Under the Mushroom Cloud: Hiroshima, Mon Amour (Dir Alain Resnais, 1h30m, 1959)

 

 

Two bodies, a man (Eiji Okada) and a woman (Emmanuelle Riva), abstracted into curves, and edges, shadow, and light, entwine as snow-no, atomic ash-falls, slowly covering their bodies, their backs and embracing arms. In a slow fade, the deadly ash, the black rain of nuclear fallout. Out of the ashes of Hiroshima, life  must continue, no matter how difficult the circumstances. This is how Hiroshima, Mon Amour begins, showing the aftermath of disaster and the complexity of love, as the unnnamed couple conduct a passionate, affair in the city that has just suffered one of the most infamous acts of the 20th Century.

Hiroshima, Mon Amour has a rather strange journey to its creation; director Alain Resnais is a somehwhat underappreciated midwife in the birth of the French New Wave, beginning as a documentary maker, winning an Oscar for Van Gogh (1948, remade in 1950) and, after several further short films focusing on art and artists, so he arrives at Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, 1956). Like Hiroshima Mon Amour, it uses one of the starkest moments of the Second World War, in this case the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, as a stepping off point to discuss the way in which the camps were considered in the memory of the landscape around them, in which 1940s footage of the liberation of the camps in black and white, and the horrors with are juxtaposed with then contemporary colour footage. It, despite it s attempted censorship by a French government and subsequent attempted withdrawal from Cannes by the German embassy in Paris, a staggering piece of cinema, unflinching in its depiction of atrocities, whilst placing these in the context, these banal places where horrific things happened, and rightfully stands as one of the greatest documentary films ever made.

This concept of past horrors and modern reportage, indeed, informs the long opening sequence of Hiroshima, whereby the woman describes the aftermath, as a heady mix of newsreel, fictional footage, and modern documentary footage of the city's destruction and rebirth plays, whilst she meditates on what it is like to forget, whilst the man gently rebuts her sweeping statements. It is nearly fifteen minutes before we break from this stream of imagery, of Hiroshima's incineration and the dead within it giving way to the Peace Park, the terrible and beautiful form of the Dome at its epicentre, and even to tourism and dramatisation of the events and places, as Hiroshima returns to normality, one particularly impressionist shot coursing, camera mounted on a moped, through a market, the city returned to life. This stream of conscience imagery not only belies the heavy influence of surrealist directors like Andre Breton upon Resnais, and the subsequent influence Resnais would have upon the French New Wave, but the origin of this film as a documentary.

With Resnais commissioned by the same production team that had bankrolled Nuit et Brouillard to make a film about the atomic bomb, so the director battled with the concept, clearly unwilling to become synonymous with documentaries such as Nuit et Brouillard, nor keen to reproduce its thematic exploration of sites of immense human suffering. Thus, he reframed the film as narrative, bringing French novelist, playwright and essayist Marguerite Duras in to write the film's plot. Here, as the film explores the past of the woman, so Duras' own experiences during the war, including the near death of her then-husband, and her life under the Vichy regime, colour the film, explored in the rapid cut recollection of the woman as she remembers her first love. The arrival of this figure, an unnamed German (Bernard Fresson), is heralded by a sudden jump-cut, a visual semblance of a Proustian recollection, the twitching hand of the Man in sleep juxtaposed with the hand of the dying soldier, is as sudden as it is visceral.

It is in the happy accident of the film's two leads, though, that the film finds its most profound moments-one of the stipulations from its producers is that the talent in front of the camera must be equal parts French and Japanese-the crew share this split, with veteran French cinematographer Sacha Vierny joined by Michio Takahashi (largely otherwise famous for cinematography on the noirish Typhoon Reporter (1963), and a couple of the charming but creaky Gamera tokusatsu films), imbuing the streets of the Nevers of the past, as the Woman's period of "madness" and quasi-imprisonment by her family jostles for position with the Hiroshima of the present. Resnais, Vierny and Takahashi match the love story of the past, the death of past love, the darkness of cellars and confinement, this "thing" that, despite the film's opening dialogue, she is beginning to forget, with this new love story, this new "thing" in her life, as a city ground to nothing but ash and wreckage bursts back into light and life.

At its heart, though, Hiroshima Mon Amour is an undeniably sensual love story-an unorthodox one-the film takes place over barely twenty-four hours, from waking entwined to discuss Hiroshima's destruction after meeting the previous night, to their encounters across the day, including the film set on which the Woman acts in an anti-war film, to the slow uncovering of exactly what the woman is trying to forget in a teashop in the city, The climax comes in their seeming parting of ways in the city's neon lit night, the woman fragile and unable to move on, to forget, in the heart of a city that like her, is trying to forget, to move on from its own grievous wounding, with the film's final, beautiful, moments, connecting the two locations, the two lovers, together, in sublime simplicity. The Woman may be terrified of forgetting her love, but Hiroshima, the world, moves onward, despite the threat, the fear of loss, of further nuclear bombings to come. Like no other film of the age, it captures the fear of the mushroom cloud rising once more, of "a whole city...raised and once more crumble into ashes", and marries it to the hope of fresh life-and love. 

But Hiroshima Mon Amour is more than a simple romance-it is the birth of the French New Wave, a provocative blast of a film, moving back and forth in time and place, and between factual documentary and fictional narrative at will. Whilst Godard et al would hone this to perfection, there is an immaculate roughness, an emotionality in its usage here, to recount the fleeting meeting of two lovers against the backdrop of one of the atomic age's most harrowing moments, born to live again from destruction, in a searing, and strikingly modern piece of cinema that truly heralds the arrival of modern cinema

Rating: Must See

Hiroshima, Mon Amour is available to watch online in the UK via Amazon Prime and MUBI, and on DVD from Criterion In the United States, it is available to watch online via MUBI and the Criterion Player, and on DVD from Criterion.

Next week, we see the funny side in Mutally Assured Destruction, as we, and Peter Sellers (thrice!) meet again, in Stanley Kubrick's bleak satire, Dr Strangelove (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb).

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