HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR directed by Alain Resnais (France, 1959)

This is a movie about the fallibility of memory; an intense love story set against the backdrop of the bombing of Hiroshima in Japan.

On August 6th 1945, an atomic bomb killed around 200,000 people. The exact numbers will never be known since the victims and buildings were reduced to ash.

The film begins with graphic and disturbing images of people in the city receiving treatment for terrible injuries. These shots illustrate how it was originally conceived as a sombre yet poetic study in the same vein as Resnais’ Night And Fog (1955) about the Nazi concentration camps.

Perhaps Resnais recognised the limitations of the documentary form and realised that facts tell us relatively little about the human cost of such tragedies. However compassionate a filmmaker’s intentions may be, the risk is that the viewer’s role will be reduced to that of a passive witness to the horror. Continue reading →