But it’s also the story of two lovers who face similarly inescapable histories, and it’s into their story that Resnais immediately immerses us. Its much-lauded opening scene stands as a testament to Hiroshima, the city, rebuilt after the cataclysm of the war, but unable to escape its past. Hiroshima mon amour is a film of bold contrasts. Its striking score, penned by Georges Delerue and Giovanni Fusco, ties these haunting elements together. Far less playful than many of the films that would follow it and announce the arrival of the nouvelle vague, including Jean Luc-Godard’s À bout de souffle (1960) and François Truffaut’s Les quatre cents coups ( The 400 Blows, 1959) and Jules et Jim (1962), the strength of its impact lies primarily in the affecting juxtaposition of horrific imagery with rhythmic, poetic dialogue (written by Marguerite Duras). The fictional love story he uses to frame Hiroshima mon amour enabled Resnais to present a more universal inquiry into the nature of suffering and remembrance.Ī film of tremendous beauty and gravity, the experience of Hiroshima mon amour lasts long after the screen fades to black. Hiroshima mon amour grew from a commission to make a documentary short about the atomic bomb, but Resnais found this an impossible task – how can one make a documentary about Hiroshima, the impossibility of speaking the unspeakable, imagining the unimaginable? Can we ever really see what happened in Hiroshima? Is seeing understanding? Can we only understand another’s suffering if we experience it ourselves? These are some of the questions that shaped Resnais’ narrative.
Preceding his entry into fiction filmmaking Resnais had directed over 20 short documentaries, most extraordinary among them Nuit et brouillard ( Night and Fog, 1955), a document of the legacy of the death camps Auschwitz and Majdanek. Hiroshima mon amour, the result of that concern, remains one of cinema’s most profound meditations on the horror of war, suffering and forgetting. The importance of bearing witness preoccupied Alain Resnais (1922-2014) in the years prior to directing his first feature length film. – He (Eiji Okada) in Hiroshima mon amour (1959)
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