Hiroshima mon amour

Hiroshima mon amour

Original 1959 movie poster
Directed by Alain Resnais
Produced by Samy Halfon
Anatole Dauman
Written by Marguerite Duras
Starring Emmanuelle Riva
Eiji Okada
Stella Dassas
Pierre Barbaud
Music by Georges Delerue
Giovanni Fusco
Cinematography Michio Takahashi
Sacha Vierny
Edited by Jasmine Chasney
Henri Colpi
Anne Sarraute
Distributed by Pathé Films
Release dates
  • 10 June 1959 (1959-06-10)
Running time
 90 minutes
Country France / Japan
Language French
Japanese
English

Hiroshima mon amour (French pronunciation: ​[iʁoʃima mɔ̃.n‿amuʁ], Hiroshima My Love; Japanese: 二十四時間の情事 Nijūyojikan'nojōji, Twenty-four-hour affair) is a 1959 drama film directed by French film director Alain Resnais, with a screenplay by Marguerite Duras. It is the documentation of an intensely personal conversation between a French-Japanese couple about memory and forgetfulness. It was a major catalyst for the Left Bank Cinema, making highly innovative use of miniature flashbacks to create a uniquely nonlinear storyline.

Plot

Hiroshima mon amour concerns a series of conversations (or one enormous conversation) over a 36-hour long period between a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva), referred to as Her, and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada), referred to as Him. They have had a brief relationship and are now separating. The two debate memory and forgetfulness as She prepares to depart, comparing failed relationships with the bombing of Hiroshima and the perspectives of people inside and outside the incidents. The early part of the film recounts, in the style of a documentary but narrated by the so far unidentified characters, the effects of the Hiroshima bomb on August 6, 1945, in particular the loss of hair and the complete anonymity of the remains of some victims. He had been conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Army, and his family was in Hiroshima on that day.

The film uses highly structured repetitive dialogue, mostly consisting of Her narration, with Him interjecting to say she is wrong, lying or confused, or to deny and contradict her statements with the film's famous line "You are not endowed with memory." Although He disagrees and rejects many of the things She says, he pursues her constantly. The film is peppered with dozens of brief flashbacks to Her life; in her youth in the French town Nevers, she was shamed and had her head shaved as punishment for having a love affair with a German soldier, which she juxtaposes with the loss of the hair "which the women of Hiroshima will find has fallen out in the morning."

Cast

Production

According to James Monaco, Resnais was originally commissioned to make a short documentary about the atomic bomb, but spent several months confused about how to proceed because he did not want to recreate his 1955 Holocaust documentary Night and Fog. He later went to his producer and joked that the film could not be done unless Marguerite Duras was involved in writing the screenplay.[1]

The film was a co-production by companies from both Japan and France. The producers stipulated that one main character must be French and the other Japanese, and also required that the film be shot in both countries employing film crews comprising technicians from each.[1]

Reception

Hiroshima mon amour earned an Oscar nomination for screenwriter Marguerite Duras as well as the Fipresci International Critics' Prize at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival,[2] where the film was excluded from the official selection because of its sensitive subject matter of nuclear bombs as well as to avoid upsetting the U.S. government.[3] It won the prestigious Grand Prix of the Belgian Film Critics Association in 1960.[4] In 2002, it was voted by the international contributors of the French film magazine Positif to be one of the top 10 films since 1952, the first issue of the magazine.

Hiroshima mon amour has been described as "The Birth of a Nation of the French New Wave" by American critic Leonard Maltin.[5] New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard described the film's inventiveness as "Faulkner plus Stravinsky" and celebrated its originality, calling it "the first film without any cinematic references".[6] Filmmaker Eric Rohmer said, "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".[7]

Among the film's innovations is Resnais' experiments with very brief flashback sequences intercut into scenes to suggest the idea of a brief flash of memory. Resnais later used similar effects in The War Is Over and Last Year at Marienbad.

It was shown as part of the Cannes Classics section of the 2013 Cannes Film Festival,[8] as well as having nine screenings at the Harvard Film Archive between November 28 and December 13, 2014.[9]

Film references

In his book on Resnais, James Monaco ends his chapter on Hiroshima mon amour by claiming that the film contains a reference to the classic 1942 film Casablanca:

“ Here is an 'impossible' love story between two people struggling with the imagery of a distant war. At the end of this romantic, poignant movie about leave takings and responsibilities, the two fateful lovers meet in a cafe. Resnais gives us a rare establishing shot of the location. 'He' is going to meet 'She' for the last time at a bar called 'The Casablanca' - right here in the middle of Hiroshima! It's still the same old story. A fight for love and glory. A case of do or die. The world will always welcome lovers. As time goes by.[1] ”

Cultural errors

In Japan Journals: 1947-2004, film historian Donald Richie tells in an entry for 25 January 1960 of seeing the film in Tokyo and remarks on various distracting (for the Japanese) cultural errors which Resnais made. He notes, for example, that the Japanese-language arrival and departure time announcements in the train scenes bear no relation to the time of day in which the scenes are set. Also, people pass through noren curtains into shops which are supposedly closed. The noren is a traditional sign that a shop is open for business and is invariably taken down at closing time.[10]

In popular culture

Music

Film

References

  1. 1 2 3 Monaco, James (1979). Alain Resnais. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-520037-3.
  2. ↑ "Festival de Cannes: Hiroshima Mon Amour". festival-cannes.com. Retrieved 2009-02-14.
  3. ↑ Lanzoni, Remi Fournier French Cinema: From Its Beginnings to the Present, London: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd., 2004, p229
  4. ↑ ""The Artist" reçoit le grand prix de l'Union de la critique de cinéma". rtl.be (in French). Retrieved 2012-07-22.
  5. ↑ Maltin, Leonard (1995). "Alain Resnais". Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia. Plume. p. 744. ISBN 978-0-452-27058-9. Resnais's first 35 mm feature Hiroshima mon amour (1959) — in 1946, he made a 16 mm feature Ouvert pour cause d'inventaire — dealt with the nature of history and memory, and deviated from traditional notions of narrative time as it recounted a fleeting liaison between a French actress and Japanese architect. Its sexual candor and provocative ideas, wedded to a dazzlingly sophisticated visual style, made Hiroshima, Mon Amour the New Wave's The Birth of a Nation and it deservedly won the Cannes Film Festival International Critics Prize.
  6. ↑ in Michael S. Smith, "Hiroshima Mon Amour", DVD release review in Popmatters.com
  7. ↑ Kent Jones, "Time Indefinite", essay for the Criterion Collection DVD release. Accessed 23 May 2007
  8. ↑ "Cannes Classics 2013 line-up unveiled". Screen Daily. Retrieved 2013-04-30.
  9. ↑ "Harvard Film Archive Detailed Calendar Page for "Hiroshima Mon Amour".". Harvard Film Archive. Retrieved 2015-01-28.
  10. ↑ Richie, Donald Japan Journals: 1947-2004, Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2004, p126
  11. ↑ "Festival de Cannes: H Story". festival-cannes.com. Retrieved 2009-10-19.
  12. ↑ "Best French Films Ever. 39. Hiroshima, Mon Amour". www.topfrenchfilms.info. Retrieved 2014-12-12.

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