Hiroshima mon amour (1959)

Synopsis

Resnais's feature debut, a collaboration with novelist Marguerite Duras, was a revolutionary event in movies.

"Seeing Hiroshima gives you the impression of watching a film that would have been absolutely inconceivable in terms of what you already know of cinema". (Jean-Luc Godard).

In Hiroshima, a French actress (Emmanuèle Riva) working on an antiwar film meets a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada). They become lovers but their encounter only revives memories of the war, revealing that the woman is her past, the man, his.



Their struggle to come to terms with the idea that life goes on is reflected in images from a collective memory, represented in newsreel footage of Hiroshima's hospital, war museum, and the rebuilt city, in which the film's pacifist subtheme is skillfully developed.

The seamless integration of past and present, the poetic fusion of music to text and image to the clipped poetry of dialogue, were shared tropes of Resnais and Duras.

The tactile sensuality of the images is in profound counterpoint to the radical interiority of the protagonists: for Duras, especially, there is something irreducible about separateness which sex can transcend only fleetingly. -- Frenchculture.org  

Cast: Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada, Stella Dassas, Pierre Barbaud, Bernard Fresson

Read about this film

Country: France | Japan
Language: French | Japanese | English
Color: Black and White
Runtime: 90 Min.