Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959, France, Alain Resnais)


Wherein Ben and I warm up to the cool stylings of Alain Resnais.


Ben:


This is a very, very good film. Almost excellent but for its problems with pacing and didacticism. I will not elaborate on these weaknesses, however, because I have recently had it brought to my attention that it's OK to catch other people doing things right.

First and foremost, the opening scene was, for me, like the Taj Mahal. In short, it rises above the hype and delivers. I've visited the Taj and it blew me away, transcending all the journalism about it I had encountered over the years. I reckon every time I mentioned that I was meaning to check out HMA, you told me about the opening scene. It simply devastated me. Devastated me.

As did the subsequent segues from the lovers to the depictions of the city, the museum, the horror footage; all of this cut and blended brilliantly, with very effective musical ques and great respect for images, all the while the voice over laying the ground for the love story to come and already investigating the central theme of the picture - the duty of memory. After this quasi-documentary had been going on for a while, I mistakenly thought that the entire film would be conducted along these lines - visual impressionism accompanied by equally impressionistic language markers - and I was sold on the power of this, ready to take in an entire film of it. So I had to adjust when the film adopted a more conventional construction, (although I am aware that the use of the flashback device was still relatively unusual when the film was made). I settled in, however, and attached myself to the lovers and their relationship.

The romance of it all does not conform to cliches about the French, that's for sure. Certainly there is passion but ultimately it is not erotic. It is rather fuel for ethical feeling. This is due to the function of the love story as a vehicle for the thematic concerns of the film, overall a cerebral presentation. I think it would be incorrect to say that the love story is intended to be nothing more than a metaphor, the film is not that abstract, we are supposed to care about these two concrete characters. Yet, I think it is also valid to hold that the particular biographical substance of these individuals is offered as a means of entering intellectually into the world history the film demands that its audience never forget. In short, the personal is political.

This means that remembering is not simply a private matter on behalf of my own self-consciousness. It is a social responsibility. Historical consciousness is a fundamental precondition for praxis, for political engagement. What direction the latter should take is not specified by HMA, which restricts itself to a moral urge for pacifism. No doubt, this is what allowed the film to reach a wide international audience and considerable acclaim upon its release. For what it is worth, it seems to me reasonable to locate HMA's take on the duty of memory somewhere inbetween Marker's radical dystopian critique in Le Jette and Resnais' own later Marienbad, which is a po-mo harbinger to the extent that The Self, and therefore consciousness, disappears from the picture and we are left to grope around in serial time without history and reified space without geography.(Sidebar: I referred to Marienbad when discussing Kieslowski's Veronique and pointed out that it can not tolerate reactionary nostalgia. This is to acknowledge here that it annihilates any ground for conservative thinking just as much as it does progressive thinking). Alternatively, it might be better to compare HMA to Resnais'I own previous Night And Fog, which really does let the fucking facts speak for themselves. In any case, however it is ideologically grapsed, HMA is ultimately a feel-bad movie, if I may invert a tag. There is no refuge in psychological repression.

From a cultural perspectice, the meeting of a reconstructed Japanese urban environment with a post-war French humanist sensibility gives HMA a unique aesthetic and historical quality. Like, it would have been fascinating if Kurosawa had made a film in Paris after it had a few years to begin recovering from Hitler. At the end of the day though, HMA stands as a negative shrine to the bomb. I would be interested to know how it went over - the film, the film, Jesus please - in Japan at the time and how Japanese critics regard it today.



Dan Responds in Kind:


I'm glad you found the stardust in this one as well. It's interesting that you mention the memorability of not only that opening sequence, but the entire opening montage of nightmare images. It is one of my very favourite pieces of filmmaking; whenever I get the urge to reacquaint myself with Resnais, those of the fifteen minutes I go for. Startiling stuff. And like you, I remain kinda intrigued about what kinda film this would have been had Resnais stuck with this for the length of the feature. The film becomes a little less interesting when the film returns to an identifiable format and narrative, perhaps because it seems rather mundane after this exotic and unconventional opening. For all I know, 90 minutes more of this trippiness would have (eventually) bored me silly. I wouldn't have minded the challenge, though. This was the period of great experimentation in European cinema, with the French New Wave, Fellini getting weirder and weirder, Antonioni and his head trips, so Resnais must have fit right in.

And yet, I can also see why the new wavers in France were interested in this guy, but never really embraced him as one of their own. Resnais was certainly bracing, challenging the status quo (Monica's right, at least based on what I've read about Hiroshima's reception--the film's interracial romance was what really got chins wagging) not only with his subject matter (Holocaust, nuclear war, our ontological identity, or whatever the hell he's up to in Marienbad), but also with his cool (as in chilly, not hip) style. And it is the emotional distance that struck me about Hiroshima; for a film about a doomed romance, it doesn't have much heat (could help explain the qualifier "doomed" I guess). I know that there's blood here and their's passion between them (those opening shots leave little doubt) but as soon as they start talking, the temperature cools considerably. The fire and spit of early Truffault and Godard are not for Resnais. He's almost clinical in his approach. I believe I called the film fascinating but stilted [just checked. Yup] in my original review back in the day. I suppose that this is how he believes that we will help to ensure that our memories are more reliable, by divorcing them from emotion. I dunno. I still adore the film, particularly that opening salvo, which continues to knock my socks off.

Not so parenthetically, I went back and hauled up my review off of Apollo Guide. Here it is:

I'm glad you found the stardust in this one as well. It's interesting that you mention the memorability of not only that opening sequence, but the entire opening montage of nightmare images. It is one of my very favourite pieces of filmmaking; whenever I get the urge to reacquaint myself with Resnais, those of the fifteen minutes I go for. Startiling stuff. And like you, I remain kinda intrigued about what kinda film this would have been had Resnais stuck with this for the length of the feature. The film becomes a little less interesting when the film returns to an identifiable format and narrative, perhaps because it seems rather mundane after this exotic and unconventional opening. For all I know, 90 minutes more of this trippiness would have (eventually) bored me silly. I wouldn't have minded the challenge, though. This was the period of great experimentation in European cinema, with the French New Wave, Fellini getting weirder and weirder, Antonioni and his head trips, so Resnais must have fit right in.

And yet, I can also see why the new wavers in France were interested in this guy, but never really embraced him as one of their own. Resnais was certainly bracing, challenging the status quo (Monica's right, at least based on what I've read about Hiroshima's reception--the film's interracial romance was what really got chins wagging) not only with his subject matter (Holocaust, nuclear war, our ontological identity, or whatever the hell he's up to in Marienbad), but also with his cool (as in chilly, not hip) style. And it is the emotional distance that struck me about Hiroshima; for a film about a doomed romance, it doesn't have much heat (could help explain the qualifier "doomed" I guess). I know that there's blood here and their's passion between them (those opening shots leave little doubt) but as soon as they start talking, the temperature cools considerably. The fire and spit of early Truffault and Godard are not for Resnais. He's almost clinical in his approach. I believe I called the film fascinating but stilted [just checked. Yup] in my original review back in the day. I suppose that this is how he believes that we will help to ensure that our memories are more reliable, by divorcing them from emotion. I dunno. I still adore the film, particularly that opening salvo, which continues to knock my socks off.

Not so parenthetically, I went back and hauled up my review off of Apollo Guide. Here it is:

"Hiroshima, Mon Amour operates under the weight of its reputation as the "the most important film made since the war," a title accorded it by filmmaker and ex-Cahiers du Cinema cohort Eric Rohmer. Director Alain Resnais' at-the-time radical treatment of the fluidity of time, shifting from past to present without any warning, thereby "fracturing" time, has since become accepted filmmaking practice, making some of the critical accolades heaped on this film appear hyperbolic, but if we view the film sans the burden of expectation, and place it in the appropriate cinematic and historical context, Hiroshima, Mon Amour emerges from the hype as a somewhat stilted but still intellectually engaging glimpse at profound and challenging questions of the role of memory in our sense of identity. Hiroshima, Mon Amour 's famous magical opening sequence – a pair of naked torsos of two lovers (Emmaneulle Riva, Eiji Okada) embracing while a glittering sand (or is it radioactive ash?) coats their bodies – is a gorgeous and haunting image that quickly, beautifully and succinctly establishes the film's complex themes and difficult central relationship. Over a 24-hour period, the entire course of this lovers' relationship will be played out. As they move around contemporary Hiroshima, they begin to drift quietly apart, as the past begins to seep into their experiences until past and present merge, and to some extent at least, time loses meaning.

Can you live (or relive) a lifetime in one day? Hiroshima, Mon Amour posits that time as we conventionally understand it doesn't exist, but rather we live in our perceptions and memories, which layer atop each other to produce an experience of life that constantly shifts in time. Okada's character is at once sceptical, as he denies that Riva has seen the real Hiroshima throughout the film's opening documentary-like montage that carries us through Hiroshima past and present. He begs Riva to stay with him in Japan, despite the fact that both are married and from very different worlds. The strikingly handsome Okada ( Woman in the Dunes) is generally believable and affecting in this important role. An architect, Okada tries to build a bridge between them by wrenching her out of the past, but while she may wish to be through with the past, it isn't through with her.

In the film's most wrenching sequences, over a glass of beer, Riva revisits her youthful war experiences in Never, France, confronting the ghosts of her doomed forbidden and hidden relationship with a German soldier during the Nazi occupation. When Riva, an actress who is in Hiroshima to make a film protesting nuclear war, wrenchingly reveals her wartime journey from bliss to madness, the effect is more draining than cathartic, leaving us, if not pessimistic, at the very least sceptical about the power of love to transcend the boundaries that separate us. The relationship of both pairs of lovers in the two different contexts of past and present confronts questions of personal and political existence, as Riva innocently and perhaps naively believes that love can erase personal borders (mirror images of Riva atop the two men in her past and present abound) and political or racial boundaries. Riva is sexy and beautiful, completely inhabiting this role in a manner that is both riveting and extremely affecting. The movie is based on a screenplay by acclaimed French novelist Margeurite Duras that Resnais claims to have shot virtually word for word. While some of the dialogue seems stilted and overly-literary, this is not a Masterpiece Theatre knock off, as Resnais is certainly very capable in his use of the camera to illuminate the film's themes.