“The First Modern Film of Sound Cinema” Still Has So Much To Teach Us

The big picture

• Alain Resnais'
  Hiroshima my love
  revolutionized modern cinema with its timeless emotional rawness.
• The 1959 drama is about trauma, time and memory, and how big historical events shape small personal stories.
• Hiroshima my love
  presents
  

  flawed protagonists and serves as a reflection on cinema and the importance of cinema.

Paris, 1959. The staff of Cahiers du Cinema, the now-legendary French film magazine, convened only its second panel of hand-picked critics. The occasion, titled as “an event that seems important enough to warrant further discussion”, was the premiere of the film. Hiroshima my lovethe first feature film of Alain Resnais. The recording of this proto-podcast was attended by many critics who would become filmmakers, such as Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivettei Eric Rohmer. (The transcript was published in the July 1959 issue, available here .) It was Rohmer who gave the film the perfect quote when he called it “the first modern film of the sound age,” comparing it in importance with Picasso's “Guernica”. .” The most shocking thing is that this praise still stands. The film captures the sensations of a brief and intense affair between two nameless lovers who meet by chance in Hiroshima, 15 years after the end of the Second World War 65 years later, it is immediately easy to understand how this film would have blown the mind of a 1950s audience. because even today, it is emotionally raw, immediate and timeless.

Without further ado, let's dive into the film that Godard described as “quite inconceivable in terms of what I already knew in cinema.” which would become one of the first films of the French New Wave.

Alain Resnais' “Night and fog” led to “Hiroshima mon amour”

Before directing Hiroshima my love, Resnais was best known as a director of short documentaries. His best-known work was that of 1956 Night and Fog. This project came about as part of an exhibition commemorating ten years since the liberation of France from the Nazis. Resnais was commissioned by the curators of the exhibition to direct a documentary about the Nazi concentration camps. Night and Fog combines color footage from Resnais's visits to the abandoned structures of Auschwitz and Majdanek with historical film that had been shot inside the camps during the war. Uncomfortable talking about the camps despite not having lived in them, Resnais commissioned the camp poet and survivor Jean Cayrol to write the narrative. The result is an unflinching look at the human capacity for depravity that the camp system displayed. The film, now considered one of the most important documentaries of all time, it ensures that the horrors of the Holocaust are not compartmentalized as a discrete event that happened over a period of time in the past.but as a part of human history that could be repeated.

After the success of Night and Fog, Resnais was approached to create a film about another atrocity whose memory was still fresh, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, Resnais did not want to simply recreate himself Night and Fog. And that's why he suggested making a feature film, rather than a documentary. As the film scholar reports James Monaco'books Alain Resnaisthe untitled project that would become Hiroshima my love received funding from Japanese and French producers. But the money came with certain creative stipulations. The story was to feature one French and one Japanese character, and to contain sequences shot in both Japan and France, with crews from those countries.

Sometimes imposing rules on a creative process stimulates incredible leaps of imagination. This was one of those times.

What is “Hiroshima mon amour”?

Resnais hired a novelist Marguerite Duras to write the script, based on the guidelines above. Together, they invented the story of a short romance between a Japanese man and a French woman, set in Hiroshima. The film opens with a sequence that combines documentary footage of the aftermath of the Hiroshima attacks, combined with re-enactments and current footage filmed in a historical exhibition about the attack. The assembly, very reminiscent Night and Fog, contains a dream dialogue between the two lovers (who are never named, and credited as Elle and Lui, French for “her” and “him”). She insists that she remembers being present at the attack, and he tells her that, of course. , his memories are false. The conversation has a dreamlike quality, and it's unclear if it represents a conversation the two had in real life.

The film moves from this surreal sequence to a more grounded conversation between the characters (played by Emmanuel Riva i Eiji Okada), now in bed. We learn that they met the night before in a cafe. (We see the cafe later. It seems to be a place for French expats and Japanese Francophiles, called Casablanca. Okada's character speaks perfect French.) Riva's character is an actor in Hiroshima to take part in a film about the bombing. He is scheduled to return with his family to France the following day. He is an architect whose wife is away.

They clearly have an intense physical connection, and he keeps asking her to delay his return by a few days. However, the experience of his The temporary romance, which at some point must end, resurfaces his traumatic memories of the war. During the German occupation of her town, when she was 19, she fell in love with a German soldier. He was killed on the day of the French Liberation, and her community punished her for her affair with an enemy soldier by shaving his head.

These memories are played out, thus fulfilling the creative mandate to include major shoots in France. However, Resnais insisted that they will not be called “flashbacks” that represent the events as they happened, but will be treated as memories, which may even be false. Hiroshima my love he is widely credited with inventing the technique of using quick edits of past events to convey the idea of ​​sudden and intrusive memories. The first instance of this sinks in as she sees her lover's hand shake in his sleep, and immediately remembers the shaking hand of the German soldier as he lay dying.

'Hiroshima mon amour' is about memory, trauma and forgiveness

This is often said the great recurrent theme of Resnais's work is trauma, time and memory. In Hiroshima my love, this topic is addressed very directly. Emmanuelle Riva's character's affair is traumatic for her in a way that her marriage is not, because it has to end, as her affair with the German soldier ended in her death. In a tortured monologue, she recalls how her memories of the soldier left her: what he looked like, how he sounded. She knows the same will happen after her current lover leaves. And even if the sensations go away, the memory will live on in her, somehow. Life goes on, trauma continues to exist just beneath the surface. He is troubled by his realization that this pattern is just part of the way of life, even though it seems somehow not good enough.

Another concern of the film is the road great historical events are absorbed into small personal stories. And because of this, the characters must be imperfect vessels for the “correct” opinions on the subject of Hiroshima. They only briefly discuss the event itself, and she recalls experiencing the bombing as an event that signaled “the end of the war.” Although he is from Hiroshima, he does not stray far from it, except to note with regret that the destruction of his city was experienced around the world as a positive event. But these feelings are completely overwhelmed by his attraction to her, just as his love for the German soldier overwhelmed any loyalty he felt to his home. The film forgives these characters for their loyalty to their own feelings and does not suggest that they are any different from the rest of us in this respect. It's a film about flawed protagonists.

'Hiroshima mon amour' is a film about cinema

Finally, the film is a “film about cinema”. worried about the way cinema will become the main vault of our shared traumatic memories. The film opens with many staged images of the terrible immediate aftermath of the attack. These are interspersed with documentary footage, which implies that they should be taken at face value. When we later learn that Riva's character is an actress working on a film about Hiroshima, we see a make-up artist fabricate radiation damage on an actor's back, casting doubt on the authenticity of previous depictions . A later scene is staged with the giant glowing tower mounted on top of a movie theater.

As Rohmer pointed out during the Cahier du Cinema discussion, Hiroshima my love “has a very strong sense of the future, especially the angst of the future.” I was probably thinking of the time when the bombing of Hiroshima is marked as the beginning of our unrelenting anxiety about the atomic age. But Resnais also seems keenly aware of how his “first modern film” marks the beginning of a new era, where the weakness of our own memories, which lose control of the physical sensation of disturbing traumatic events, it is reinforced by the permanent commemoration that films allow.

Hiroshima my love is available to rent on Prime Video in the US

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