Where Film Meets Philosophy by Vaughan Hunter;

Author:Vaughan, Hunter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, PER004000, Performing Arts/Film and Video/General
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2013-02-04T16:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 3.4

The camera of Hiroshima, mon amour glides through visualized memories.

Redirecting these theorists’ argument, then, one could rather see this as Nevers’s coexistence at once as the subject of her own narrated story and as an object in a physical context (which is the text that we are watching). Though it contributes to the dialogic notion of film, this reading of the speech-image code proposes a conventionalized overlapping between perception, memory, and communication (what she has seen, remembers, and tells). Christian Metz’s suggestion that a flashback is like a striptease is particularly poignant here: the more that she reveals, the more that she posits herself as an object of her own narration, the more subjective control she has over the text.47 This codification begins to display its own fragility, however, as the protagonist proceeds further into recounting her own traumatic history. She tells of her German lover and of her incarceration in the family cellar as punishment for the shame caused by her affair with the occupying enemy. Denotatively, this sequence is particularly moving for its allegorical representation of the repression of female sexuality and the dualistic nature of fascism as a function of what Noël Burch calls “the stupidity of the provincial bourgeoisie” during wartime. Burch observes, furthermore, that Nevers’s story unfolds a-chronologically: we see the events not in the order that they happen but in the order that they occur to her, “the stream of her impressions and associations.”48 Burch’s point upholds the common understanding of this enunciation as a conventionalized representation of her attempt to represent her own experience.

We should, however, view this breakdown of denotative linearity as a question primarily of formal—not narrative—subversion. For the sequence to unfold as it does, it must be engendered to do so by the construction of subject-object relations in the form of the speech-image code. During this scene Hiroshima, mon amour encounters short-circuits in the flashback process, blips in the speech-image code that connote imperfections in conventional systems of reference. This is a contradiction between temporal sources of speech and image: the image of the past is still dominated by her voice in the present. We are in the present with the couple. Her voice ushers the visual track into an image of the past, but an objective relationship with that past is never established. The voice-over flashback does not fulfill its role as a code, does not transfer the image from her subjectivity to an objective image set in the past. Resnais’s experimentation with the simultaneity of sound blends objective and subjective poles in a manner that challenges our conventions of understanding and representing memory. The images begin slightly to contradict her narration: she tells about hearing “La Marseillaise” overhead, and we see soldiers passing silently. The speech-image code, whose coherence of enunciation is meant to connote a particular order of meaning, is beginning to splinter.

The division of subjectivity represented by the shift in temporality proves to be too much for the psychological stability of the character. Herein lies

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