One of the poignant moments in Mick Jackson’s powerful 1984 nuclear holocaust drama Threads is a scene in which the staff of a museum remove paintings from the galleries for safe storage in advance of the nuclear bomb blast. The camera pauses briefly on the surface of a street scene by L. S. Lowry which captures the high point of the civilisation that would soon be destroyed. Lowry records a crowd of figures who are profoundly alien to one another yet united by their pursuit of industry. Jackson’s film prognosticates that the social and cultural threads which bound communities together would fail in the coming shock. The art which survives it might somehow help to rebuild the shattered society.
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