I watched the first reel of Hiroshima Mon Amour -- Alain Resnais' masterpiece about peace, love, memory and rebirth -- at the FTII's Film Appreciation course in 2004. I was breathless by the end of the experience and terribly disturbed by the juxtaposition of the visual imagery in that 10-minute sequence. Two naked human bodies lie intertwined in bed; two faceless voices are in the midst of a cryptic conversation about Hiroshima, the devastated relic of World War 2. Then, a shower of some shimmering substance on the bodies (minutes later we realise it's nuclear dust), inter-cut with horrifying imagery of the aftermath of the bombing of August 6, 1945, a woman's voice narrating in a soft monotone the experience of visiting the hospitals and museums. The man's voice insists she saw nothing in Hiroshima while a jarringly cheerful background score and lyrical, picture-postcard compositions of the city in ruins leave a niggling unease about the incongruous mosaic.
And that was it. For six months thereafter, the Hiroshima experience was just that one reel I'd seen, till finally, we screened it at our Film Appreciation course at the Mumbai University, and I watched the entire film for the first time with my students. At the end of it, I was too stunned to react. Many of my students greeted it with scepticism and even ridicule. For them, the film was a jigsaw puzzle of disjointed plot and scenes muddled together in an illogical fashion. Some western critics too have described it as pretentious. For me, it was poetic perfection -- the kind of film that rightfully claims cinema its place amongst other modern arts.
I've watched Hiroshima several times thereafter. Been mesmerised by Emmanuelle Riva's raw passion and Eiji Okada's handsome, comforting face that drives the heroine to confess her darkest secret within hours of meeting him. The two characters stay nameless in the film, their personalities defined by the two cities they represent -- Nevers (in France) and Hiroshima -- as they embark on an impulsive, impossible love affair.
It takes multiple viewings to appreciate the full scale of Resnais' craft and Marguerite Duras' screenplay, because the structure of the film is such, it's designed to leave you uncomfortable, distressed and yet curious to unravel the layers of meaning hidden in its depth, without readily giving it all away. And that's the criticism my students levelled against the film -- if audiences struggled to understand a film, it didn't serve its purpose. They quoted Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali as a film that's both linear in narrative (therefore simple to comprehend), and profound in its visual tapestry and open to several philosophical interpretations. But that's because, Ray's storytelling follows a chronological narrative, while Resnais' purpose is to use the film's 'cubist' narrative structure -- which perhaps borrows the disjointed pattern of human memory -- to symbolise the incoherence of human existence post-WW2.
Hiroshima Mon Amour describes the horrors of individual and collective loss, of the human mind's ability to forget, and its struggle to live with the scars of a personal or universal disaster. It takes the heroine several years and innumerable futile relationships with unknown men to finally open her wounds and narrate the incidents that led to the death of her German lover at the end of the war. Like the German, her Japanese lover too belongs to an 'enemy' nation that fought against the allies in the war and paid the price with the annihilation of two cities. Her individual loss has no place in the realm of international politics, yet love isn't bound by borders. Just as nothing she sees in the museums and the memorials in the city of Hiroshima can give her a real sense of the tragedy, the man too must use his imagination and intrinsic compassion to fathom the pain and humiliation she suffered on account of her doomed love. And that's as close as two human beings can get. The impossibility of their affair makes it deeper and stronger than their relationships with their respective spouses -- with whom they've learnt to live another kind of functional life.
Like her loss leave permanent scars, the destruction of Hiroshima would take generations to repair. Yet, she plods on, as does the human race -- new life started taking form in the burnt Hiroshima soil within days of the bombing. The tragedy is, human memory doesn't serve well enough to learn from the past. We've built monuments and museums to lament our mistakes, only to repeat them over and over again for newer memorials and more self-destruction. Quite like the heroine, who's spent a lifetime trying to find the one love that could revive the intensity of her lost youth and doomed affair.
Resnais was originally commissioned to make a documentary on the Hiroshima tragedy. But as he started researching the topic, he found there was already enough factual documentation available. Instead, he chose to weave the film's pacifist message into a love story -- of a French actress visiting the city to shoot a film about peace and her architect lover (she's living a lie in real life too, while he symbolically helps 'rebuild' her wounded soul), and interspersed the unusual romance with horrific images of faces burnt beyond recognition, disfigured bodies, abnormal babies and skeletons of buildings lying in ruin.
Hiroshima Mon Amour is now 48 years old. After all these years, it continues to provide an intense, gut-wrenching, meaningful cinematic experience. To me, and hopefully, a few others….
Deepa Gumaste
And that was it. For six months thereafter, the Hiroshima experience was just that one reel I'd seen, till finally, we screened it at our Film Appreciation course at the Mumbai University, and I watched the entire film for the first time with my students. At the end of it, I was too stunned to react. Many of my students greeted it with scepticism and even ridicule. For them, the film was a jigsaw puzzle of disjointed plot and scenes muddled together in an illogical fashion. Some western critics too have described it as pretentious. For me, it was poetic perfection -- the kind of film that rightfully claims cinema its place amongst other modern arts.
I've watched Hiroshima several times thereafter. Been mesmerised by Emmanuelle Riva's raw passion and Eiji Okada's handsome, comforting face that drives the heroine to confess her darkest secret within hours of meeting him. The two characters stay nameless in the film, their personalities defined by the two cities they represent -- Nevers (in France) and Hiroshima -- as they embark on an impulsive, impossible love affair.
It takes multiple viewings to appreciate the full scale of Resnais' craft and Marguerite Duras' screenplay, because the structure of the film is such, it's designed to leave you uncomfortable, distressed and yet curious to unravel the layers of meaning hidden in its depth, without readily giving it all away. And that's the criticism my students levelled against the film -- if audiences struggled to understand a film, it didn't serve its purpose. They quoted Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali as a film that's both linear in narrative (therefore simple to comprehend), and profound in its visual tapestry and open to several philosophical interpretations. But that's because, Ray's storytelling follows a chronological narrative, while Resnais' purpose is to use the film's 'cubist' narrative structure -- which perhaps borrows the disjointed pattern of human memory -- to symbolise the incoherence of human existence post-WW2.
Hiroshima Mon Amour describes the horrors of individual and collective loss, of the human mind's ability to forget, and its struggle to live with the scars of a personal or universal disaster. It takes the heroine several years and innumerable futile relationships with unknown men to finally open her wounds and narrate the incidents that led to the death of her German lover at the end of the war. Like the German, her Japanese lover too belongs to an 'enemy' nation that fought against the allies in the war and paid the price with the annihilation of two cities. Her individual loss has no place in the realm of international politics, yet love isn't bound by borders. Just as nothing she sees in the museums and the memorials in the city of Hiroshima can give her a real sense of the tragedy, the man too must use his imagination and intrinsic compassion to fathom the pain and humiliation she suffered on account of her doomed love. And that's as close as two human beings can get. The impossibility of their affair makes it deeper and stronger than their relationships with their respective spouses -- with whom they've learnt to live another kind of functional life.
Like her loss leave permanent scars, the destruction of Hiroshima would take generations to repair. Yet, she plods on, as does the human race -- new life started taking form in the burnt Hiroshima soil within days of the bombing. The tragedy is, human memory doesn't serve well enough to learn from the past. We've built monuments and museums to lament our mistakes, only to repeat them over and over again for newer memorials and more self-destruction. Quite like the heroine, who's spent a lifetime trying to find the one love that could revive the intensity of her lost youth and doomed affair.
Resnais was originally commissioned to make a documentary on the Hiroshima tragedy. But as he started researching the topic, he found there was already enough factual documentation available. Instead, he chose to weave the film's pacifist message into a love story -- of a French actress visiting the city to shoot a film about peace and her architect lover (she's living a lie in real life too, while he symbolically helps 'rebuild' her wounded soul), and interspersed the unusual romance with horrific images of faces burnt beyond recognition, disfigured bodies, abnormal babies and skeletons of buildings lying in ruin.
Hiroshima Mon Amour is now 48 years old. After all these years, it continues to provide an intense, gut-wrenching, meaningful cinematic experience. To me, and hopefully, a few others….
Deepa Gumaste
