Hiroshima Mon Amour

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Title
Hiroshima Mon Amour
Producing Organization
WBEZ
Contributing Organization
WBEZ (Chicago, Illinois)
AAPB ID
cpb-aacip/50-38jdft90
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Description
Description
This week, I heard about a Chicagoan who had a very special childhood. At an early age, he would sneak out of the house of his suburban parents and take the train to the city to see movies. At the age of 9, he saw Hiroshima Mon Amour . He says it changed his life. I don't know this individual, so I don't know what it was in Hiroshima Mon Amour that so affected him, or how it changed him. It was made in 1959, ostensibly as a part of the flowering of the French New Wave, but it belongs there uncomfortably, both because Alain Resnais, who made it, was older and not really a part of the Godard-Truffaut-Chabrol-Rivette constellation, and because it is so much more structured and formal, a film which revels in the narration. Understandably: the script was written by Marguerite Duras. Today, it is hard to imagine that this could be Resnais' first feature film. The plot is minimal: Emmanuelle Riva plays a French actress who is in Tokyo to make an anti-war movie. She meets and falls in love with a Japanese architect. This triggers in her a memory of her love for a German soldier during World War II, a soldier who was killed the day before she was to leave with him. It is a memory she has buried for 14 years. At the beginning of Hiroshima Mon Amour, Resnais lets us know where we are. In a brilliant editing sequence, he cuts between Riva and her lover in bed close-up shots of skin, arms, shoulders and a tour of the Hiroshima holocaust museum. The still lives of twisted metal, melted bottle caps, singed skin, shorn-off hair, the still photographs of disintegrating faces, arms and eyes gradually turns to newsreel footage of the devastated Hiroshima landscape and the survivors. But that's all. Then, for the rest of the film, Resnais focuses on the love affair. Hiroshima Mon Amour is a film about the pain of forgetting. Emmanuelle Riva sees the spirit of her dead wartime German lover in the presence of the living Japanese one. The erotically charged black and white images we are treated to the most intimate confession. At every step, there is the beauty of Duras' script. "I believe the act of seeing has to be learned," she has Riva say, and Resnais' great achievement is to help us learn see what he calls "the anguish of forgetting." Hiroshima Mon Amour , the most apolitical of films, becomes the most political. The Hiroshima night which envelops Riva and the Japanese architect will never end, but we don't want it to end, because having it end means that we might forget. And so Hiroshima Mon Amour builds the quietest tension of the greatest thriller, holding a mirror to our souls, facing us up to our past. There is only one fact: the human tragedy of the past, and in Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour , the memory of that past makes even love impossible. What makes this so devastating is how Resnais internalizes the horror of the atomic bomb and its aftermath. The love of the two people arrested, frozen in time, seared into our eyes with the flash of the atomic bomb. I don't know what the 9 year-old boy saw when he saw Hiroshima mon amour while so young, but seeing Hiroshima mon amour at any age makes any argument for any war or conflict, or for nuclear arms impossible and obscene, a concept that, in light of the film, is a crime against humanity. Hiroshima Mon Amour is a film beyond description.. The two characters in Hiroshima Mon Amour , the actress, played by Emmanuelle Riva and the architect, played by Eiji Okada are nameless. She names him, at the very end of the film. "To me," she says, "your name is is Hiroshima." This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio's Worldview .
Media type
Sound
Credits
: WBEZ
Editor: Drew Hill
Producing Organization: WBEZ
AAPB Contributor Holdings
Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ-FM) and Vocalo.org
Identifier: (unknown)
Format: audio/mpeg
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Citations
Chicago: “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” WBEZ, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed July 18, 2025, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-50-38jdft90.
MLA: “Hiroshima Mon Amour.” WBEZ, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. July 18, 2025. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-50-38jdft90>.
APA: Hiroshima Mon Amour. Boston, MA: WBEZ, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-50-38jdft90