"The First Modern Film of Sound Cinema" Still Has So Much To Teach Us (2024)

The Big Picture

Alain Resnais' Hiroshima mon amour revolutionized modern cinema with its timeless emotional rawness.
The 1959 drama is about trauma, time, and memory, and how major historical events shape small personal stories.
Hiroshima mon amour presents flawed protagonists and serves as a reflection on filmmaking and the importance of cinema.

Paris, 1959. The staff of Cahiers du Cinema, the now-legendary French film magazine, convened only its second all-hands-on-deck critics' round table. The occasion, headlined as "an event which seems important enough to warrant a new discussion," was the release of the film Hiroshima mon amour, the debut feature film by Alain Resnais. Present at the recording of this proto-podcast were many critics who would go on to become filmmakers, such as Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and Éric Rohmer. (The transcript was published in the July 1959 issue, available here.) It was Rohmer who gave the film the perfect pull-quote when he called it "the first modern film of the sound era," comparing it in importance to Picasso's "Guernica." The shocking thing is that this praise still holds up. The film captures the sensations of a brief, intense affair between two nameless lovers who meet randomly in Hiroshima, 15 years after the end of World War II. 65 years later, it's immediately easy to understand how this movie would have knocked the wind out of a 1950s audience, because even today, it's emotionally raw, immediate, and timeless.

Without further ado, let's dive into the film Godard called "quite inconceivable in terms of what one was already familiar with in the cinema," which would become one of the first movies in the French New Wave.

"The First Modern Film of Sound Cinema" Still Has So Much To Teach Us (1)

Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)

Not Rated

Drama

Romance

Release Date: May 16, 1960
Director: Alain Resnais
Cast: Emmanuelle Riva , Eiji Okada , Stella Dassas , Pierre Barbaud , Bernard Fresson , Moira Lister
Runtime: 90 Minutes
Writers: Marguerite Duras

Alain Resnais' 'Night and Fog' Led to 'Hiroshima mon amour'

"The First Modern Film of Sound Cinema" Still Has So Much To Teach Us (2)

Before directing Hiroshima mon amour, Resnais was best known as a director of documentary shorts. His best known work was the 1956 Night and Fog. That project arose as part of an exhibit commemorating the ten-year anniversary of the liberation of France from the Nazis. Resnais was commissioned by the exhibit's curators to direct a documentary about Nazi concentration camps. Night and Fog combines color footage from Resnais' visits to the abandoned structures at Auschwitz and Majdanek with historical film that had been shot inside the camps during the war. Uncomfortable with speaking about the camps despite not having experienced them, Resnais commissioned the poet and camp survivor Jean Cayrol to write the narration. The result is an unflinching look at the human capacity for depravity that the camp system put on display. The film, now considered one of the most important documentaries of all time, makes sure that the horrors of the Holocaust are not compartmentalized as a discreet event that occurred during a period of time in the past, but as a part of human history that could repeat itself.

Following the success of Night and Fog, Resnais was approached to create a film about another atrocity whose memory was still fresh, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, Resnais didn't want to simply recreate Night and Fog. And so he suggested making a feature film, rather than a documentary. As reported in film scholar James Monaco's book Alain Resnais, the untitled project that would become Hiroshima mon amour received financing from both Japanese and French production companies. But the money came with certain creative stipulations. The story had to feature one character who was French and one who was Japanese, and it had to contain sequences filmed in both Japan and France, with crews from those countries.

Sometimes, imposing rules on a creative process spurs incredible leaps of imagination. This was one of those times.

What Is 'Hiroshima mon amour' About?

Resnais hired novelist Marguerite Duras to write the script, based on the above guidelines. Together, they came up with the story of a brief romance between a Japanese man and a French woman, set in Hiroshima. The film opens with a sequence combining documentary footage of the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombings, combined with recreations and current day footage filmed at a historical exhibit on the bombing. The montage, heavily recalling Night and Fog, contains dreamlike dialogue between the two lovers (who are never named, and credited as Elle and Lui, French for "she" and "him.") She insists she remembers being present at the bombing, and he tells her that, of course, her memories are false. The conversation has a dreamlike quality, and it is not clear if it represents a conversation the two had in real life.

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They clearly have an intense physical connection, and he keeps asking her to delay her return a few days. However, the experience of their temporary romance, which must at some point end, resurfaces her traumatic memories of the war. During the German occupation of her village, when she was 19, she fell in love with a German soldier. He was killed on the day of French liberation, and she was punished by her community for her affair with an enemy soldier by having her head shaved.

These memories are reenacted, thus satisfying the creative mandate to include major filming in France. However, Resnais insisted that they not be called "flashbacks" depicting events as they took place, but rather treated as memories, which may even be false. Hiroshima mon amour is widely credited with inventing the technique of using quick edits of past events to convey the idea of sudden, intrusive memories. The first instance of this packs a wallop, as she sees her lover's hand twitching in sleep, and immediately remembers the twitching hand of the German soldier, as he lay dying.

'Hiroshima mon amour' Is About Memory, Trauma, and Forgiveness

It is often said that the great recurring theme of Resnais' work is trauma, time, and memory. In Hiroshima mon amour, that theme is very directly addressed. Emmanuelle Riva's character's affair is traumatic to her in a way her marriage is not, because it must end, as her affair with the German soldier ended with his death. In one tortured monologue, she remembers how her memories of the soldier left her: what he looked like, what he sounded like. She knows that the same thing will happen after her current lover leaves. And even as the sensations recede, the memory will live on in her, in some way. Life goes on, with the trauma continuing to exist just beneath the surface. She's troubled by her understanding that this pattern is just a part of the way of life, even though it seems, in some way, not good enough.

Another preoccupation of the film is the way great historical events are absorbed into small personal stories. And for that reason, the characters have to be imperfect vessels for the "correct" opinions on the subject of Hiroshima. They only briefly discuss the event itself, and she remembers experiencing the bombing as an event that signaled "the end of the war." Though he is from Hiroshima, he doesn't push back much on this except to note with remorse that the destruction of his city was experienced around the world as a positive event. But those feelings are completely overwhelmed by his attraction to her, just as her love for the German soldier overwhelmed any loyalty she felt to her own home. The film forgives these characters their loyalties to their own sensations, and does not suggest that they are unlike any of the rest of us in that regard. It is a movie about flawed protagonists.

'Hiroshima mon amour' Is a Film About Filmmaking

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Finally, the film is a "film about filmmaking," concerned with the way cinema will become the primary vault for our shared traumatic memories. The film opens with many staged images of the horrifying immediate aftermath of the bombing. These are cut with documentary footage, implying that they should be taken at face value. When we later learn that Riva's character is an actress working on a film about Hiroshima, we see a makeup artist fabricating radiation damage to an actor's back, throwing the authenticity of the earlier depictions into doubt. A later scene is staged to feature the giant glowing tower mounted atop a movie theater.

As Rohmer noted during the Cahier du Cinema discussion, Hiroshima mon amour "has a very strong sense of the future, particularly the anguish of the future." He was likely thinking of the moment when the bombing of Hiroshima is marked as the beginning of our non-stop anxiety about the atomic age. But Resnais also appears to be very aware of how his "first modern film" marks the beginning of a new age, where the weakness of our own memories, which lose their grip on the physical sensation of haunting traumatic events, is bolstered with the permanent memorialization that the movies allow.

Hiroshima mon amour is available to rent on Prime Video in the U.S.

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