If you watched Editing as Punctuation in Film, you may recall that at the end of Fail Safe (1964), Sidney Lumet represents an atomic bomb blast with a series of very rapid frame enlargements to freeze frames accompanied by appropriately abrupt and abrasive sound (gifs here). It's a terrific, harrowing, ingenious formal device that smashes the narrative to a complete halt. But another film topped it the following year.
When the A-bomb goes off at the end of The Bedford Incident (1965), director James B. Harris and editor John Jympson represent the enormity of the blast by simulating a burn-through of the celluloid in the projector. It's as if the event of the bomb's detonation is so horrendous, its annihilation so total, that it can only be represented by simulating the destruction of the medium itself. I've never seen a mainstream film do anything quite like it.
