The French director Alain Resnais was thirty-seven when he directed his first feature film, “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” (which I discuss in this clip). He was already burdened by memory, which has been the most consistent and deeply reworked theme of his entire career (a career that continues to this day, as with his most recent film, “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet,” which was shown at the New York Film Festival last fall).
For Resnais, personal memory and historical memory, in their various forms, are inseparable. In “Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” a French actress (played by Emmanuelle Riva—who, now eighty-five, is up for the Oscar for Best Actress this year for her role in Michael Haneke’s “Amour”) is in Hiroshima to make a movie promoting peace. There, she visits the museum and tours the city in order to immerse herself in the specifics of its recent devastation. She also has an affair with a Japanese man, whose questions about her past bring up her own experiences in the dark days of the German occupation of France, which overlap with the story of Hiroshima and with this very love story.
The text was written by Marguerite Duras, one of France’s greatest modern novelists—but, Resnais, speaking last year with Michel Ciment in an interview on France Culture, explained that the literary source for all of his movies has been not novelistic but theatrical. He said, “I like the cinema to have the ring of theatre” (that’s the explicit basis for “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet”). Discussing “Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” Resnais said, “Marguerite Duras, for me, is ‘The Square’”—a novel written in dialogue form—“she’s as much an author for the theatre.” It’s certainly true that Duras’s novels, even the ones not written in dialogue, have a unique, incantatory tone. It’s no surprise that she ultimately became a movie director whose films feature distinctively rich and iconic dialogue—or that her most famous work, “The Lover,” is a modern masterwork expressly on the theme of memory. Then there’s Proust; then there’s the Cinémathèque Française and the French New Wave, with its fanatical absorption in (and of) the history of cinema, culminating in Jean-Luc Godard’s magisterial video essay “Histoire(s) du Cinéma.” What is it about France, history, and memory? What induces so many of its artistic luminaries to define themselves in terms of the personal, cultural, and political past?