Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)

 Alain Resnais' "Hiroshima Mon Amour"

I am of the firm opinion that it was Agnes Varda that started the French New Wave movement with her 1955 film "La Pointe Courte." The film's freeform style, mixed with realism, is drenched in creative liberties while it decommissions conventionality. The way the film is shot, edited, and written has a quality that is almost untethered to a tangible viewpoint of reality. Varda's editor on this film, Alain Resnais, once stated his reluctancy to work on it because it was "so nearly the film he wanted to make himself." He was so inspired by the project, that it influenced him to make 1959's "Hiroshima Mon Amour." 

After making his 1956 documentary "Night and Fog" about the recent holocaust, Resnais was then commissioned to shoot another short documentary. This time, about the atomic bomb. However, Resnais felt that making a documentary about the war would be too similar to the documentary he just made and he didn't want to repeat himself. Instead, he reached out to French novelist Marguerite Duras to create a screenplay. 

"Hiroshima Mon Amour" is a film about two lovers, a French actress and a Japanese architect. The French woman is visiting Hiroshima to film a 'movie about peace.' There, her and the Japanese man spend a few days recounting previous romances and life experiences. The two intertwine their stories about the past while pondering the devastation wrought by the atomic bomb dropped on the city.

I find it a bit difficult to speak critically or emotionally about "Hiroshima Mon Amour" because its an incredibly evasive film. It somehow manages to have both a linear story while also having some existential story that exists somewhere between the moments of what's happening. On top of this, Resnais and writer Duras seem to fracture time in the film. 

Firstly, Resnais seamlessly obscures time visually. Moments just between the narrative story, a documented reality of the Hiroshima bomb fallout, flashbacks of the characters, and visual moments that transcend the story like a point of view of walking down a park sidewalk. Because of this, time becomes untethered visually. The formal creative reach of the story is unbound. 

Secondly, narrative gets unspooled as well. We spend the film with this couple, but the couple continue to subvert reality themselves with their comments. Their relationship becomes tangled and identity becomes meshed and confused. Their identities become fractured, just as time in the film does. The woman has somehow seen the devastation of Hiroshima, despite never being there. The man becomes her former lover. And in the end, they both become the cities of their youth. 

With the film, Resnais was able to fracture time, identity, and formality. It was such a revelation, that many filmmakers and film critics hailed it as being a game changer of the film form. American critic Leonard Maltin cites the film as being the "The Birth of a Nation' of the French New Wave." French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard was enthralled by the film's inventiveness and originality, saying it is "the first film without any cinematic references." Fellow French filmmaker Eric Rohmer make an even bolder statement about the film, saying: "I think that in a few years, in ten, twenty, or thirty years, we will know whether 'Hiroshima Mon Amour' was the most important film since the war, the first modern film of sound cinema."

As designated by all the praise, Resnais' film was able to capture something many consider the first evolution of 'modern' cinema. It's lack of coherence to structure, time, and visual congruency allowed the film to be something more of a fractured mirror of modernity through the lens of pure emotion. After the war, realism was an important element many filmmakers felt that films needed to capture. Realism helped maintain the integrity of visual storytelling. Godard felt this to be true too, which is why a Godard film is visually grounded in reality. Despite this, Godard manages to film and edit his film sans reality, providing a weird freeform visual style to realism. Where Godard's freeform visual style is more like visual jazz, Resnais has more of a formal intentionality in the vein of the great Sergei Eisenstein. As Kent Jones writes in his 2015 essay for Criterion, Resnais is able to "erect a complex, rhythmically precise fictional construction in which pieces of reality are caught and allowed to retain their essential strangeness and ominous neutrality." Sure, realism is a key component to Resnais. However, the way Resnais structures and edits this reality, the visual language of the film becomes an emotion, rather than a concrete happening. Sure, this helped in continuing to kick off the French New Wave movement, but even more so, it helped kickstart the concept of modern cinema as we know it. Cinema built upon an emotional visual language. I think that without this form, we would not have a filmmaker like Andrei Tarkovsky. 

In taking all of these elements of the film into account, the film itself transforms into a film fractured in time and space. It is a film about the past, detailing the pain of war and its causalities and terrors. It is also a film about the present. The pain of the past still sits firmly in the present. Despite this, the present must move on. As the female protagonist points out, we as a global community somehow both forget about what happened, but at the same time can't forget. Because of this, the film is also about the future. What has happened, is still happening, and will happen again. The new world we live in is now the atomic age. Our lives as a global community is hanging on the verge of oblivion and the film is able to transcend 1959 and capture the emotional existentialism of humanity's future evermore. The film's quiet desperation is merely an echo of the modern world. As time fractures in the narrative of the film, so too does it fracture time beyond its frame. Our past won't ever leave us. It informs us. It follows us. The characters try desperately to escape their own personal pasts. The male and the devastation of Hiroshima. The female and the horror of the holocaust and the emotional trauma of being locked in a cellar. However, try as they might, their past comes back to haunt them in the waking reality of the now. It becomes so ever-present that their very identities become these tragedies. They are somehow able to forget about them while also not forgetting about them. They become them, but they are also separate. Our realities are no different. We spend all of our time being in love, watching films, engaging with life. But the horrors of yesterday and tomorrow are happening regardless. The fracturing of time is apart of our identities. The identities of others are part of our identities. The things that have happened to others are happening to us and will happen to us. Because of these notions, the film acts as an existential perspective of modernity. The future is coming and its exists in the now. And this horrifies us, no matter how much we try to escape it. As the female protagonist cites: "Listen to me. I know something else. It will begin again. Two hundred thousand dead and eighty thousand wounded in nine seconds. Those are the official figures. It will begin again. It will be ten thousand degrees on the earth. Ten thousand suns, people will say. The asphalt will burn. Chaos will prevail. An entire city will be lifted off the ground, then fall back to earth in ashes."