. Free of the noxious emissions of coal-fired plants and the geographic constraints of hydroelectric plants, nuclear plants continue--even in the aftermath of the 2011 Fukushima disaster--to be viewed as an attractive source of relatively cheap, relatively "green" electricity. The governments of Japan and Germany disavowed the use of nuclear power after Fukushima, but a number of developing nations, including China, India, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam, have pressed on with planned building programs. Embracing nuclear power, however, saddles national governments--and, by extension, the entire human species--with the problem of dealing with spent nuclear fuel. The fuel, though no longer capable of efficiently powering a reactor, remains toxic to living organisms and dangerous to the environment and must be disposed of in ways that isolate it from both. Launching nuclear waste into the sun or depositing it in tectonic "subduction zones" where it will be pulled into the Earth's semi-molten mantle are prohibitively expensive and politically problematic. Plans for nuclear waste disposal have thus focused on burying it in specially designed repositories dug into geologically stable terrain.

Onkalo, funded by Finland's two nuclear-power companies and located on a desolate island off the country's southwest coast, is humankind's first attempt to meet that challenge. Under construction since 2002 and scheduled to accept its first shipments of waste in 2020, Onkalo is projected to remain open for a century--eventually storing 5500 tons of highly radioactive waste. Placed in copper canisters insulated with a layer of dense, impermeable clay and sealed using advanced welding techniques, the waste will be inserted into a network of horizontal shafts bored through solid granite 450 meters (1500 feet) below the surface. The individual shafts will be sealed once full, and when the facility reaches capacity, early in the twenty-second century, plans call for the access shafts to be backfilled, the surface facilities dismantled, and the site returned to its natural appearance. Onkalo is a Finnish word meaning "hiding place," and the complex itself--unique among the world's great engineering projects--is deliberately designed to remain hidden and forgotten.

Michael Madsen's Into Eternity is a film about Onkalo, but not a conventional one. It offers footage of the existing shafts and tunnels and shows workers drilling and blasting their way deeper into the rock, but it spends little time on technical details. There are few facts and figures, and--other than a passing reference to the depth of the lowest tunnels--no attempt to convey the scale of the project. Neither on-screen experts or offscreen narrators recite statistics on cubic meters of rock removed, tons of concrete poured, or miles of wire strung. Footage of waste-handling machinery in action is extensively used but rarely explained, and scenes of drilling and blasting likewise pass without comment. The film's numerous scenes of men and machines at work are accompanied by ambient sound or a delicate strings-and-woodwinds score, rather than by explanatory narration. The skepticism about Onkalo that runs through the film is palpable, but it is not rooted in technical questions about the stability of the rock, the permeability of the clay seals, or the durability of the storage containers. Into Eternity is far less about how Onkalo was built than about how the fact that it was built reflects on us, its builders.

Madsen explores the significance of Onkalo through questions that, by their nature, have no clear answers. What does it say about us that we believe ourselves capable of building a structure that will last twenty times longer than the pyramids have stood beside the Nile? What does it mean that our "legacy" to future generations is so toxic that it must be hidden away in a structure designed to be forgotten? How will future generations interpret Onkalo if they do manage to find it: as a monument, a place of worship, a treasure trove? How can we convey to them that it is a place of danger, sickness, and death--best left alone? Will our descendents, a thousand centuries hence, be able to understand our language, our symbols, or even the concepts that frame our understanding of the world?

The majority of Madsen's narration in Into Eternity, and the majority of his on-screen conversations with experts, are given over to such questions. "How do we know ... ?" his quiet, insistent off-screen voice inquires of one interviewee after another. "How can we be sure ... ?" The answer, as Madsen is clearly aware, is that we do not know, and can never be sure. The time scales involved are too vast, and human experience is too limited. The entire span of recorded human history is only 5,000 years; we have no experience with, and no basis for thinking about, how governments, societies, languages, or ideas might evolve over such time spans. The abstract thinkers--scientists, and one theologian--interviewed by Madsen are comparatively comfortable with the uncertainty inherent in the project. Those used to thinking in more precise, concrete terms--engineers, company officials, and government regulators connected to Onkalo--are, predictably, less so. Resolutely focused on the present and near future, they appear lost and ill-at-ease when prodded to consider the possibility that the far future could be utterly different.

Into Eternity tacitly assumes that the changes unfolding over the next thousand centuries will include the decline and eventual disappearance of the industrialized civilization. The film's imagery reinforces the point by consistently rendering the human presence minimal, ineffectual, and transient. The constructions workers' movements are slow, almost dreamlike, as if they are prisoners, rather than masters, of their environment. One wordless sequence of a worker waking, rising, and dressing evokes the shipboard sequences in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its deliberate movements and deadened expressions. Scientists and engineers on the surface are shown moving, in the same weirdly slowed-down fashion, along empty laboratory hallways and through seemingly endless service tunnels at the same, almost-slow-motion pace. When they sit for on-screen interviews, it is at the corners and edges of the frame, dominated by the space around them rather than dominating it. The film frequently returns to images of spaces--both natural and artificial--in which no humans at all are visible, suggesting the impermanence of humans' presence on Earth.

The interviewees' themselves project none of the confidence of traditional documentary "talking heads," but speak in soft, halting voices with long pauses between and after thoughts. The answers themselves are often soft as well, freighted with uncertainty and unawareness. Rather than cutting away at the end of an answer, Madsen frequently holds the camera on the subject's face, waiting--like a patient but disappointed teacher--for something more substantive. In some scenes it is people, rather than words, that fade away, as Madsen uses slow dissolves to remove a figure from the frame while leaving their surroundings on the screen. The director himself, in each of his half-dozen brief appearances as on-screen narrator, stands in darkness, striking a wooden match to half-illuminate his face. The darkness gradually reclaims him as the match burns down, swallowing him up completely as the flame burns out.

Framed as a message from a vanished civilization--a last attempt by the dead to explain themselves to the living--the 75-minute theatrical version of Into Eternity is subtle, elliptical, and allusive. Speculative, rather than concrete, and philosophical, rather than narrative, it would be ill-suited to a conventional lecture-driven classroom, but a fruitful discussion starter for seminars on the philosophy of history or the social dimensions of technology. The 56-minute television version (available on the same disk) is shorter, more briskly paced, and more conventionally structured--a useful introduction to the social and cultural (though not technical) complexities of long-term nuclear waste disposal. It too, however, has value in the classroom beyond the information it conveys. A close comparison of it with virtually any mainstream television documentary about a large engineering project--an episode of Modern Marvels, for example--would be an illuminating exercise for students of documentary filmmaking. Conventional engineering documentaries celebrate, at least implicitly, the power of humans to leave a lasting mark on the surface of the Earth. Into Eternity is a meditation on the ultimate transience of such achievements, and the disturbing idea most lasting legacy will be the nuclear waste we bury.

A. Bowdoin Van Riper

Independent Scholar