Global Art Cinema by Rosalind Galt;Karl Schoonover; & Karl Schoonover

Author:Rosalind Galt;Karl Schoonover; & Karl Schoonover
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2010-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 10.5. Hiroshima mon amour (Resnais, 1959). Zenith International/Photofest. © Zenith International.

In the guise of an extremely fluid and linear subjective tracking shot penetrating the space toward the vanishing point, Riva’s stream of memories about hospital corridors and victims’ faces rejecting her look breaks down in favor of a binary montage between street signs from Nevers and the neon lights of Hiroshima. Thus, her stubborn wish to understand the history of her Japanese lover accommodates both her own inner dialogue and a two-person conversation about the dilemmas of remembering too much or forgetting too quickly.

Instead of asking only questions about perception and illusionism, surrealism here raises the problems of value and perspective on the past. Resnais’s film explores how geographical displacement can lead to a reassessment of personal memory in light of an even bigger tragedy. Just as in Brunius’s open-ended epiphanies for his collages, Resnais’s “mon amour,” in the title, ambiguously refers to both the young German lover and the handsome Japanese architect. Is this the story of a girl’s first love? And is it as banal as a dime novel, or as subjectively traumatic as the bombing of Hiroshima for the architect? In line with the anti-referential thrust of Ubac’s photomontage, the consequences of the atomic bomb are so extreme that neither photojournalism nor life-size models in the Hiroshima museum can document the horror experienced by the population. Notwithstanding this representational impasse with history, the legacy of surrealist photomontage becomes most apparent in the museum sequence, where we see sets of grotesque legs with no bodies walking underneath huge boards.

Striving for the right distance between past and present is, by definition, an elusive project that involves constant shifts in time and restless wandering from the hotel to the teahouse in Hiroshima, and from the ruins to the stables in Nevers. At the expense of the Japanese architect’s opportunities for self-expression, the French actress becomes the emotional center of the film and a figure of mobility. Significantly, she plays a nurse in a film about peace, shot among Japanese survivors. How fair is it to situate a trauma that belongs to the history of Japan onto a French woman’s change of space? The actress and the architect are the representatives of two nations formerly at war, while neither one of these two characters gets a name in the film. Without falling into a sentimental universalism, Resnais’s lovers exchange something modest yet deep. Her nominal reinvention into “Nevers” and his new name of “Hiroshima” suggest that the processes of filmmaking and film-viewing alleviate the problems of historical and emotional distance, thanks to the development of a temporary intersubjective zone.16 This dynamic zone is based on how movement in film activates an exchange between space and time, on one hand, and on how love itself models an attraction between audience and screen, on the other. Reaching this weighted moment of exchange, however, does require traveling, or going to the cinema, in such a way of wandering inside oneself and through foreign lands.

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