Picking up from last week, I decided to discuss Hiroshima in two parts. Length that’s perfectly fine for the original course assignment paper might be too much for one blog post. Anyways, here’s the conclusion of this film analysis.
While such pioneering techniques of storytelling were pleasing to the contemporaries of Resnais, it should be noted that the whole venture was originally intended strictly as a documentary (which, not surprisingly gives viewers that impression as mentioned earlier). However, this plan was cast aside as Resnais thought the better idea was to fuse the horrific atomic attack on Hiroshima with a fictional romance story. The intention was for this to somehow break down such a gigantic and tragic historical event into a more human, quantifiable one.
Resnais did a remarkably good job of providing a sobering account of the actress remembering her profoundly distressing experience of World War Two in occupied France. This was coupled with the perspective of the architect who had been a soldier away fighting when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Resnais also managed to effectively use past images of the ravaged city with the reconstructed present one as a profound backdrop for the collective, painful memories of both characters during World War Two. This was to express their past sorrows and sufferings with current feelings of apprehension, loneliness and emotional isolation.
The devastated images of the immediate postwar city functions as a striking metaphor for the ruin that the actress and her lover felt in that immediate period…while the reconstructed city symbolically serves as a sort of rebirth (and perhaps a partial recovery from the traumas of years gone by). Still, both characters remain curiously unfulfilled as their musings of past and present do not lead to a specific outcome. Once again, this is where a film like Hiroshima, Mon Amour is so dramatically different from typical films of that era.
There is no major goal(s) or specific sense of purpose for the actress and the architect to aspire to. The entire narrative and especially the ending are quite ambiguous as to intent — we never know for a certainty if they will continue their affair or not. It’s not a foregone conclusion whether or not they find any sense of true contentment and satisfaction beyond their brief affair. Thus, we have one of the more outstanding elements of French New Wave films (and Hiroshima, Mon Amour is definitely a prime example of this story type) as the narrative doesn’t follow any strict structure. It’s not imperative that one event must logically lead to the next one, and that the characters must accomplish such and such to a achieve a certain outcome. There are no tidy, wrapped up endings which otherwise typified filmmaking in the 1950s.
