18 April 2017                                                                                                    Analyzing Film and Television Presentation                                                        Prof. Lesley Marx

Lengthy Encounter (Or, Before the Rising Sun):

The many kind abysses of Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)

“Hiroshima is a trick, not done with mirrors but with vertigo.”

– John Francis Kreidl in his Alain Resnais (1978:61)

“Seeing Hiroshima, you have the impression of seeing a film that is quite impossible to foresee in relation to what you already knew about the cinema.”

– Jean-Luc Godard quoted in Roy Armes’s The Cinema of Alain Resnais (1968: 16)

“If you close the door

The night could last forever

Leave the sunshine out

And say hello to never”

– From the lyrics to ‘After Hours’ by The Velvet Underground

At bottom, Hiroshima Mon Amour is a series of images that double as wounds. It begins as a visual and spoken catalogue of unimaginable horrors, and then continues as an ever-so-gradual extirpation of trauma until both of the protagonist lovers assume the mantles and monikers of their respective defining experiences: in the very last shot, his name is finally asserted as “Hi-ro-shi-ma”, hers as “Ne-vers.” Thus they dispose of their tragedies by becoming them; a truly radical form of acceptance as the last stage of grief.

What do I mean though when I say that an image may have a wounding quality, or be in itself a cut in the psyche? Resnais and his screenwriter, Marguerite Duras, (or should that be ‘Duras and her director, Alain Resnais’?) seem to make this their film’s primary thesis in Cinema’s historical development. And, as Dan has probably pointed out by now, it correlates quite closely to a certain progression in the Modern French Novel, from Proust’s attempts to narrativise his involuntary memories to Alain Robbe-Grillet’s abandonment of ideas for things-in-themselves. But in cinematic terms, it is evidenced here by complementary invocations of presence and absence. Firstly, Emmanuelle Riva is here, in all her youth and unutterable beauty. Then her lover, a man who chance alone has kept from nuclear incineration or death on the battlefield. And then Hiroshima is somehow also on show, rebuilt in little more than a decade into an international metropole and a monument to its own distant suffering. This foundation is partly the result of Resnais’s years as a documentarian, and it’s a tribute to the carefulness of his style that the viewer never feels as if the location is just being exploited as a setting for a liberal melodrama. But what it provides, in strictly fictional terms, is a present-tense that functions as a canvas for memory. And memory is more than anything an absence. It contains everything we have lost and cannot choose to see anymore, for sure, but it is also, for the most part, an absence in itself. It returns from a kind of nowhere and bears a transparent fragility. To have a fourteen-year-old love affair rush back in all its intensity at the sight of a twisted hand on a bed is to realize how easy it is to forget our greatest feelings in the first place. What is the memory of the apocalyptic suffering of Hiroshima compared to the inexorable tide of personal amnesia?  How do we function in the present moment if we know it will not last, not even in our deliberate recollections?

These are psychology’s agonies, but they become Cinema’s too when we connect them to the impossibilities of the recorded image itself. Like Riva’s character we can see absolutely everything that remains of the bomb’s impact. We can be taken on a guided tour of confident tracking shots through every museum, hospital ward and staged reconstruction of the aftermath of disaster. We can say to ourselves with all sincerity that we feel we understand the extent of the trauma. But it can still never actually be ‘ours’ to understand. “Empathy is no substitute for experience” (Ward: 18-9) and even her lover, despite being as personally affected as anyone by it, had to undergo the tragedy from the distance of the frontlines. The only true owners of the memory of Hiroshima are the dead themselves. And the only person who properly remembers what it was to be jailed in the cellar in Nevers was the version of Riva’s character who died as the war itself ended. The fact that not only are the dead unreachable but that the dead memories within the living are just as lost, is Hiroshima’s signature revelation.

But Film is itself a kind of memory, and though it also cannot go beyond the experiences of the living, it can transform this experience into something seemingly unconfined. Resnais’s transition from documentary to fiction cinema can be explained, in creative terms, through the realization of this epiphany. The truth of memory is not reducible to reality itself. It takes a poetic leap to simultaneously liberate and situate these two historical traumas – the dropped bomb and the German occupation – and allow them to appeal to our sense of autobiographical solidarity. Pauline Kael, in her uncharacteristically misguided review, commented that in as much as the film presents the process of an ad-hoc ‘talking cure’ between the two lovers, it shows that “[t]he real you or me that we conceal because we think people won’t accept it is slop – and why should anybody want it?” (1994:32) In saying so, she answers her own question. Resnais and Duras’s point is that we don’t want people to ‘want’ the slop that we are. We want them to accept it. We want to see how far we can go in revealing our ridiculous ‘real selves’ before our intimates are turned off by them. But simultaneously, our intimates want to see how far they can go in drawing out our confessions. They want to see how long they can stand seeing us for what we really are. This explains why Eiji Okada’s character jumps up and embraces Riva in triumph on hearing himself to be the first to know about her life in Nevers. It proves the particularity of their love that she was able to use him as a foil for her dormant memories. In as much as he is her faceless analyst, she must love him as an individual, and indeed she does and so finds herself unable to leave either him or Hiroshima by the film’s end.

Film is memory too though in another, more paradoxical sense. As with David Lean’s Brief Encounter or Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, Hiroshima exists and shows the extent of its central lovers’ intimacy only in so far as its characters will seemingly soon be parted. The end of the affair approaches as swiftly as the end of the film, and just as there are so many moments within the duration of a relationship that seem to encase their own eternities, there are an unremitting number of images in Hiroshima Mon Amour that seem to last forever or are at the very least disconnected from the linearity of mainstream cinema. From the radiance of the silver dust on their sleeping bodies to the brightness of Riva’s prayer-like face in the train station to the sleepy interest of the old woman sitting between them, these moments are wounds in as much as they disfigure the progress of the story they’re a part of.  Thus the last burst of energy in the final embrace of a departing loved one becomes the emotional dynamo for the entire film. And because the film is preserved and still watched today, there is a sense in which this energy has served its purpose by keeping the lovers together ad infinitum, at least within the borders of the 24 hours the movie chooses to mummify. With Emmanuelle Riva’s recent death, an extra coating of poignancy is added to our viewing. Given the urgency and power of her performance, it’s an almost unavoidable part of the experience to speculate which memories she herself drew on to full out her role. But just as with Maria Falconetti in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, whose performance Riva and Resnais undoubtedly based the Nevers scenes on, I get the prevailing impression that what we see in the film is a kind of actor’s miracle, where the moment, the location and the lighting all match up to make her own explosion of feeling transcend the film’s constructs. In this way, cinema can give the convincing impression of historical freedom, of a certain sublimity in detail that answers all political and aesthetic questions with a few undeniable flashes of beauty.

Despite this dependence on visual lyricism, the film finally succeeds by using its own silver-grey splendour to demonstrate an intellectual point. Namely, that however fixed and self-affirming such images seem they nonetheless remain mere instances in a continuity that ultimately undermines everything. The repressed returns because there is no safe vantage-point from which the personal and historical past can be re-collected and narrativized with complete efficiency. A paradox always breaks out and an off-rhyme in the present between gestures, people and places inspires a breakdown in the story. As such, Hiroshima Mon Amour is nothing but the tale of its own breakdown, the collapse into disfigurement of any story that tries to convey the experience of disfigurement in a manner that transcends mere empirical description. The film intimates then that we only have memory in the first place because of our failure to ‘get over’ our past, and that this form of failure is not only advisable but indeed must be taken to the end so that we become our own inability to forget ourselves if we are to hold on, even temporarily,  to what we love most.

Reference List:

Armes, Roy. 1968. The Cinema of Alain Resnais. London: A. S. Barnes.

Kael, Pauline. 1994. For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies. New York: Plume, Penguin Books.

Kreidl, John Francis. 1977. Alain Resnais. Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers.

Thomson, David. 2008. ‘Have You Seen…?’: A Personal Introduction to 1000 Films. Great Britain: Allen Lane.

Ward, John. 1968. Alain Resnais: Or, the Theme of Time. London: Martin, Secker and Warburg Ltd.