Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)

The end of Hiroshima clearly indicates that the french female protagonist is an embodiment of Veners, her hometown in France, and that the Japanese male protagonist is an embodiment of Hiroshima. In each place a tragedy had occurred at a similar time. In Veners the female had lost her lover 10 years before, holding him in her arms as he bled to death from a bullet wound, leaving her with a deep emotional scar.

The film is mostly set 10 years after the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, news of which reached the female protagonist after her grieving period. The painful effects of the bombing are evident in the male protagonist, but the film also illustrates it's collective social effects, by showing anti-nuclear strikes in Hiroshima and in the significant opening scene, where we are shown the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and found footage is displayed of the aftermath of the bombing. The female's individual plight and suffering is thus paralleled with the collective plight and suffering of the bombing of Hiroshima. Subtle connections between the individual and the collective are here addressed and the film may, on a very important level, be seen as an exploration of such connections.

I admire the way in which, wanting to address the atrocity that occurred in Hiroshima, Alain Resnais did not direct a film about the actual bombing, but directed a film set 10 years after the bombing, detailing the event's emotional effects on individuals. It is also sensitive and intelligent, I think, that the film is primarily from the perspective of the french. Both protagonists speak french and the film is mostly from the perspective of the french female protagonist; it is she who provides the main narrative impulse. The plot is largely about her, with the help of the male protagonist, trying to come to terms with a personal trauma. Resnais is a french director giving his culturally and geographically relative account of the situation in Hiroshima, showing how it is connected to similar situations in other places.

Resnais was certainly occupied with the horrific atrocities of his time. Previous to Hiroshima, he made Night and Fog (1956) and Guernica (1950). Night and Fog is about the Holocaust and Guernica about the 1937 bombing of Spain. Resnais aimed to address and remember such events; he did not want them to be forgotten, repressed, misunderstood or repeated.

In Hiroshima both the female and male protagonists state that they are happy with their partners and yet still have a romantic affair together. This is because they, being embodiments of different places where tragedies have occurred, feel an illimitable magnetism, regardless of whether they are happy in love or not, and this magnetism assumed the form of a romantic affair. They are two countries, two groups of people, two tragedies, two individuals involved in a complex form of deep copulation and connection. Again, this point is demonstrated in the opening scene, where a male and female are shown embracing in extreme close-up shots with only their limbs showing. Such close-up shots also indicate the film's opposition to the style of classical narrative cinema, where long shots are commonly used, reminding one of it's influential position in the history and development of art cinema.

The fact that the protagonists embody larger social groups and geographical areas is significant for it expresses the idea that we have all grown from and invariably express our environments. The film also shows that such environments, and thus our individual selves, are linked to other environments and individuals too. It expresses the idea that we are all, ultimately, neighbours and relatives, and that we should thus stop warring with each other. There is a deep experience of poignancy and profundity with Hiroshima that is derived from such insights. As individuals and societies it's lessons are still desperately relevant today.

Wings of Desire (1987)

Wings of Desire is nothing short of life-affirming. There is something raw and deeply emotional in the way it recognises and values the most basic aspects of everyday life. The film overcomes many of the distractions and concerns of superficial adult life and returns to the initial, essential questions of a child coming to terms with the world.

“When the child was a child it was the time of these questions: Why am I me and why not you? Why am I here and why not there? When did time begin and where does space end? Isn’t life under the sun just a dream?”

As with many great stories, the film dramatises different realms or levels of existence. The film is about angels, specifically Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander), who are watching over Berlin, often in a caring capacity. The angels occupy another realm, which is communicated to us by slowly gliding camerawork (courtesy of cinematographer Henri Alekan), aerial shots of Berlin, an orchestral soundtrack (by Jürgen Knieper) and black and white imagery.

Damiel faces a dilemma. He is an angel but wishes, as we find out early in the film, to “enter the history of the world”, to live and be finite, to sense and love and feel pain. We learn that as angels they live eternally. They can observe every facet of the world and are all-knowing, but are disconnected from the limited, sensual and profane world of manifested life.

In an early scene, the angels Damiel and Cassiel are in a stationary car, calmly recounting their observations of Berlin, as though they had done this many times before.

Cassiel:

“Today, on the Lilienthaler Chaussee, a man walks slowly, and looks over his shoulder into space. At post office 44, someone who wants to put an end it to it today has stuck collectors stamps on his farewell letters, a different one on each, then he spoke English with an American soldier, for the first time since his school days, fluently. In the hills, an old man was reading The Odyssey to a child, and the young listener stopped blinking his eyes.

And what do you have to tell?

Damiel:

“A passer-by, in the rain, folded her umbrella, and was drenched. A school boy described to his teacher how a fern grows out of the earth, and astounded the teacher. A blind woman who groped for her watch, feeling my presence”

During the next lines of this scene we learn of Damiel’s dilemma, as he states:

“Sometimes I’m fed up with my spiritual existence. Instead of hovering above, I’d like to feel a weight grow in me, to end the infinity and tie me to earth. I’d like, at each step, each gust of wind, to be able to say “now”, and no longer “forever” and “eternity”.

No, I don’t have to beget a child or plant a tree. But it would be rather nice, coming home after a long day, to feed the cat, to have a fever, to be excited not only by the mind, but, at last, by a meal, by the line of a neck, by an ear. To lie, through one’s teeth! As you’re walking, to feel your bones moving along. To guess, instead of always knowing. Or at last to feel how it is to take your shoes off under a table, to wriggle your toes barefoot”

The realm of manifested life is characterised, prominently, by desire. Desire arguably shapes most of what humans do and think. The desire to love and to be loved. The desire for carnal pleasures. In most Buddhist thought, desire creates suffering and life is defined as suffering. Thus desire is viewed negatively and something to avoid. But desire, for me, is not something to avoid, but something to be apprehended accurately. Desire is multi-faceted and beautiful; pain, love, happiness, longing, connection, suffering. I think this point is expressed in the film too.

Essential to Wings of Desire is romantic love. Part of Damiel’s wish to enter history is his longing for a woman, a trapeze artist named Marion. This longing is expressed in the film, structurally, by the transition from black and white to colour. Black and white represents the eternal angelic realm. When we find Damiel observing Marion, there are moments where the film shifts to colour. The full shift to colour occurs when Damiel emerges into the world of life.

Marion, like Damiel, is also longing. When she finds Damiel in a dream she knows that she belongs with him. Her need for him and his need for her helps the film define human life, which is based on desire (or need) and connection. Marion says to Damiel “You need me. You will need me”.

Marion’s words to Damiel near the end of the film are very telling:

“At last it’s becoming serious. We are now the times. Not only the whole town, but the whole world is taking part in our decision. We are now more than us two. We incarnate something. We’re representing the people now. And the whole place is full of those people dreaming the same dream. I am ready”

After longing and thinking, Marion is ready to take her decision, to be serious, to embrace life. In doing so, she incarnates the world and its capacity to create. Her's and Damiel’s union encapsulates all unions; they are embodying and expressing every act of love, “We are now more than us two”.

A lot more could be said about Wings of Desire, in terms of its historical references, use of music and its connections with other films and styles. Maybe another time!

“Why am I me and why not you? Why am I here and why not there? When did time begin and where does space end? Isn’t life under the sun just a dream?”