(1959)
directed by Alain Resnais
“You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.”
Eiji Okada
“Hiroshima mon amour”
“Hiroshima mon amour” opens with a close-up of two bodies entwined in a naked embrace. Dust rains down and covers the bodies. This image is both beautiful and shocking. It reminds us of the countless bodies covered in deadly atomic dust after the detonation of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima.
“Hiroshima mon amour” is a profound meditation on the horrors of war, on remembering, and on forgetting. The horrors of war are presented as both public horrors and private horrors. Similarly, remembering and forgetting are both public and private matters.
Regarding the present, the city of Hiroshima has been completely rebuilt only fifteen years after the city was destroyed by an atomic bomb. Tourists are visiting ground zero. A French actress (played by Emmanuelle Riva) is making a film “about peace.” A Japanese architect (played by Eiji Okada) has fallen in love with the actress.
Regarding the past, the traumas of the war in Europe and of the war in the Pacific are recent memories. The architect simply states that he was a soldier in the Japanese army. The actress tells her lover a more complicated story. She tells him about how her passionate love for a German soldier was discovered by the people in Nevers, her hometown in France. She was shamed, humiliated, and spat upon by her neighbors. Later, she is crippled by grief when her German lover is shot dead by a French sniper. Telling her story is a way of keeping her lover’s memory alive. After listening to her story, her Japanese lover tells her, “I know now that I shall think of this story as of the horror of forgetting.”
“In my film, time is shattered,” Resnais said. In “Hiroshima mon amour,” the storytelling is circular and inconclusive. Past, present, and future are entwined. To embrace the future, perhaps the past must be forgotten. The trauma of the past, however, leaves the future uncertain. Eric Rohmer, discussing “Hiroshima mon amour,” famously called this dilemma the “anguish of the future.”
Resnais uses images, sounds, and words to guide the viewer as he plays with time and location. Be sure to pay attention to the actors hands. In a particularly moving scene, the actress looks down on her sleeping Japanese lover. He opens and closes his hands while dreaming. The movement of his hands mirrors the opening and closing of her German lover’s hands after he is shot. The wonderful musical score by Georges Delerue and Giovanni Fusco announces whether we are witnessing events in Europe or Japan. Listen carefully to the music for cues regarding the location. The poetic script by Marguerite Duras manages to be both specific and universal.
“Hiroshima mon amour” is a very intimate film. It is immersive and dreamlike. The images in the film have a strange hypnotic quality. The film’s final lines suggest a story with no end. “Hiroshima. That’s your name,” she tells him. He replies, “It’s my name. Yes. Your name is Nevers. Nevers, a city in France.” Each character is forever located in the place from which they came. Each character reminds the other not to forget.