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.