This poetic feature debut from New Wave stalwart Alain Resnais lucidly captures the fleeting intangibility of memory.
After years of making short documentaries,
Alain Resnais burst forth with his ghostly, nonlinear style of filmmaking in 1959 to help set the stage for the
French New Wave. His feature debut -
Hiroshima mon amour - as well as his other films, are crafted of memory, time, and poetry.
These three things conceptually are more similar to sand or water, and admittedly don’t make a stable base to build on, but then again films of this type aren’t meant to be stood upon or held onto either. Rather the audience is meant to sink into them, or if they’re so inclined, melt into them. These films are to be felt before they’re to be understood, just like the themes of love and memory in Hiroshima mon amour, things which can be experienced, and can swallow you whole, but try to mold them to your liking and they’ll crumble in your hands.
In the film a Japanese man and a French woman engage in a passionate and ostensibly cathartic affair over the course of two days as they intimately discuss the private and public horrors of World War II. It begins with a montage, intercutting between the lovers entangled on a bed and documentary footage of
Hiroshima’s fallout, as the woman recites facts about the bombing of Hiroshima that she saw in newsreels and museums, continually stating, “I know it,” as the man continually replies, “You saw nothing in Hiroshima,” contrasting outside observance with private experience.
Later in the film the woman recounts her own horror story of the war, detailing how at the age of 18 she fell in love with an occupying German soldier, only to see him shot dead in the street as the war neared its end. Going mad with anguish, she spent the next few years of her life locked in a cellar by her family, as the townsfolk periodically shaved her head to shame her. Again we see the dichotomy of the personal and the public, as the townsfolk observed her as a traitorous whore who fooled around with the enemy, contrasted against her own personal experience of a young girl’s first love, violently ripped away, and punished for it herself afterwards, both by outsiders and by her own memory.
Speaking through time to her dead lover she states, “I begin to forget you. I tremble at forgetting such love.” It’s the type of line that also speaks to the power of grief, and makes it easier to understand why those who’ve been bereaved of loved ones so strongly fear the thought of moving on, as if it’s a betrayal of memory and life lived.
They may seem odd things to honor, but
Hiroshima mon amour is a testament to love’s forgetfulness, and the traumas that not only shape the world, but shape the lives of those who must continue on.
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