"Hiroshima Mon Amour"
Hiroshima Mon Amour, a film by Alain Resnais, is filled with a remarkable atmosphere created by lovers who are deeply attracted to one another and who are driven into their passion by the compelling reality of Hiroshima. There is a paradox. How can a mind or heart encompass the catastrophe its people have seen?— even as its children cry out for peace and march in the streets? The paradox. You are in the midst of Hiroshima and still have seen nothing of it.
The names of the two lovers remain unspoken through the length of the film. And in the pages of the screenplay by Marguerite Duras, the actors lines are only marked as HE and SHE.
SHE is French and comes to Hiroshima as an actress, and is taking part in the making of an enlightening film about Peace. SHE is originally from Nevers, and now has a husband and two kids, living in Paris.
HE is Japanese, an architect whose wife is spending a few days away from Hiroshima.
Duras has script notes referring to film archives that the French woman has seen in the museum:
(Shots of various survivors: a beautiful child who upon turning around, is blind in one eye; a girl looking at her burned face in the mirror; a blind girl with twisted hands playing the zither; a woman praying near her dying children; a man, who has not slept for several years, dying. [Once a week they bring his children to see him.])
In the museum, in addition to vintage film, there are recreations and models.
HE: You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.
SHE: The reconstructions have been made as authentically as possible. The films have been made as authentically as possible. The illusion, it’s quite simple, the illusion is so perfect that the tourists cry. One can always scoff, but what else can a tourist do, really, but cry. I’ve always wept over the fate of Hiroshima. Always.
HE: No. What was there for you to weep over?
Marguerite Duras explains one apparent goal of the film. And she writes about the man and woman: “Theirs is a one night affair. But where? At Hiroshima.”
Their embrace—so banal, so commonplace—takes place in the one city of the world where it is hardest to imagine it: Hiroshima. Nothing is “given” at Hiroshima. Every gesture, every word, takes on an aura of meaning that transcends its literal meaning. And this is one of the principal goals of the film: to have done with the description of horror, by horror, for that has been done by the Japanese themselves, but make this horror rise again from its ashes by incorporating it in a love that will necessarily be special and “wonderful,” one that will be more credible than if it had occurred anywhere else in the world, a place that death had not preserved.
HE: You made it all up.
SHE: I saw the newsreels…
HE: (interrupting her) You saw nothing. Nothing.
SHE: Nothing.
Just as in love this illusion exists, this illusion of being able never to forget so I was under the illusion that I would never forget Hiroshima.
Just as in love.
HE: Nothing. You know nothing.
Their unusual pillow talk goes on. And while they continue, the film flashes out brief black-and-white snapshots taken in the rubble of Hiroshima, of doctors applying forceps to a woman’s eyelids, to extract an eye,—and then the scene that comes later—street demonstrations, rage over tons of contaminated food that must be confiscated and buried—and then more pictures in black-and-white resurface, of naked bodies embracing.
SHE: (softly): …Listen to me. Like you, I know what it means to forget.
HE: No, you don’t know what it is to forget.
SHE: Like you I have a memory. I know what it is to forget.
HE: No, you don’t have a memory.
SHE: Like you, I too have tried with all my might not to forget. Like you, I forgot. Like you, I wanted to have an inconsolable memory, a memory of shadows and stone.
(The shot of a shadow, “photographed” on stone, of someone killed at Hiroshima.)
Shadows and Stone
She asks him if he was in Hiroshima on that terrible day. He laughs in a playful way, saying it’s obvious that he could not have been, since he is all in one piece. He was far away, still serving in the Japanese Army. But suddenly (with a strange look on his face) he says, “my family…my parents were in Hiroshima”.
The conversation changes as they leave the room and pass into the hotel lobby.
The French woman begins to tell him the story of how she came to lose her mind in Nevers, a place where she can never return. “In Nevers I was younger than I have ever been,” she tells him.
HE: Young-in-Nevers.
SHE: Yes. Young in Nevers. And then too, once, mad in Nevers.
Their conversation moves out into the bright plaza in front of the hotel, as they step lively into the noise of morning traffic. And wearing her nurse’s uniform, she is dressed for the role she has to play in the Peace film.
SHE: You see, Nevers is the city in the world, and even the thing in the world, I dream about most often at night. And at the same time it’s the thing I think about the least.
HE: What was your madness like at Nevers?
SHE: Madness is like intelligence, you know. You can’t explain it. Just like intelligence. It comes on you, it fills you, and then you understand it. But when it goes away you can’t understand it at all any longer.
HE: Were you full of hate?
SHE: That is what my madness was. I was mad with hate. I had the impression it would be possible to make a real career of hate. All I cared about was hate. Do you understand?
They find themselves at the curb and her taxi is already pulling up. She has opened the back door, and is about to ease in,— when he steps forward and says, “I want to see you again”. “No,” is her answer, and the taxi pulls away.
He goes looking for her, and catches sight of a crew of men breaking down and stowing cameras and sound equipment. He can’t believe his luck. She is sitting in the grass asleep, half her face in shadow. All around them is a wide river of humanity. Suddenly protest and peace marches have seized the day, lined up with singing children, schoolgirls holding large paper cranes, monks chanting, and teachers waving wide banners and posters above them.
They become lost in the crowd together, as they dodge and move around the others, at the edge of the street. He finally pulls her away and takes her to his house, leaving behind scenes of rapt faces, full of an intensity of seeing. After they enter the house the telephone rings and he doesn’t answer..
(At Hiroshima. The light is already different. Later. After they have made love.)
HE: Was he French, the man you loved during the war?
SHE: No…he wasn’t French.
(At Hiroshima. She is lying on the bed, pleasantly tired. Darker now.)
SHE: Yes. It was at Nevers.
(Nevers. A shot of love at Nevers. Bicycles racing. The forest, etc.)
SHE: At first we met in barns. Then among the ruins. And then in rooms. Like anywhere else.
(Hiroshima. In the room, the light had faded even more. Their bodies in a peaceful embrace.)
SHE: And then he was dead.
***
In her former life, in Nevers, she had met her star-crossed lover: her first love, a young German soldier of the Army of Occupation. He had come into her father’s pharmacy to have his hand bandaged. Later, they put their heads together and thought about the future, and worried constantly about being discovered. Yes, they even planned to run away somehow before the war was over. They were frightened out of their wits whenever they met in a secluded place. He would find himself in a field, waiting for hours at night, and be so happy to see her at last. And 14 years later, in Hiroshima, she finally opens up to the Japanese man: and a few hours later unburdens herself of her grief. Her love was dead. But in Hiroshima she reclaims the dreadful reality of her ordeal in Nevers: months on end confined in the cellar of her parents’ house.
The universe of solitude, the home of shadows and stone. “My dead lover is an enemy of France”, she said in a flat tone. She had been too stunned to feel any insult, when her hair was cropped down to the scalp, after the liberation of the city. This was public shaming, and it marked her as a woman who had slept with the enemy. She is lost before long, in the oblivion of madness, where there is neither time enough to live nor time enough to die. When she is alone she claws at the stone walls, and is licking the blood from her fingers.
Surrounded by stone walls, she wants to be dead, like her dead love. In the cellar of her father’s house, she could feel a timelessness folded around her which she accepted as a kind of eternity: nothing but shadows passing along the walls to the far corner of the room. Then her parents allow her go outside again. They think she is better. She can ride her bicycle. One day her mother tells her that she is now 20; and when more time has passed her mother gives her some money, and wants her to leave the city under the cover of darkness.
Since the night she left Nevers for Paris (riding her bicycle for 2 days) she had spoken to no one about this past. She had never told her husband about these things. It was only when she got to Paris, talking to people in the street, that she heard the news about Hiroshima.
The horror of forgetting and self-reproach torment us as time passes. “Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges”, as Melville said. So many of us cling to opinion or sleep soundly on moral virtue ; but someday you might hear a voice cry out from a place of insight or conscience, “You have seen nothing of Hiroshima, nothing.”