HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR (1960) B/W 91m dir: Alain Resnais

w/Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada, Stella Dassas, Pierre Barbaud, Bernard Fresson

From the Turner Classic Movies website (www.tcm.com), this article about the film:

"An art house sensation unlike any other, this groundbreaking depiction of cultural differences and the slippery nature of human memory was a major calling card for the late Alain Resnais, who made this debut feature after ten years of documentary shorts including the acclaimed Night and Fog (1955). In fact, this project originated as another documentary short (focusing this time on the devastation wrought by the atomic bomb on Hiroshima at the end of World War II), but he decided that there was no way to sufficiently address and convey the nature of that event in the intended format.

"A solution arrived in the form of Saigon-born French writer Margeurite Duras, a prolific novelist and playwright who would go on to become a noted experimental filmmaker in her own right a decade later. Resnais himself had also started in other fields, most notably as an actor, but a career behind the camera was cemented with his 1948 short, Van Gogh, which picked up an Oscar for Best Short Subject (Two-Reel). His frequent focus on painters and musicians was an ideal match for Duras' screenplay, which presents a nameless French actress (Emmanuelle Riva, a future Oscar nominee herself for Amour) and a married Japanese man (Eiji Okada) carrying on an extended conversation during a brief love affair while she shoots a film in Hiroshima.

"The dual nationalities of the two characters was actually a matter of commercial necessity as the film was the first narrative feature collaboration between France (via distributor Path Films and production companies Argos Films and Como-Film) and Japan (via Daiei Studios, who would go on to the long-running Gamera and Zatoichi film series). Riva was essentially an unknown at the time, but she would soon become a familiar face in international films for decades ranging from Jean-Pierre Melville's Lon Morin, Priest (1961) to Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors: Blue (1993). A bit more seasoned was Okada, whose role here led to a string of notable titles like Woman in the Dunes (1964) and Antarctica (1983).

"Perhaps less discussed but equally important are the collaborations among some of the other crafts on this film, including dual music composers courtesy of the great Georges Delerue (who would become a Truffaut regular as well) and the more experimental Giovanni Fusco, who would score several films for Michelangelo Antonioni. The cinematography was also the result of a pairing of Japanese cinematographer Michio Takahashi for some of its grittier documentary segments and the delicate, gliding camerawork of Sacha Vierny, who had been working with Resnais since Night and Fog and would go on to shoot such films as Belle de Jour (1967) and many films directed by Peter Greenaway.

"Despite or perhaps even because of its unorthodox narrative approach (including an innovative use of interspersed flashbacks to indicate bursts of memory), Hiroshima Mon Amour became a sensation upon its release and racked up a number of accolades including awards from the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Board of Review, the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics, a BAFTA UN Award, and an Oscar nomination for Duras's screenplay. Most significantly, its screening out of competition at Cannes alongside The 400 Blows is usually regarded as the opening salvo in the French New Wave, which would become one of the most important film movements of the 1960s.

"In fact, the term 'new wave' was already part of the English-language critical parlance when Resnais's film opened in the United States in the spring of 1960, with The New York Times critic A.H. Weiler calling it 'a complex yet compelling tour de force--as a patent plea for peace and the abolition of atomic warfare, as a poetic evocation of love lost and momentarily found, and as a curiously intricate but intriguing montage of thinking on several planes in Proustian style.'

"Among its fellow films in the French New Wave, Resnais's film would quickly become significant as a touchstone for what would become known as the Left Bank (Rive Gauche) members with stronger ties to art forms outside cinema (compared to the more internationally famous Cahiers du cinema members). In addition to Resnais and Duras, other significant colleagues of the Left Bank would include Chris Marker and the married Jacques Demy and Agnes Varda.

"Inspired by the creative fruit of working with a noted novelist, Resnais repeated the same feat with his next film, Last Year at Marienbad (1961), also shot by Vierny, which pushed the fragmentation of memory even further thanks to an audacious screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet. In fact, memory and temporal displacement would become fixtures in Resnais films for the rest of his career regardless of the screenwriter.

"Hiroshima Mon Amour has since become a repertory mainstay, a staple of film schools, and a home video favorite, most recently with an immaculate restoration conducted in 2015. For that most recent edition via Criterion, New York Film Festival director Kent Jones noted that the film's refusal 'to resist a comforting sense of definition fifty years after its release may help to account for Resnais's nervousness when he set off for the shoot in Japan. He was convinced that his film was going to fall apart, but the irony is that he and Duras had never meant for it to come together in the first place. What they created, with the greatest delicacy and emotional and physical precision, was an anxious aesthetic object, as unsettled over its own identity and sense of direction as the world was unsettled over how to go about its business after the cataclysmic horror of World War II.' Even divorced from its historic context and the intended postwar audience, viewers can still step into the distinct cinematic realm created by Resnais and Duras to appreciate its haunting snapshot of a meeting of two people, two worlds, and two artists whose worked fused together in a flash for one indelible moment."

From the Senses of Cinema website (www.sensesofcinema.com), this article about the film by Joanna Di Mattia:

"'You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.' --- He (Eiji Okada) in Hiroshima mon amour (1959)

"The importance of bearing witness preoccupied Alain Resnais (1922-2014) in the years prior to directing his first feature length film. Hiroshima mon amour, the result of that concern, remains one of cinema’s most profound meditations on the horror of war, suffering and forgetting.

"Preceding his entry into fiction filmmaking Resnais had directed over 20 short documentaries, most extraordinary among them Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955), a document of the legacy of the death camps Auschwitz and Majdanek. Hiroshima mon amour grew from a commission to make a documentary short about the atomic bomb, but Resnais found this an impossible task --- how can one make a documentary about Hiroshima, the impossibility of speaking the unspeakable, imagining the unimaginable? Can we ever really see what happened in Hiroshima? Is seeing understanding? Can we only understand another’s suffering if we experience it ourselves? These are some of the questions that shaped Resnais’ narrative. The fictional love story he uses to frame Hiroshima mon amour enabled Resnais to present a more universal inquiry into the nature of suffering and remembrance.

"A film of tremendous beauty and gravity, the experience of Hiroshima mon amour lasts long after the screen fades to black. Far less playful than many of the films that would follow it and announce the arrival of the nouvelle vague, including Jean-Luc Godard's A bout de souffle (1960) and Francois Truffaut's Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959) and Jules et Jim (1962), the strength of its impact lies primarily in the affecting juxtaposition of horrific imagery with rhythmic, poetic dialogue (written by Marguerite Duras). Its striking score, penned by Georges Delerue and Giovanni Fusco, ties these haunting elements together.

"Hiroshima mon amour is a film of bold contrasts. Its much-lauded opening scene stands as a testament to Hiroshima, the city, rebuilt after the cataclysm of the war, but unable to escape its past. But it’s also the story of two lovers who face similarly inescapable histories, and it’s into their story that Resnais immediately immerses us. Resnais presents a cropped image, a close-up of two bodies, naked and locked in an embrace. Dust showers down, covering them. It’s an image of doom, both beautiful and shocking, intended to draw us back in time, to remind us of the countless bodies like these, buried in the rubble of war, covered in the deadly atomic dust that rained over Hiroshima (and Nagasaki) at the close of World War II. And then the scene dissolves into the present. Two lovers, naked and locked in embrace, dust replaced now by less ominous beads of sweat.

"From here, Resnais cuts to images at the hospital in Hiroshima and at the museum. The woman, a French actress in Hiroshima making a film 'about peace,' known only in the credits as She (Emmanuelle Riva), recounts in voiceover what she saw there. She repeats, 'I saw them ...,' in an attempt to memorialise and make real her experience because she knows what it is to forget. Resnais presents a series of horrific images --- loose human skin and hair, twisted metal, photos and moving images of scorched bodies, malformed children --- 'since there is nothing else,' But her Japanese lover, an architect, known only as He interrupts her narration, repeating the film’s most powerful, orienting line: 'You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.'

"In Hiroshima mon amour suffering is both public and private, remembrance both collective and personal. But what can She really know? Later, She tells He the tale of her passionate love for a German soldier during the war in her home-town, Nevers --- their discovery, his murder, her crippling grief and her humiliation at the hands of the townsfolk. She fears forgetting him. Telling their story is a way to keep him alive, while she is also aware that every step she takes into the future is a step further from her past. He tells her, encapsulating the whole film: 'I shall remember you as love itself forgotten. I know now that I shall think of this story as of the horror of forgetting.' But She feels that in telling her story she has already forgotten the German man. The telling, the remembering, as essential as they are, feels like a betrayal.

"Memories fade, people forget, people are forgotten. There is a melancholy inevitability to this. But to embrace the future, perhaps the past must be forsaken. Resnais, by the film’s moving finale, has not definitively resolved this dilemma and yet we are left with a feeling, as Eric Rohmer described it in a roundtable discussion on the film in 1959 with other Cahiers du cinema editors, of the 'anguish of the future.'

"Resnais presents time in a circular fashion --- past, present and future looping into each other. He achieves this through repeated dialogue and a wholly innovative film aesthetic. Hiroshima mon amour, debuting at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival alongside Truffaut's Les quatre cents coups, was immediately marked as a 'different' kind of film, heralding a new, exciting cinematic language.

"Using multiple flashbacks, ellipses and voiceover narration, Resnais presented a challenge to classical narrative cinema forms. Here, as in much of the New Wave that he was both a part of and apart from (he was more closely aligned with the 'Left Bank' group early in his career), was a cinema of images and ideas, evolving with little reverence for the conventions of plot and story development that cinema audiences had grown comfortable with. In Hiroshima mon amour linear construction is abandoned; storytelling is circular and unresolved.

"For all its weighty ideas, Hiroshima mon amour is also a deeply intimate film. The repetition of dialogue affects this familiarity, as does the framing of shots at angles and distances that trap us within the frame. But it is not claustrophobic so much as immerse and dreamlike and images gain a strangely musical, hypnotic quality. Despite this, it always feels like a film that exists in the real world; not quite neo-realist but certainly revealing something of its conceptual origins as a documentary.

"The film’s final lines suggest not only a story with no end but also a new beginning. 'Hi-ro-shi-ma. That’s your name,' She tells him. And He replies, 'It’s my name. Yes. Your name is Nevers. Ne-vers in France.' Each body forever located in the suffering of the place from which they come; enabling the other to never forget.

"If it was and remains impossible to speak of what happened in Hiroshima it is less difficult to imagine something of the impact of what happened through our own experiences of loss, grief and forgetting. And this, ultimately, is what we take with us when we view Resnais’ film --- a feeling of the weight of time and how we go on living, sometimes, against insurmountable odds. Hiroshima mon amour is one of the most important films of the 20th century and certainly one of its cinematic milestones, but also one of its most emotionally devastating."