Hiroshima Mon Amour

"Man's political intelligence is one hundred times less developed than his scientific intelligence"

Hiroshima Mon Amour is a film featured in both 1001 Movies You Should See Before You Die and They Shoot Pictures Don't They? Such is its influence that it has been called the "first modern film of sound cinema", and it was instrumental in kicking off the French New Wave of filmmaking. It's also quite a controversial film for its time, depicting an interracial sexual relationship between a Japanese man and a French woman (prior to this the few interracial relationships depicted on the screen had put the western/european character in the male position), and also features some disturbing documentary footage that shows the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing.

The premise for this film grew out of Alain Resnais' attempt to make a documentary about the atomic bomb. Resnais had previously made the acclaimed Holocaust documentary Night and Fog, and he was commissioned to look at the impact of the atomic bomb in a similar fashion. Resnais felt that the films would've been too alike if he treated them in the same way, so he decided to incorporate the themes into a fictional film that saw a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese politician (Eiji Okada) indulging in a holiday fling in post-war Hiroshima. The romance is fleeting, and soon intensifies as both characters relive the consequences of the war.

Together the couple discusses life, love, humanity, war, and Hiroshima itself. The French woman's past still haunts her, she had an affair with a Nazi soldier and was humiliated and ostracised by her fellow townspeople as a result. Meanwhile, the Japanese man was conscripted into the Japanese war effort just prior to the dropping of the bomb - meaning that he avoided the obliteration that took the rest of his family from the face of the Earth. Both are slowly healing from their respective traumas, bearing metaphors of their internal scarring (her hair was shorn off, whereas his numbness represents the physical loss of his family). In light of all this, the demise of their affair seems inevitable.

The reason why this film had such a huge historical impact is mainly via the way Resnais constructs his narrative. He employs a new kind of montage that uses short silent flashbacks cut together whilst a character narrates, it's a technique born in non-fiction filmmaking that he brought with him from his previous background as a documentarian. The documentary is a genre that neccessitates increased dynamics in storytelling, and Resnais brought the associated techniques over into the world of the fictional film text with Hiroshima Mon Amour. Aside from the use of montage, this also means unexpected fade outs, a highly-stylised backstory, and point-of-view shots that are used to evoke the power and processes of memory. The entire treatment is fresh and vibrant - making this quite simply completely unlike any other film that had come before it (and like very few films made since).

A word of warning that I probably could've used myself - the real footage of the Hiroshima aftermath that features near the film's beginning is incredibly graphic and horrific. I had to look away a few times because it was too much for me. A big part of Hiroshima Mon Amour is the theme of memory and the processes we use in remembering... this film is a crucial remembrance that accompanied the birth of the Cold War, an iteration of the boiling fears of nuclear armageddon that everyone was no doubt feeling at the time. Occasionally the dialogue in Hiroshima Mon Amour disappears up itself with an almost poetic use of repetition, and the narrative may feel overly artsy for anyone used to more traditional forms of filmmaking, but I think that if a film over sixty years old can still manage to make people feel uncomfortable or challenged then it's a sure sign of its status as a truly groundbreaking work.

DIRECTOR: Alain Resnais
WRITER/SOURCE: Marguerite Duras
KEY ACTORS: Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada, Bernard Fresson

RELATED TEXTS
- The documentary Night and Fog, also by Alain Resnais.
- Resnais also continued his exploration of this style with the film Last Year at Marienbad.
- The film has been remade as H Story (2001, by a Japanese director) and re-imagined as Where or When (2003, by an Iranian director).
- Other early French New Wave films: The Handsome Serge, The 400 Blows and Breathless.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - nominated for Best Screenplay.
BAFTAs - won UN Award. Also nominated for Best Film and Best Foreign Actress (Emmenauelle Riva).
Cannes Film Festival - nominated for the Palmes d'Or.