Readers who have followed my Alain Resnais cycle for some time know that this is my very first entry in the series. I intend to write a piece about each of the director’s twenty features, starting with his debut, Hiroshima mon amour (1959). Until 1958, the director had a successful career as a maker of documentary shorts. Van Gogh (1948) won an Oscar, but his most famous short film is Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard, 1956), which documents the concentration camps during World War II. One of the themes of that film was the difficulty, verging on the impossible, of depicting such a horrendous event. It was scripted by Jean Cayrol, who was a concentration camp survivor.

Hiroshima mon amour started out as a commissioned documentary, but Resnais soon felt that not only was he repeating himself from Night and Fog, but above all that a completely different form would be needed. Resnais was an avid admirer of the author Marguerite Duras. He even toyed with the idea of making an amateur 16mm version of her novel Moderato Cantabile (1958), if only to be able to show it to her and in that way get her attention. It turned out to be enough to ask her to write the script for what would become his first feature. Several of his future collaborations would be with novel authors rather than regular scriptwriters.

Subsequently, the project became a French-Japanese co-production, with the precondition that the film must be shot in both countries with the respective crews and that one of the leads must be French and the other Japanese. With those restrictions in mind, Duras crafted a script about a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) who travels to Hiroshima to act in a film about the atomic bomb and has an affair with a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada). Apart from the presentation at the Cannes Film Festival, which was somewhat divisive, the film was an immediate success. Hiroshima mon amour showcased Resnais’ formal rigour, which was constantly inventive but never academic.

The style of Hiroshima mon amour

The scenes in Hiroshima are set in the present time, whereas the French parts are set in the past, sometimes referred to as flashbacks. The term is not obvious when discussing Resnais’ oeuvre. We will flash forward to that. From a formal aspect, it is interesting to note that while the Japanese parts contain dialogue, the French section plays like a silent film. The silent era is an essential reference for Resnais, but more interesting here is to note that he was never afraid to challenge the structure he had established.

In one French scene, Riva’s nameless character screams, creating a rupture in the silence that has permeated the scenes until then. That’s the only instance of diegetic sound in those scenes, pointing to a playful side within the formalism at play. Resnais is routinely referred to as a formalist, but his playfulness and sense of humour are not mentioned enough. We will get back to this while discussing later works.

Hiroshima mon amour begins with the featured image above set to Giovanni Fusco’s music. The credits are followed by two naked people hugging, covered in something resembling dust or ashes. Then, the architect says, ” You have seen nothing in Hiroshima”. The woman answers that she’s seen everything. Thus begins a startling sequence lasting almost fifteen minutes, which doesn’t kick off the narrative, but rather becomes a meditation on love and death set to Riva’s voice.

It is difficult to imagine how surprising that start of the film was for the audience at the time. Even today, it still manages to impress and is one of the most replayed sequences from the film. The sequence is only rivalled by the shot where Riva’s character watches Okada’s character sleeping while his hand is moving. Only two years earlier, Bergman felt the need to announce in a monologue in Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället) that the story was going back in time, but Resnais merely cuts to an unknown character’s hand. It will take some time before we will get the full context of this character.

In my list of the best debut films ever made, Hiroshima mon amour took the first spot. I never considered any other film there considering the startling maturity which Resnais displays here. For many directors, a film like this would be their crowning achievement, but Resnais was only getting started, as was his collaboration with Sacha Vierny who shot the scenes set in France. That goes for this series of reviews as well. Stay tuned for the next piece in the intellectually rewarding puzzle that is the films of Alain Resnais.