thursday, march 27, 2008
Hiroshima mon amour
Alan Resnais’ monumental 1959 film, Hiroshima mon amour, takes on the formidable conceit of expressing the sublime. In this case, the aftermath of the dropping of the atomic bomb on August 6, 1945. That event not only devastated the city but entailed vast and profound effects on the world afterward.It would seem, perhaps, that film would be perfect for this type of subject. The critic Siegfried Krackauer noted that film was an ideal medium for conveying the impact of “phenomena overwhelming consciousness” such as acts of violence and destruction on the scale of Hiroshima.
Such events, he wrote in 1960, “call forth excitements and agonies bound to thwart detached observation” which serves to make recounting the experience of it almost impossible for those who witnessed it. Film, he argued, has the means to convey the scope and impact of the event “without distortion.”
“The cinema, then, aims at transforming the agitated witness into a conscious observer,” Krackauer wrote. “Thus it keeps us shutting our eyes to ‘the blind drive of things.’”
Yet, Resnais understood that this very process has its own insidious aspect by blunting the impact of the event in consciousness through the process of pushing the observer away from the subject. It was something he wished to avoid… to overcome.
By the time he undertook Hiroshima mon amour there were, he admitted, several superb documentaries on the aftermath of the bomb in Hiroshima. His approach, then, was the need to film “the impossibility of filming it.”
That poses the philosophical quandary of addressing something that, by every description, is ineffable. And to do so within the confines of the cinematic medium that has very specific limitations of its own.
Hiroshima mon amour takes the brilliant approach of equating it to the most overwhelming and powerful human emotion – love. And, by doing that, Resnais’ film goes much farther than a simple moral tale about the dangers of the atomic age; he has created a film that addresses something deep inside the human condition.
“Chance meetings occur everywhere in the world,” wrote Marguerite Duras, the novelist who penned the screenplay. “What is important is what these ordinary meetings lead to.”
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Nothing is “given” at Hiroshima. Every gesture, every word, takes on an aura of meaning that transcends its literal meaning.” she wrote in her synopsis of the film. “Hiroshima is a place that death had not preserved. It is the common ground for the two.”
What is interesting about Resnais’ approach in meeting this challenge is the masterful way he used existing cinematic techniques to do it rather than reach out and try and find a new method. He seemed to understand such an approach would distract from the underlying theme of his work.
So, as much as the other directors who comprised the French New Wave despised it, Resnais embraced montage. Godard and Truffaut objected to the technique as a shortcut that deprived the audience the emotional impact the film should earn on its own merits. Misc en scene was their preferred method.
Yet in Hiroshima, Resnais uses this aspect of montage in Hiroshima mon amour for that precise reason. He wants to emotionally distance the audience and then show the way that strange distance in light of such a massive event on the scale of Hiroshima might seem wrong, it is also somewhat inevitable.
As the French woman (Emanuelle Riva) tells her new Japanese lover (Eiji Okada) about how well she knows Hiroshima due to her visit his denials are demonstrated by the antiseptic way the museum about the bombing are shown. The deceptively simple montage leads you into the sterile building and it presents the magnitude of the disaster in an almost insulting simplicity and distance.
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It’s a disturbing juxtaposition that Resnais pursues doggedly as the dialogue of the yet-unseen lovers evokes echoes of the horror that has occurred to the city. “I’ve seen the newsreels,” the woman says and then we see them too with their horrible images of destruction and slow painful decay.
But those images are archival. They still keep you from beholding the actual horror that has happened at Hiroshima. The revulsion, though powerful, is momentary and passing. Yet, the atrocity of the event itself never loses its importance despite our fickle memories and attention.
In her treatment of the film, Duras described the sequence in terms that echo Resnais’ explanation of the film itself.
“It is allegorical,” she wrote. “It is impossible to talk about Hiroshima. All one can do is talk about the impossibility of talking about Hiroshima.”
The conceit of two spent lovers idly musing over the destruction of the atomic blast is, Duras wrote, “a sacrilegious recollection from a hotel bed after passion.” But to hold them morally in contempt is to miss the point because, she continues, “what is really sacrilegious is Hiroshima.”
But there is certainly a price to be paid for profaning the sacred. The passion between the two and the implacable face of Hiroshima and all it entails awakens the horrible tragedy of the woman’s own life. As complete and whole and happy as she seems in the morning, it slowly begins to fall apart under the fury of understanding.
The bomb is an impossibly incandescent light that strips everything away. For the residents of Hiroshima it takes their lives either immediately or by the degradation of radiation poisoning. The blunt power of what it represents eventually tears down the walls of protection she has built and illuminates her own suffering.
Despite these weighty matters, there is a wonderful balance in Resnais’ directing touch. He captures the idle wandering nature of the day after for the two lovers as well as the way they stagger through the streets dazed by the impact of what they have discovered.
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Hair, for instance, becomes a symbol of vitality as well as weakness. The woman clearly relishes not only the appearance of her hair but the sensual suggestion of it. During her tryst her lover plays with her locks and she is shown tossing them about with no real reason other than to luxuriate in the feel of it about her head. It's a wonderfully subtle but vivid cinematic touch.
As the film progresses she often shakes her hair in this manner. When she dons her nurse's costume with the head covering she seems almost de-sexed and it is a relief when she removes it. For much of the first half of the film the vitality that is expressed with her hair and mannerisms gives a sense of her distance between her those in this city who have suffered. It underscores her professed amazement of having such an affair in a place like Hiroshima.
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Like many French women who took German soldiers as their lovers, after the liberation her head is shaved in public to humiliate her. Her process of healing from this affront is depicted through the slow progression of her hair growing back out which, when it has sufficiently returned, allows her to flee her home in rural Nevers for Paris
Yet Resnais has already taken care to show us the scenes of Hiroshima survivors is marked by how they lost their hair – a precursor to the ravages radiation sickness would soon succumb to. A scene of a doctor demonstrating how easily a patch of a bomb survivor's hair comes out is in almost perfect juxtaposition with the way the French woman's hair is shorn.
This attention to detail adds a significant layer of continuity to Hiroshima mon amour that helps stress it's message. It is a decidedly literary touch for a medium that is often derided for it's inability to express the human condition in the same degree as literature. (No less than Godard, hailed the film a literature.)
And another aspect where the film takes on a distinctive literary form is in the manipulation of time. Like montage, the sense of the past and the passage of time is usually achieved in a relatively straightforward technical manner through the flashback. But Resnais takes the method and shuffles the images in both a chronological and narrative manner.
“In my film,” Resnais once said. “Time is shattered.”
Rather than a linear chronological thread in the flashbacks the images are told in the chaotic manner of memory. Images with powerful attachments surface and are quickly subsumed, more complex recollections take time to emerge and do so in eddies and swells.
Each time we come back to the present and see the ravaged face of the woman facing her past with nothing to protect her. Her love for this Japanese man has left her emotionally defenseless and the pain of her past rushes in unopposed.
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She prefaces this terrible personal epiphany when she tells the man how she felt when she learned that the bomb had been dropped. The tremendous relief of knowing the long horrible war was over almost immediately was replaced by something else…
Astonishment they dared to do it and astonishment that they succeeded and the beginning of an unknown fear for us as well… and then indifference. And the fear of indifference as well.”
Eventually, in a very subtle way, the ending of Hiroshima mon amour segues perfectly with the beginning bringing this unique approach to the passage of time to a satisfying conclusion of sorts. The lovers are back in the room as day breaks.
They are wounded and vulnerable but they are free in a way they felt they were in their passion a day earlier. The same passion that set the feelings in motion that has brought them back to where they started.
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| comment posted by: Lisa on march 28, 2008 @ 11:05 am |
If your words were food, I could eat for years. |
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