Eli Solt

Walter Benjamin in his 1935 essay “The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction” explores the changing modes of perception to artistic creation in regards to the mass production of art and the reproducible nature of the cinema. The essay responds to the rising culture of filmic reproduction and cinematic expansion in the beginning of the twentieth century.

Alain Resnais’ 1959 film Hiroshima, Mon Amour attempts to capture and confront the horror of the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing, a point which arguably marked the most dramatic shift in the twentieth century and symbolized the beginning of the nuclear age. The film questions the ability to gain knowledge though the act of looking—it problematizes the validity of the gaze for its narrative subjects but also for the audience. The abrupt way in which the film uses montage and flashbacks reveal a lack of concern with narrative linearity and a focus on the emotional deconstruction and understanding after such an immensely traumatic event.

As Benjamin questions, how can this contribute to a universal perspective (if it can at all) and how can our perception affect and tie into history? Not only is the concept of historicity questioned by the structure of the film but the notion of memory itself is scrutinized, particularly the idea of narrative being able to accurately portray memory and history. The film’s use of free indirect discourse in its cinematography lends itself to analysis of the way in which films use flashbacks to represent truth. Along with Benjamin’s essay, I will also be using Lev Kuleshov’s “The Principles of Montage” to close-read the first fifteen minutes of the film in order to understand the construction of the “documentary-like” opening and the effects that it has on the rest of the film. In my essay, I will analyze the visual cinematic language of Hiroshima, Mon Amour, particularly focusing on the opening extended montage sequence and the cutting between flashbacks in order to compare it with Benjamin’s considerations of the reproduction of art/history (and history via art) and the structural guidance of audience perception that moves beyond the frame.

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Alain Resnais began work on Hiroshima mon amour not long after he completed his documentary Night and Fog (1955): a film about the Holocaust. Producers asked him to make a documentary about the Hiroshima bombing of 1945 but Resnais struggled with coming up with a satisfactory idea that wouldn’t just be something similar to what he did on his previous film. Soon, Marguerite Duras was hired to work on the screenplay and create a fictional story around the historical events. The story is the one that is seen in the finished film however, elements of the original documentary concept are still found within the film, particularly noticeable in the first fifteen minutes.

This opening sequence blends narrative storytelling with a documentary style of filmmaking that acts as an extended montage. The entire montage (from opening shot to the first cut after the diegetic world has been re-established) consists of 142 different shots. The structural frame of this montage (and the narrative world that we enter when it finishes) is a scene of two people, clutching each other in an intimate embrace. Shots of the two bookend the montage and are interspersed throughout the shots of the documentary. Of the 142 shots in the montage, twelve are of the two lovers. Their faces aren’t shown until the end of the montage (a swift pan up that sharply breaks the rhythmic editing). The only thing the viewer can see are hands clutching a bare back.

The rest of the 130 shots give us some important (though slightly ambiguous) historical background. They are also filled with narrative and visual juxtapositions which initiate and foreshadow the themes present in the rest of the film. Shots of people walking left are cut into shots of people walking right; slow dollies to the left jump into reverse dollies to the right; a shot of a child’s deformed hand precedes a shot of one of the lover’s perfect hands; a burned and mutilated body of a survivor is shown just before the smooth and overtly sensual back of a lover. The purpose of this opening montage, which I will return to later, is to establish the binary opposition of reconstruction and deconstruction; of love and hate; of memory and forgetfulness. Furthermore, several of the opening shots, like the heavy emphasis on Hiroshima’s river, foreshadow both narrative significance and the complex cinematographic discourse that will occur with the river in the French town of Nevers later in the film.

In “The Principles of Montage” Lev Kuleshov argues that montage is not just essential to cinema, it is cinema. Kuleshov writes of filmic material: “The cinema is much more complicated than other forms of art, because the method of organization of its material and the material itself are especially “interdependent” (Kuleshov 140). The material cannot become a film without some form of organization and there can be no organization without the material of the film itself. This relationship is the foundation of montage: the organization of the material of film. As Kuleshov discusses, the nature of montage cannot be objective as the process of filmic organization requires a human and artistic touch: “…montage (the essence of all art) is inextricably tied to the world-view of the person who has the material at his disposal” (Kuleshov 138). This is also true of history.

The difficulty arises in our attempts to recreate or show that history through artistic mediums. Resnais film is highly centered around the fear of a cultural loss of memory of these historical events. In the opening montage, Riva talks about (and we are shown visually) the museum in the new Hiroshima that she visited which had exhibits discussing the tragedy. However, Okada keeps insisting that she saw nothing of and knows nothing about the bombing. Riva believes that she does but Okada understands that the representation of the event in the museum will never equate to personally experiencing the horror. The second problem is the subjectivity and bias of the artist who is presenting the information. Even with documentary, the lens and montage of images cannot be purely objective. Everything is framed in a specific manner at the hands of people who have a message or ideology to deliver through the film. This problematizes the way film can talk about history with any sort of objective discourse. Resnais, with Hiroshima, Mon Amour, appears deeply conflicted on how to possibly recreate such a monumental and horrific event in world history. His solution to this problem is to work with opposites. An event that symbolizes one of the greatest acts of hatred, as Resnais frames it, should be placed next to a scene of great love. The fear of cultural loss of the memory (or the significance of the memory) of these important events is projected onto Riva’s fear of losing the memory of the German solider that she loved. As it is revealed in the film, despite her hesitation, the best way that her memory can live on is through her retelling of it to Okada. Here, Resnais is suggesting that human memory on an individual level is faulty and unreliable. The best way to remember the importance of tragic historical events is by continuing to talk about them so they aren’t lost to time.

The opening montage of the film presents a particularly challenging interpretative problem and, upon first viewing, partially disorients the viewer. After the opening credits, the film fades into an image of two entwined bodies covered in a substance that is unclear but could be either dust, ash, snow, rain, or sweat. The ambiguity of the substance is further obscured by the cross dissolve into the second shot where the substance appears to glitter more than before. The third shot of the film is dissolved into to reveal the two bodies again but now without anything on them, just smooth skin.

Not only does this establish the thematic polarity of deconstruction and reconstruction which I will return to later, it presents a distorted sense of time/memory through its dissolves via editing. The entire opening montage acts in the same way, edited in a manner that promotes disorientation and purposefully disposes the viewer (and the event itself) from any placement in time, forcing the historical images to be felt rather than seen. It also begins to connect the historical depictions of the horrors of the Hiroshima bombings with the intensity of feelings in the love affair between Riva and Okada. For example, one shot from the “documentary” is an upward pan showing the ruins of destroyed house. At the end of the shot, a distressed looking woman emerges from a pile of wood, looking around in a panic. The film then hard cuts back to the shot of the two embraced bodies. The result is a powerful contrast between destruction/ruin and creation/perfection. While creating a contrast, it also markedly connects the two ideas, suggesting that one cannot exist without the other and that one can possibly result from the other as well.

There is a different kind of temporal discourse in the structure of Resnais’ visual images. A large part of the beginning montage focuses on a river in Hiroshima. A first-time viewer doesn’t understand the significance of that river yet. It is not until later in the film that the connection to the river in Nevers where Riva’s lover is killed within the flashback do the opening river shots mean anything. A second or third time viewer will understand immediately and, perhaps even more importantly, instantly connect the river image narratively to Riva. So why does Resnais show us the river at the beginning when we don’t know why it’s important? Walter Benjamin begins to explore the nature of the cinematographer in relationship to the art that she/he is attempting to represent:

“The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, whereas the cinematographer penetrates deeply into its tissue. The images obtained by each differ enormously. The painter’s is a total image, whereas that of the cinematographer is piecemeal, its manifold parts being assembled according to a new law (Benjamin 242).”

Unlike a painting, a film has the ability to rearrange its formal parts to create a new understanding of the content it portrays. Part of the power of montage is its ability to restructure time to manipulate audience emotions in response to images that are being shown. That power is held in the cinematographer’s and editor’s hands as they are capable of directing our eyes to specific places and manipulate our gaze whenever they want. This opening montage manipulates our gaze in the way in which we view the historical event and in the way that we view the rest of the narrative. The images of the river at the beginning have a narrative (and historically narrative) connection to each other: they are inextricably bound. The displacement of these images within different points of the film suggests a displacement of the historical event itself into an idea that becomes a-temporal. Since the images are bound only to each other and not to specific moments in time, the event of the bombing and of the affair don’t have to exist in a particular point in time and therefore can exist at any (and potentially multiple) points in time. These beginning images give way to a feeling that this has happened before and that it will happen again, suggesting the well-versed thought that history repeats itself. Through this interpretation, Hiroshima, Mon Amour takes the Hiroshima bombing and, unable to fully articulate its horror, transforms it into the symbolic: representative of many great historical disasters.

Godelieve Mercken-Spaas argues that, “…Resnais underlines the fact that historic events like Hiroshima, when shown with all their ramifications, resist time and transcend space” (Mercken-Spaas 246). This makes the Hiroshima event much more significant. It wasn’t just a one-time horrific event, but continues to affect people decades later. This is mostly perpetuated in the visual images of the opening montage but is also revealed by the score which acts as another juxtaposition to the images that we see. As David Bordwell points out: “The score pulls a bit away from the images, […] seldom emphasizing them even at their most horrific” (Bordwell). The soundtrack jumps around from the slow, melodic, and progressively atmospheric to almost comedic, “bouncy” moments that often come at odds with the destructive images we see on screen. Leah Anderst similarly notes that the score “at times complements the images and at other times conflicts with them” (Anderst 359). This is simply an added element of the montage, a secondary layer to the visual cutting that was not available for analysis when Kuleshov constructed his theory. The score works together with the montage to set the viewer up for the later juxtapositions between love and hate (violence). It frames the story’s thematic and narrative preoccupations and frustrations with portraying reality.

The juxtaposition of themes is not just a way for Resnais to emphasize the emotional value of the narrative but it also acts as a structuring device for the film. One of the main functions of the film is to internalize a discourse that is understood as external: the Hiroshima bombings. The way in which it does that is (1) to place the story of the affair and the love story side by side and (2) use the ideas of deconstruction (thesis) and reconstruction (antithesis) in a narrative and symbolic sense. This is not to suggest that the film’s construction is limited to this structural arrangement, it is moreover highlighting how a complex web of interconnected themes is wrapped up neatly within this overarching dichotomy in the same way the film’s narrative is encapsulated within the opening montage.

Mercken-Spaas suggests that the film is broken into five distinct parts which are:
1. The destruction of Hiroshima
2. The Love in Hiroshima (which awakens destruction in Nevers
3. The reconstruction of Hiroshima
4. The reconstruction of Nevers
5. The merging of Hiroshima and Nevers (Mercken-Spaas 245).

This structure reinforces the connection between the two cities and the two lovers. However, despite their similarities, the film also suggests significant differences in the external representation of the two even if their stories relate. The devastation of Hiroshima is clearly evident upon observation but the horror of Nevers only appears under the surface; literally symbolic in the scenes in the cellar. The merging of the two is only possible through the process of doubling through reconstruction and deconstruction (in a literal and metaphoric sense). “The architect, manifestly involved in the process of building and re-building Hiroshima, in fact reconstructs Nevers, while the actress, who apparently came to commemorate and re-live Hiroshima’s tragedy, in reality reenacts the Nevers tragedy” (Mercken-Spaas 248). This is a process of negation that forms the foundation of the narrative.

The merging of Hiroshima and Nevers at the end of the film is a complex interpretive problem. “Both cities are linked and reconstructed, but whereas Hiroshima is reconstructed to become the subject of a film on peace, Nevers is constructed to uncover the repressed harm of the war” (Mercken-Spaas 247). Internally they reflect the exact same tragedy while their exteriors tell different stories (like the two lovers). Their internal nature is what so dramatically connects them. The personification of the lovers resembling both cities can be seen to represent the anxiety about rising globalization and the problems that arise from it. Not only are there issues of war and destruction like with the bombing event itself but also the cultural issue of how to deal with horrific events as a global community. The film seems deeply concerned with trying to figure out a way to articulate a form of healing between communities. However, the fact that the narrative ends with indecision (Riva’s inability to choose whether to stay or leave) further hints at the Hiroshima tragedy’s lingering effects decades later and the notion that we really have no idea how to reconnect after this kind of devastation.

Finally, just as it was important to deconstruct the opening montage, it is also important to look at how the flashbacks are seamlessly woven into the narrative. “In 1968 [Resnais] reiterated: ‘In Hiroshima there is not a second’s worth of flashbacks’” (Bordwell). For Resnais, everything is meant to represent the present even though things happen at different periods of time. It is almost like a stream of consciousness, where present interpretation of reality blends seamlessly with memory. This creates what is the “camera version” of an unreliable narrator. This is established in the opening narration with the line: “You saw nothing”. The acousmatic voice is, at the beginning, already telling us that seeing is not actually believing and is not a reliable means of knowledge.

“There is no chronological development from one level to the next, nor is there a clear transition from Hiroshima to Nevers. Images of Nevers intrude suddenly in Hiroshima; the past is inserted into the present, thus causing a spatial and temporal merging” (Mercken-Spaas 245). With the lack of any visual cues of the introductions and dismissals of the flashbacks, the film creates an unusual discourse that is used occasionally in literature but rarely in film: Free Indirect Discourse or Free Indirect Style (FID/FIS). Leah Anderst explains: “Cinematic FIS is just this: within single instances of cinematic narration, narrative agency, narrative perspective is multiplied, and, because of this proliferation of perspectives, uncertain” (Anderst 361). The uncertainty of the narrative perspective persists throughout the entire film but is most prevalent in Riva’s flashbacks to Nevers.

Typically, in film, flashbacks are portrayed as being the subjective memory experience of the character experiencing the flashback. However, in Hiroshima, the memory sequences consist of a variety of shots ranging from close-ups on Riva’s face to almost jarring external, objective, wide shots. These camera shots are so unique because the viewer does not expect them. Riva could not have these perspectives in her own memory because their objectivity and distance would make that impossible. Not only do these angles replicate the opening “documentary-like” shots but they also complicate the idea of perceiving memory and how such a difficult subject can be portrayed objectively on screen while still acknowledging its subjective nature. The complexity of this also comes from the fact that Resnais was not just representing memory visually but also representing the idea of “forgetting”.

The multiple perspectives created through cinematic FIS creates a dual or multi-narrative perspective where the viewpoint of Riva, the narrator, and the viewer are all different but all valid perspectives. As Anderst suggests: “The film narrates this memory, then, but even as it does so, it resists showing her story; it resists her solitary perspective, the expected perspective” (Anderst 376). Not only does the film problematize the telling of her narrative, which parallels the content of the character having issues, it problematizes the representation of memory as a whole. “The film narrates her memory, but as it does so, it questions that narration. The film wonders whether its task is possible; it wonders whether cinema can narrate, can represent or ‘remember’ memory” (Anderst 381). Like the connection between Hiroshima and Nevers, the film creates a connection between the difficulty of representing memory and the difficulty of representing history. The task is so complex that Resnais doesn’t even appear to fully try. Rather, he tells a story about the difficulty of memory being enough to record and retell history in the same way that Benjamin asks similar questions about art.

Through its groundbreaking opening montage and its unique blending of flashbacks into reality, Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour problematizes the notion of historical representation or reconstruction through art. While, as Benjamin suggests, it is easy to assume that film has the capability to reproduce an event in the modern age, this film opposes that idea. As Benjamin writes of the changes in humanity’s entire perception of our mode of existence, he leaves the question of perspective unanswered. How can our human sense be related to history? Can we even have a universal perspective at all? With this film, Resnais struggles with the fact that our minds might simply not be capable of comprehending this tragedy in the first place, let alone remembering it. The repeating line of “You saw nothing” reminds us that we have no idea what the actual experience of the Hiroshima bombing was like. Benjamin himself suggests that even in “the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now…its unique existence in a particular place” (Benjamin 232). That is part of the beauty of this film and the horrifying reality that it reveals: even art might not be capable of showing us history. In effect, Resnais shows us that Hiroshima transcends itself: it becomes a universal event that we can see rippling and recurring throughout history.

Works Cited

Anderst, Leah. “Cinematic Free Indirect Style: Represented Memory in ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour.’” Narrative, vol. 19, no. 3, 2011, pp. 358–382. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41289309.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Second Version).” Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings, Bedford/St. Martins, 2011, pp. 229–252.

Bordwell, David. “Five Reasons Why Hiroshima, Mon Amour Still Matters.” Observations on Film Art, Criterion Channel, 25 Sept. 2018, www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2018/09/25/on- the-criterion-channel-five-reasons-why-hiroshima-mon-amour-still-matters/.

Durgnat, Raymond E. “Alain Resnais.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 25 Feb. 2019, www.britannica.com/biography/Alain-Resnais.

Kuleshov, Lev. “The Principles of Montage.” Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings, Bedford/St. Martins, 2011, pp. 137-146.

Mercken-Spaas, Godelieve. “Destruction and Reconstruction in ‘Hiroshima, Mon Amour.’”Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 4, 1980, pp. 244–250. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43795784.

Resnais, Alain, director. Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Pathé Films, 1959.

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