HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR (Resnais, 1959)
Criterion Collection, Blu-ray, Release Date July 14, 2015
Review by Christopher S. Long
Alain Resnais' landmark debut feature
“Hiroshima Mon Amour' (1959) exists at a permeable border where the
past bleeds into the present, documentary intersects with fiction,
and the individual blurs into the collective.
An unnamed French woman (Emmanuelle
Riva) travels to Hiroshima (where the hypocenter of the bomb that
killed over sixty thousand has already morphed into a memorial site
called Peace Square) to shoot a film. She meets an unnamed Japanese
architect (Eiji Okada) and they carry on a brief, passionate affair,
initially portrayed in purely physical terms as the film opens with
close-ups of their intertwined bodies covered by glittering silt, but
later blossoming into an even more intense form of intimacy.
The opening sequences bear witness to
the fact that Resnais was initially commissioned to shoot a short
documentary, a form he had already mastered in extraordinary films
such as “Statues Also Die” (1953), “Night and Fog” (1955) and
“Le chant du Styrene” (1959), the latter being one of the most
unlikely masterpieces of all-time: an achingly beautiful movie about
a polystyrene factory. This early portion of the film combines
footage from the modern city (hospital corridors, the Peace Memorial
Museum with its brightly-lit atomic display) with archival footage of
Hiroshima victims while our protagonists debate in voice-over. She
says, “I saw everything.” He says, “You saw nothing.”
We don't even see either of their faces
until the sixteen-minute mark when, as if a spell is broken, the film
lurches firmly into both the present and the fictional as the lovers
share a bed, a shower and drinks out on the town. Information is
doled out slowly. After an early shot shows her wedding ring as she
digs her fingers into his back, we learn that they are both married
(contentedly, they claim) and also both struggling with their own
traumas.
Through the intricate use of
flashbacks, Resnais suggests that the past (trauma) is eternally
present, a defining quality of the often uncomfortably intimate (even
navel-gazing) screenplay by then-established novelist and future
filmmaker Marguerite Duras. While their bodies were close before,
their minds (or spirits, if you prefer) mingle even closer as she
unloads a lifetime of despair by revealing the tragic outcome of her
teenage first love during the Occupation in Nevers, France. The
knowledge that he is the first person she has ever shared her story
with turns him on more than any roll in the hay.
Her personal loss coincided, more
or less, with the Hiroshima bombing. How can she still obsess over a
doomed teenage romance (no matter how badly it ended) while visiting
the site of a recent historical mass killing? The script and film
suggest that the answer is simple: because she's human. Pain is
subjective.
Resnais used different cinematographers
and different film stock to stage the flashback scenes set in France
(shot by Sacha Vierny) and the contemporary scenes shot in Japan
(Michio Takahashi), but the constant cutting back and forth between
time frames along with her increasingly frantic voice-over merges the
two into one flowing stream. These may well be the images she sees
every time she closes her eyes and those memories are as much “now”
to her as her affair with the architect, so much so she begins to
confuse this new man with her lost lover.
From her perspective, the bombing is
something “they” did, not just a reference to Americans vs.
French but to the “they” who were obsessed with the war while she
was obsessed with “dime-store romance.” From his perspective, she
is they. Summarizing the Hiroshima he assures he she knows nothing
about, he says of the bombing, “The whole world rejoiced and you
rejoiced with it.” Whatever meeting of the minds (and spirits) they
have had, they will never be one.
The film's unusual narrative structure
makes it difficult to describe, but the far more challenging aspect
is the intricate, affective score by Georges Delerue and Giovanni
Fusco. As several commentators have noted, Resnais often sought out
writers who had a musical quality and “Hiroshima Mon Amour” is
inextricably linked to a score that never strikes the obvious chord,
never settles for underscoring the obvious emotion. Alas, critics not
trained in music simply don't know how to write about it. The film
must be seen to be understood but it also must be heard. And this
would be true for most of Resnais' work.
The overall experience is both
unnerving and unshakeable. It's also a unique experience that makes
it tough, more than half a century later, to view “Hiroshima Mon
Amour” as truly being part of the first batch of French New Wave
films alongside Chabrol's “Le beau Serge” (1958) and Truffaut's
“The 400 Blows.” Resnais, like his friend Agnรจs
Varda (whom he helped considerably in post-production on her great
1956 debut film “La Pointe Courte”), was never quite part of the
movement defined by the younger (and less broadly erudite) Truffaut,
Godard and others. The only film of the time that springs to mind as
being particularly similar to “Hiroshima” is Resnais' next movie,
the all-time great “Last Year At Marienbad” (1961).
While I prefer “Marienbad” to
“Hiroshima” (and also to almost every other film ever made)
there's no need to choose between the two. The one-two feature punch
of “Hiroshima” and “Marienbad,” following on the heels of
several of the greatest short documentaries ever made, rendered
Resnais' first decade as a filmmaker one of the greatest first
decades by any filmmaker.
The next five decades weren't so bad
either.
The film is presented in its original
1.37:1 aspect ratio. Criterion originally released “Hiroshima Mon
Amour” on DVD in 2003 and I do not own that disc as a point of
comparison. This Blu-ray upgrade retains the old Spine Number 196.
The source for this high-def transfer
is a 2013 restoration conducted at the Cineteca di Bologna lab with
the collaboration of several organizations. The restoration looks
pretty fantastic and the high-def transfer shows a film with rich
black-and-white contrast and only a few minor instances of damage. As
mentioned, the flashback sequences in France and the scenes in Japan
were shot by different cinematographers and on different stock. The
early portion of the movie also incorporates a lot of archival
footage. The video quality obviously varies based on the source but
it all looks quite spectacular when assembled here. I have no
complaints about this very fine 1080p presentation.
Audio:
The LPCM Mono audio mix is sharp and
sounds appropriately hollow/haunting at times. The score, so integral
to the film, sounds quite rich and resonant. Again, no complaints.
Optional English subtitles support the mostly French audio.
Extras:
The Criterion Collection has assembled
an impressive collection of extras both old and new.
The film is accompanied by a 2002 audio
commentary by film historian Peter Cowie. This was included on
Criterion's 2003 DVD release of “Hiroshima Mon Amour.”
The disc include two interviews with
Alain Resnais. The first is from 1961, an excerpt (6 min.) from the
French TV show “Cinepanorama.” Resnais just stands in front of a
wall and talks and he is at his most humble and engaging, describing
himself more as an editor than a director and how he feels it's
important to ask viewers to “complete” films as a show of
solidarity. He is, of course, correct. The second is from 1980, an
excerpt (11 min.) from the French TV show “Le cinema de cineastes.”
It is audio only (with a still of Resnais showing) in which he talks
about the impossibility of filming the bombing of Hiroshima as a
subject. He also talks about the different collaborators on the
project at various times which included, briefly, Chris Marker.
We also get two interviews with actress
Emmanuelle Riva. A 1959 clip (5 min.) is mostly a publicity piece
shot at the film's debut at the Cannes Film Festival and doesn't
offer too much except the chance to see Riva in 1959. The 2003
interview (19 min.), in which Riva was filmed by the Criterion
Collection, is much more substantive.
The disc also offers two new
interviews. Film scholar Francois Thomas (2015, 26 min.) discusses
both pre-production and shooting of “Hiroshima” in detail. This
is a fine analytical piece that had me interested from start to
finish. Professor Tim Page (2015, 10 min.) talks about the film
score, spotlighting the contributions of both Georges Delerue and
Giovanni Fusco.
The final feature is a piece on the
restoration of the film (11 min.) which was conducted in 2013. Davide
Pozzi, director of L'immagine ritrovata (the lab where it was done)
and cinematographer Renato Berta (who Resnais asked to supervise the
restoration) discuss the process. I felt they both rambled off-topic
for a while and little more than half of this short feature actually
touches on the restoration.
The insert booklet includes an essay by
critic Kent Jones and excerpts from a 1959 “Cahiers du Cinema”
round-table discussion about the film, including critics and
soon-to-be-filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette and Eric
Rohmer among others.
Final Thoughts:
Alain Resnais' death last year also
means that cinema is all but dead. But then cinema has always been a
mausoleum, a fact few directors understood as well as Resnais, so
perhaps there's nothing much to worry about. Not as long as we have
perfectly-preserved releases like this available for home
consumption.
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