Hiroshima Mon Amour

If you go to the movies mainly to be hypnotized, Hiroshima Mon Amour will seem even better the second time you see it.

Movies somehow discourage both reflection and recollection. You can usually remember single episodes or images, but putting them back into their proper narrative sequence is as hard as re-telling a dream. It is equally hard to keep a critical distance between yourself and the film while experiencing it.

Alain Resnais is, of course, notorious for exploiting this state of affairs to the limit. Hence the hypnotic effect of his films. His counterpart in literature, Alain Robbe-Grillet, who wrote the screenplay of Resnais' second film, Last Year at Marienbad (1961), speaks for Resnais when he calls his own work "an attempt to construct a space and a time purely mental--that of dreams, for example, or of memory."

Resnais seems to have discovered an extensive correspondence between the mind's eye and a more or less controlled movie camera. The succession of shots in a given sequence, each reproducing a fragment of a whole experience, resembles the process of association of images or ideas by which the mind constructs its own "space and time."

Resnais is the first director to have exploited this analogy systematically, making it a principle of his art. In Hiroshima (1959), his first full-length film, he employs this style to break radically with conventional narrative techniques.

The theme of Hiroshima is the insufficiency of memory. Memory is treacherous; it cannot, or will not, retain what is should. Neither can it be forced or faked. But, suggests Resnais, there is hope after all, for if worse comes to worst, memory can always be ignored...

A case in point: the heroine of Hiroshima, played by Emmanuelle Riva. For her, the bombing of Hiroshima was a dreadful example of man's mistreatment of man. It should be unforgettable to everyone. But unfortunately, owing to the elusive disposition of human memory, it isn't. Her solution at film's end: stop worrying about it, accept the affection of Eiji Okada (who has been having as much mnemonic trouble as she) and start a new.

As the film ends, it is easy to convince yourself (post-hypnotically of course) that you have just seen a work of art. The story of these two unremembering individuals has been woven together so well with the greater story of the horrors of war that, while you are under the spell, you can scarcely tell one from the other.

But if you are inclined to be critical about the movies you see, you may have second thoughts about the art of Hiroshima on seeing it again.

The girl-meets-boy story is not as inextricably bound up with the hydrogen bomb as it seemed on first viewing. The two are not legitmately connected, since neither of the lovers was near Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped. The entire first part of the film revolves around Riva's efforts to create a recollection that isn't there.

Resnais made this film on a limited budget and on condition that it be about Hiroshima. Given those terms, you can't blame him if the story and setting don't ultimately correspond. You are then left merely technical objections. (One reviewer, accusing Resnais of bad faith, claims to have previously seen a Japanese horror movie containing some of the same "documentary" footage used in Hiroshima to illustrate radiation deformation.)

Perhaps your best bet is to follow the heroine's example. Stop worrying and just be absorbed by the bizarre plot, the magic music and camera work, the incantatory script, and Riva's big, hypnotic eyes.

Even for critical film-goers, however, Hiroshima remains valuable. It announces a theme which is to occupy Resnais' later work as well. In Marienbad and Muriel (1963), Resnais has continued to illustrate the thesis that you cannot remember what you ought to--for example, obligations to a former loved one. But for my money, I prefer to all of Resnais' work a film like Antonioni's L'Avventura, which makes exactly the same point without all the metaphysical mesmerism.