Light, Camera, Scientific Literacy! Understanding Marie Curie’s protagonism by Radioactive cinematographic work

Abstract

Although the cultural industry is often concerned with concentrating efforts to provide simple entertainment, cinematographic works can go beyond entertainment and offer immeasurable possibilities for reflecting on topics in the scientific, technological and social fields. Therefore, the objective of this article is to analyze the cinematographic work Radioactive, seeking to understand the contributions of this film to the scientific and technological literacy of Society. Bardin's Content Analysis technique is used. The film shows that the understanding of the structure of the atom was in full development and reveals a little of the difficulty to understand, at that moment, the nature of the rays emitted by the unstable atoms mentioned by Marie Curie. The cinematographic work allows reflecting distorted views of S&T as the individualistic and elitist idea that ignores the collective work of scientists and that shows science as being an activity of white men who would be able to decide social issues involving S&T. The film seems to leave us a series of messages, but we can highlight the one that values the democratization of science and, mainly, with the necessary participation of women as subjects of the process.