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NY Times, July 11, 2020
Kevin Rafferty, ‘Atomic Cafe’ Co-Director, Dies at 73
By Neil Genzlinger
Kevin Rafferty, who with two co-directors gathered archival material
that had been created to ease Americans into the nuclear age and turned
it into “The Atomic Cafe,” an acclaimed, darkly comic documentary film
released in 1982, died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 73.
His brother Pierce, who directed the film with him and Jayne Loader,
said the cause was cancer.
Mr. Rafferty didn’t make a lot of films — he has just six directing
credits in the Internet Movie Database — but the ones he did make drew
critical praise and covered a wide range of subjects.
In addition to “The Atomic Cafe,” which highlighted the absurdity of an
earlier generation’s propaganda and suggested the unsettling possibility
that Americans were still being so manipulated, there was “Blood in the
Face” (1991, directed with Anne Bohlen and James Ridgeway), which
examined the Ku Klux Klan and other far-right groups. “The Last
Cigarette” (1999, directed with Frank Keraudren) was about the peddling
of cigarettes to American consumers and the world. “Harvard Beats Yale
29-29” (2008) recounted a storied 1968 football game.
Other documentarians said Mr. Rafferty’s influence went well beyond his
directing credits. In an email, Robert Stone, who had help from him on
his Oscar-nominated 1988 documentary, “Radio Bikini,” spoke of Mr.
Rafferty as leaving a “deep and lasting legacy, both in his own work and
that of the filmmakers he inspired and with whom he collaborated.”
Michael Moore, the Oscar-winning director of “Bowling for Columbine”
(2002) and other films, credited Mr. Rafferty with starting his
documentary career. Mr. Moore was just an admiring fan when he briefly
met Mr. Rafferty after a showing of “The Atomic Cafe” in Ann Arbor, Mich.
But three years later, Mr. Rafferty, by then making “Blood in the Face,”
asked him for help in getting to Bob Miles, a leading Klan figure whose
farm was near Flint, Mich., where Mr. Moore was running a weekly
magazine. Mr. Moore ended up as an interviewer in that documentary,
which focused on a gathering of extreme-right groups in 1986.
A year or so later, Mr. Moore said in a phone interview, he decided to
make his own documentary, about General Motors, and asked Mr. Rafferty
for pointers. Mr. Rafferty showed up in Michigan with equipment, support
personnel and 60 rolls of film; he was credited as a cinematographer on
“Roger & Me” (1989), Mr. Moore’s career-making debut. (“Blood in the
Face,” though filmed before “Roger & Me,” was not released until after.)
“He was my film school,” Mr. Moore said. “I would not have made these
other films had he not been so generous.”
The technique employed by Mr. Rafferty and his co-directors on “The
Atomic Cafe” — which had no narration, just archival clips — was not
lost on Mr. Moore or other documentarians.
“The way he did his films was, if you are good enough at making the
film, that is your voice,” Mr. Moore said. “You don’t need to underscore
it. This is what I learned from him: that that is stronger than me
underscoring with my heavy narration — ‘But the bastards at corporate
headquarters refused to budge.’”
“The Atomic Cafe” is constructed of snippets of early Cold War films,
from government and other sources, that promoted “duck and cover”
drills, personal fallout shelters and other measures as prudent
preparations for a potential nuclear attack. It resonated with critics.
The film, David Sterritt wrote in The Christian Science Monitor, “should
be seen by everyone who cares about atomic power, the threat of nuclear
war, the roots of American culture, or the pervasive effects of the
images and ideas that blitz our minds every day through the mass media.”
“In its own modest way," he added, “it’s an explosive movie.”
Kevin Gelshenen Rafferty II, who was named for an uncle killed in World
War II, was born on May 25, 1947, in Boston to Walter and Martha Pierce
Rafferty. His father was an investment banker, and his mother was a
homemaker who served on school and other civic boards and was active in
garden clubs.
Kevin Rafferty graduated from Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts
in 1965 and from Harvard University in 1970, earning a bachelor’s degree
in art and architecture. He then studied film at the California
Institute of the Arts, where he was a teaching assistant for two years.
He and his brother began working on “The Atomic Cafe” in the 1970s, with
Ms. Loader soon joining the project. The film had a long gestation in
which the filmmakers spent many hours in various archives and many more
in the editing room.
“Because we stuck to the hard and fast rule of no ‘voice of God’
narration, a natural extension of the cinéma vérité tradition Kevin was
steeped in, the project took five years to complete,” Pierce Rafferty
said by email. “However, that decision to let the component pieces tell
the story, no matter the years added to the filmmaking process, defines
the film today.”
Manohla Dargis, reviewing the film in The New York Times, called it
“preposterously entertaining.” Mr. Rafferty, who drove thousands of
miles to interview players who had participated in the game, told The
Times that it was “the best time I’ve ever had making a movie.”
“It was a lot more fun than hanging out with the Ku Klux Klan, for
instance,” he added.
Mr. Rafferty’s first marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his
brother Pierce, he is survived by his wife, Paula Scott Longendyke, whom
he married in 1986; a daughter, Madeleine Rafferty; and four other
siblings, Sharon Patterson and Corinne, Gail and Brian Rafferty.
In 2016 the Library of Congress named “The Atomic Cafe” to the National
Film Registry, its list of movies deemed “culturally, historically or
aesthetically significant,” and IndieCollect, which works to preserve
independent films, began a restoration. The restored film premiered in
2018 at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, and later
played at Film Forum in Manhattan and elsewhere.
“When we embarked on its restoration in 2017, Cold War memes were
re-emerging in our public discourse, and White House staffers were
asserting the validity of ‘alternative facts,’” Sandra Schulberg,
president of IndieCollect, said by email. “It just seemed like the
perfect movie for our time.”
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