Before being reborn is ashes.
The first act of Hiroshima's love is undoubtedly the most beautiful in the history of cinema. Gold-powdered ashes envelop two pairs of tightly wound arms, and despair envelops a foolish passion, reminiscent of lava, inorganic and organic. Rarely in the history of cinema has such a single shot that can convey such multiple meanings, seemingly political and private, both vigorous and dead.
The story depicts an actress from Neville, France, who travels to Hiroshima, the city where World War II ended, to make an anti-war film. Here she meets a man whose lives are briefly intertwined in just 24 hours. Alain Resnais's strategy of constructing the individuality of the two characters is unique, in the film there are only endless dialogues, we have no way of knowing the uniqueness of their personalities, or even their names, we can only see what makes them connected, but not just superficial and short-lived passions.
The misalignment of sound and painting is used to show the interweaving of memory and reality
What do you see?
She said she saw twisted and deformed steel bars, skin burned by the flames of war, hair that the woman woke up the day after the explosion to find herself falling, unknown stones, bodies or tissues that remained but still seemed to be alive... However, he denied it one by one, saying that she had not seen anything.
Alan Renai challenges the viewer's imagination of history through his denial, which is not the exquisite decorations that have been montaged in museums or textbooks. So what did she see? Digging through the memories from the dialogue, we see her first love in her hometown, an unblessed love, and see the curses and madness she fell into after the assassination of her lover.
A strange city, so far away from her hometown, but closely connected, under the cold lens, we should naturally look at everything in Hiroshima from an inevitable and objective point of view, but Alan Renai places a layer of private memory between our sights and objects, so that we can understand how the vision of wandering the streets of Hiroshima like a ghost can be combined with facial or physical close-ups, such as the poetic expression seen at the beginning of the movie, so that calm and enthusiasm become synonymous, Let the distinction between calm and passion become meaningless, let tragedy and love combine to create another layer of understanding.
Hiroshima Nevel
Since the Second World War, human beings have known what the unspeakable truth is, which makes the narrative so important, to understand the core of things, we can only constantly delete, subtract, no longer try to reach the truth, but through the story to praise, with the spread of ideas to construct the truth.
The pursuit of truth has become an impossible task, but we have also regained our sense of the ability of human beings to constantly make statements. In the continuous dialogue between the two of them, we see the possibility that Arun Renai does not directly present the distorted appearance of war as he did in "Night and Fog", and convey humanistic care from a documentary point of view, but through two people who are also affected by the war, they tell and listen to each other's stories.
"From now on, your name is Hiroshima and my name is Neville."
At the end of the film, when she weakly repeats her cry: "Hiroshima... Hiroshima..." He grabbed her by the shoulders and said, "From now on, your name is Hiroshima and my name is Neville." ”
Humanity has created the atomic bomb and created something that we can never understand, but don't forget where we came from, Arun Renai seems to be using this film to remind our audiences of our identity as citizens of the world, although we come from different places, each with a different story background, but we all have a hometown that is closely tied to our hearts. Whether it is Hiroshima or Neville, it can be replaced by any place, or it can be the deepest and most human love.