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Oana Urcan
Alain Resnais Hiroshima mon amour
Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras collaborated on this project – a complex film about the genocide of Hiroshima, about the Second World War and the impact it had and still has on people’s lives. Resnais intended to make a film about the war but not in a conventional way, so he approached Duras, who wrote the script – her first venture into film. It is a love story between a French woman, an actress, and a Japanese man, an architect, and through their encounter, through memories, the past unfolds. They are two very different people with different life experiences, their memories are foreign to the other, it is about personal memory and collective memory. The film’s opening scene – two bodies entwined and covered in sand as to convey the fragility of the human body…”All we see are these shoulders-cut off from the body at the height of the head and hips-in an embrace, as if drenched with ashes, rain, dew or sweat, whichever is preferred. The main thing is that we get the feeling that this dew, this perspiration, has been deposited by the atomic ‘mushroom’ as it moves away and evaporates. It should produce a violent conflicting feeling of freshness and desire”(1) The words the couple exchange:
He: You saw nothing, nothing in Hiroshima. She: I saw everything, everything..
“Duras describes the significance of the first exchange between the two characters this way: ‘ It is allegorical. In short, an operating exchange. Impossible to talk about Hiroshima. All one can do is talk about the impossibility of talking about Hiroshima. The knowledge of Hiroshima being stated a priori by an exemplary delusion of the mind.” (2) The first fifteen minutes of the film are built like a documentary of the aftermath of the bomb. She tries to convince him that she knows the horror….
She: I saw people walking pensively around; photos, reconstructions, documentation, memory….photos, photos…reconstructions, since there is nothing else, descriptions, since there is nothing else… .. There is in the film, a juxtaposition, between the banal, everyday love story (perhaps consciously chosen so by Duras) and the intensely painful memories of war. His memories of Hiroshima are of an enormous scale, hers, on a smaller, more personal, human scale, yet as poignant. They get to know each other through their memories – she tries to know him through the recollection of images seen on the news, but these memories are inaccurate, they don’t correspond to real feelings hence the ‘ you saw nothing, nothing.’ He knows her through the memory from Nevers , when she, as a young woman, falls in love with a German soldier who gets shot , the punishment for her betrayal – being locked up, her head shaven. Love for her is a painful memory, her new lover reminding her of the old one. “The film projects a complex system of mirrors, in which two places and two love stories as well as the collective memory of Hiroshima and the French woman’s individual experience reflect one another.”(3) Resnais is concerned with the way memory and time works and how it affects us. It stems from the philosophy of Henry Bergson. “The object of intelligence is matter, and intelligence treats everything as though it were a material object. Matter is extended in space and it restricts and drags everything downwards into inertia. Perhaps it is even created by intellect, the faculty which is the source of all man’s psychological and social problems, precisely because it fragments his emotional life, separates his past, present and future and by treating him as a physical object, convinces him that he is not free……How can we approach our pasts presents and futures other than through the medium of time?.....Through memory, intuition re-creates the past and infuses it into the present and we are able to grasp the flow of our lives.”(4) All of this is being experienced by the woman from Nevers. It is the central theme of Hiroshima mon amour. The story unfolds according to those philosophical considerations. The history of Hiroshima for her “is nothing but a side-show, and no matter how hard she tries to ‘feel’ it will never be anything more. Empathy is no substitute for experience. And he is equally distant from her experiences at Nevers. …Yet if personal tragedies appear somewhat inaccessible to other people, they must be remembered by the victims because these experiences are an integral part of their lives…..”(5)
She: Listen to me – like you I know what it is to forget. He: No, you don’t know what it is to forget She: Like you I am endowed with memory. I know what it is to forget. He: No you are not endowed with memory. She: Like you, I have fought with all my might against forgetfulness, like you I have forgotten, like you I wanted an inconsolable memory, a memory of stone and shadow. Each day I fought with all my might against the horror of no longer knowing the reason for remembering. Like you I have forgotten. Why deny the obvious necessity for memory……(6)
“ In memory the past lives on into the present and interpenetrates it. Apart from mind the world would be perpetually dying and being born again; the past would have no reality and therefore there would be no past. It is memory, with it’s correlative desire, that makes the past and the future real and therefore creates true duration and true time.”(7) This is the problem with the lovers in Hiroshima. They share their memories and so connect to each other, yet they are unable to take it further, therefore it is also their separation. It is perhaps because she intellectualises her emotions, therefore in a Bergsonian sense she is fragmenting the past, and through it the future. “She might be able to tell him about the events at Nevers but she cannot tell him what is going through her mind as she does so. The evocation of the dead soldier by the position of the Japanese’s hand, for example, is something he cannot know about even though she has told him about the soldier’s death. At the time the significance of the association is something private to her. She is not just reminded of the German’s death, but of a whole experience in an essentially private context, and so it is something that cannot be wholly communicated. This inhibits him from helping her to realise the triumph of her instinct over her intellect. And because she has not understood the significance of Hiroshima, as he had begun to grasp that of Nevers, she does not have the bridge that he has between her tragedy and his. In the last resort they cannot help each other, but neither can they leave each other. They have gone too far in sharing their pasts to leave, but they cannot go far enough to remain. They recognise that they belong to two different experiences, but they fail to realise that they have it within their power to achieve a mutual identity.”(8) Hiroshima mon amour is an unconventional film, it mixes documentary, lyrical and literary elements, repetitions of music and dialogue, which makes it unique. The characters are not heroes and the love story is not an unusual one. What is interesting is the way Resnais works with time, the fusion of past, present and future, the conveyance of memory and the philosophical and psychological implications. “Resnais contemplates the difficulties of living in time, with the past hovering over us when we want to forget and receding into the shadows when we need to remember. Time is destroying us (deja/already) as it destroys empires and civilisations.(9) Resnais is interested mainly in the way the mind works and he is using the time based cinematic tool to great effect. The cinematic tool allows him to convey very well the Bergsonian theory: “So, clock time has been shattered and the mental time of interior monologue, streamed consciousness and associated ideas has taken it’s place. And together with the breakdown of ordinary time has gone the breakdown of language. Both are creations of constricting intellect. Ordinary language has been replaced by the language of the absurd, the language of the unconscious and dreams and even by new languages, in order to escape the old static and lifeless categories and create a ceaseless process of becoming.”(10)
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