Film Hiroshima Love Hiroshima mon amour (1959) Japanese Blu-ray edition cover
60 years ago, Jean-Luc Godard made his debut film, À bout de souffle (1960), which shocked the film world with its unique visual style and anti-traditional editing methods. Together with François Truffaut (1932-1984) 'Four Hundred Strikes Les quatre cents coups' (1959) and Alain Resnais' (1922–2014) Hiroshima's Love Hiroshima mon amour (1959), it became the most important representative of the French film "New Wave Movement".
As the originator of the "writer's film" in the French literary world, the "Left Bank" film representative of Aaron Renai's "Left Bank" film "Hiroshima Love" was called "an atomic bomb that exploded spiritually" by the international film industry at that time.
In the film Hiroshima Love Hiroshima mon amour (1959), the previous shot is Hiroshima after the war, and the next shot turns to the pre-war Neville
In 1959, 20 new filmmakers in the French film industry invested in their own visual creations. The first time they made a film, it was incompatible with the taste of business. For the first time, the "New Wave" strongly promoted the pure artistic interest of the international film world, and its influence has been spreading to this day. However, at the same time, there are also many people who specifically point out that the word "writer's film" is "stuffy".
Of course, it will not be wrong, but later people, when mentioning Aaron Renai's film, people are bound to think of the so-called "stuffy film" type. Moreover, Arun Renai's 1959 new wave masterpiece "Love in Hiroshima" was the largest boring film in his work. Next, Alan René wrote more in Marionbad last year/ L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad in Marumba last year (1961).
Stills from the film Hiroshima Love Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Eiji Okada
At that time, some commentators pointed out that the film "Last Year in Marienbad" was not only stuffy, but also belonged to the kind of depressed stuffiness.
"Love in Hiroshima" tells the story of a 24-hour exotic love affair between a French actress (emmanuelle Riva) who went to Japan to shoot in 1957 and a local Japanese construction engineer (played by Eiji Okada), interspersed with the love tragedy of Hiroshima who suffered an atomic bomb and the love tragedy of a World War II actress who was a girl in the French town of Navel in the French town of Naver.
In May 1959, Arun Renai came to Cannes, France, with his new film "Love of Hiroshima", which he had shot last year, to participate in the 12th Film Festival held here, and the film was like a bombshell, which immediately caused a sensation in the entire Western film world. With its themes of modern significance, warm and ambiguous themes, and shocking performance techniques, the film is closely connected with the new novel school.
Stills from the film Hiroshima Love Hiroshima mon amour (1959), by Eiji Okada and Emmanuelle Riva
In multiple senses, it inspired and pioneered modern cinema. Some consider it to be a "work of unprecedented greatness", an "end of classicism", "a decade ahead of time, which has made all critics lose their courage." But at the same time, some have criticized it as "an unusually tiresome, pompous film full of the most hated literature." "But when we look back on this film more than half a century later, there is no doubt that Aaron René as a master of modern cinema has an important place in the spiritual life of France and in the history of world cinema.
"Love of Hiroshima" is an epoch-making work in the history of Western cinema from the traditional period to the modern period, the screenplay was written by the famous French female writer margaret Duras (1914-1996) of the famous French new novelist Marguerite Duras.
In the film Hiroshima Love Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Emmanuelle Riva sees her trembling hands and thinks of her dead lover
And director Arun Renai himself loves to shuttle between film and literature, so the film has both the unique style of the creator and a strong literary atmosphere in a strict structural way. It is precisely because of this that his innovation in narrative mode is more prominent.
He completely dissolves and breaks down the boundaries of feature films, documentaries, filming and editing, sound and picture, and his films make a form of interlacing possible. The beginning of "Love in Hiroshima" is already shocking, with a 15-minute clip showing the male and female protagonists making love and the interplay of the atomic victim documentary segment, in which she says to him: "I came to Hiroshima and saw the sores and scars after the atomic bombing". He said to her, "No, I didn't see it." ”
On the set of the film Hiroshima Love Hiroshima mon amour (1959), directed by Alain Renai Alain Resnais and Eiji Okada (right)
The whole film breaks through the linear narrative and time and space, crossing between war and love, Japan and France, the sound of the present and the past, and the picture, collaged into the documentary screen, and with a large number of local close-ups of the characters, it is close to conveying the inner restless emotions of the characters. Therefore, the whole film is full of symbolic and metaphorical elements, which are endowed with the poetry of the image.
More precisely, "Love in Hiroshima" is the story of an extramarital affair, the story of a one-night stand, and these ordinary and cheesy stories that seem to us today have made a movie. Both expressed their happiness in their respective marriages, but they met, fell in love, and were inseparable in the end. This is the love of screenwriter Margaret Duras, there is no reason, there is no right or wrong.
Japanese DVD cover of the film Hiroshima Love Hiroshima mon amour (1959).
But some love is painful after all, whether it is a first love with a German soldier or a one-night stand with a Japanese man, it should not happen, and even in our opinion it can be said to be wrong: the former is the love that betrays the country, and the latter is the love that betrays the family.
The interweaving of love and anti-war themes in the film "Love of Hiroshima" is due to the original plan of Margaret Duras' script, but throughout Aaron Renai's creative process, contemporary historical events (World War II and post-war events) and the impact of war on human destiny have always been the focus of his selection of materials. Created in 1950, Guernica Guernica draws on Picasso's painting of the same name to protest the inhumane bombing of the famous ancient city of Spain by the German fascists in 1937.
Stills from the movie Hiroshima Love Hiroshima mon amour (1959).
In 1955, Aaron René filmed Night and Fog Nit et brouillard, re-editing the archive's black-and-white photographs and newsreels to recreate the brutal scene of the Nazi concentration camps. "Love in Hiroshima" is a logical continuation of these two works. Hiroshima is a name that has always been associated with trauma, an atomic bomb at the end of World War II that left its inhabitants with nowhere to escape. Thus looking back at Hiroshima also implies a desire for peace.
The film does not make a positive realistic description of the brutal bombing, but hides the theme of war behind a love story. At the beginning of the film, when the hero and heroine embrace each other with lust, beads of sweat flow from their beautiful bodies, but the beads of sweat with love are represented as analogues of atomic dust, followed by the horror of Hiroshima after the atomic bombing in 1945.
The film's representation of love is always entangled in war. Love is either interrupted by war or blocked by the shadow of war. The hero and heroine even when they are together. Nor can you get carefree happiness.
The woman constantly recalls the first love that happened in her hometown of Neville in the starting female era, and the Japanese man in front of her cannot make her forget her German boyfriend when she first fell in love. The Japanese man, trying to make the French woman forget the fact that she saw in Hiroshima, said, "You don't see anything in Hiroshima." The French woman could not forget, she said, "I saw everything in Hiroshima." "She saw more than just Hiroshima's wounds, she also saw scenes that happened in Neville years ago.
In the film Hiroshima Love Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Emmanuelle Riva flashes back to her German lover
She lost his boyfriend in that war, and perhaps it was the nightmarish pain that made her fall in love with the Japanese in front of her or escape from this Japanese love. It's hard for her to say for sure, but a bullet fired by Neville that buried the girl's innocent love affair is true.
The theme of the film is ambiguous and ambiguous, making "Love in Hiroshima" obviously different from traditional films and becoming the pioneering work of modern cinema. Love, anti-war, forgetting, and the level at which the film is read depends on the reader's own understanding and experience. This way of reading is in line with the trend of modern philosophy that shifts the focus from the author to the reader. The expression of stream of consciousness is completely borrowed from literature into the film, and throughout the film, what determines the order of the film is not the cause and effect of the story itself and the plot, but the emergence of people's uncontrollable subconscious.
Director Alain Renai Alain Resnais on the set of the film Hiroshima Mon amour (1959).
Because of this, "Love of Hiroshima" makes most viewers feel obscure. The Freudianism of modern philosophy can also be used to explain the film, namely that a person's past (especially his life in infancy) can have a profound impact on his present behavior.
Aaron Renai established the narrative structure of the film without skill, breaking the three time and space of the past, present and future in the editing, thus diluting the boundaries between the past and the present, while using the sound and picture counterpoint, the picture is Neville, and the sound is Hiroshima, so that the past and the present are intertwined, people clearly see the erosion and alienation of the past war on people from the external life to the spiritual world, this shocking effect brought by editing, in the 1958 film industry is unique.
Stills from the film Hiroshima Love Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Emmanuelle Riva
Alan Renai makes extensive use of newsreels in the film to show the brutality of war. Yet his use of newsreels reached the height of turning from realism to symbolism, beads of sweat and atomic dust on his body, the climax of love and the explosion of atomic bombs, and the use of plants scattered on the sand to symbolize the aftermath of Hiroshima, the documentary nature of newsreels and the fictionality of feature films, Arun Renai clearly went further than his contemporaries.
Aaron Renai, who has been an editor for many years, said: "For me, the exploration of form is not the end itself. The sole purpose of the form is to make people more excited and interested. Therefore, I changed the form three times according to the requirements of the theme. "This film is contrary to the linear narrative method of traditional cinema. The interlaced stream of consciousness, symbolism, and the literary language of the "new novel" are organically integrated, which greatly expands the space of film language. The large section of the heart is alone, the prayer-style overlapping narration, the aria-style recitation, which is rare in ordinary films.
Poster for the French version of the film Hiroshima Love Hiroshima mon amour (1959).
Alan Renai uses the picture to express the subconscious activity of the human mind, forming the intersection of reality and memory in the film. The stream-of-consciousness narrative approach that intersects time and space at the same time achieves a perfect balance between vision and language.
"Love in Hiroshima" not only represents a love story, but also reflects the war. But the film's love story is not as sensational and easy to identify with traditional melodrama, but is somewhat mysterious. The film omits how the two met and fell in love, because in the eyes of the film's author, the love story itself is too ordinary, and it happens thousands of times a day. They embrace such ordinary and so habitual. But the point is that it takes place in Hiroshima, the world's most unimaginable city, ———, which produces a kind of "off-the-band sound".
The film refracts the war through Hiroshima from "her" point of view and Neville (a city in central France) in the memory. She said: "I always weep for the fate of Hiroshima. Paradoxically, however, they came to talk about Hiroshima from their hotel beds. Isn't it blasphemous for such a serious subject as war? In fact, this is precisely the author's intention: to abandon the method of depicting terror in horror, but to revive terror in the ashes and combine it with a special kind of love; to contrast the beautiful and naked body of love with the human body burned, deformed and corroded by atomic radiation. This combination of montages creates a strong contrast: the slaughter of the exterminated world and the tenacious struggle of life symbolized by love.
Understanding the film on another level, one can also see the theme of "forgetting" that it contains, and it can be said that it runs through the whole process.
At the beginning of "Love in Hiroshima", a man and a woman are entangled naked in bed. In this entanglement, the Hiroshima War Museum, the ruins of the atomic bomb explosion, and the severed arm stumps alternate. It's a shocking close-up of sex, two bodies slowly squirming, the skin reflecting a bright and changing coarse particle like beads of sweat, like lights, more like falling dust, at the same time, the woman's confused voice and the man's argument are transmitted in the form of monologues.
Then the hero and heroine have a strange, satirical dialogue, in which the woman says she sees everything about Hiroshima, while the man coldly repeats that she sees nothing in Hiroshima. The woman said she had developed such an illusion that she would never forget Hiroshima and said she knew what "forgetting" meant. The man also said she didn't know what "forgetting" meant.
The woman also argued: "I have a memory like you, and I know what it means to forget." The man still insisted, "No! You don't have a memory. At this point, the woman no longer insisted: "... Like you, I forgot..."
However, the author expounds another view of "forgetting": "forgetting" is inevitable and necessary. "Forgetting" means tolerance. When a French woman and a Japanese man have a brief love affair, it evokes memories of her painful first love. She was shocked to feel that her memory was indifferent, that she could forget such a deep love, and that this encounter with the Japanese was a manifestation of her forgetting her first love.
After incoherently confiding the story of her first love to the Japanese man at the café, she left him and returned to her room at the hotel.
Film Hiroshima Love Hiroshima mon amour (1959) British Blu-ray edition cover
She complained bitterly to herself (inner monologue): "You haven't completely passed away, and I told others our story that I was unfaithful to you in front of this stranger tonight." I told him our story. You see this is a story that can be told to others. It's been 14 years and I haven't tasted it again... The taste of unattainable love, since Neville, see how I am forgetting you... Look how I've forgotten about you..."
Time washes away memories. Man cannot live forever in the past, and only then can there be the beginning of a new life.
"Love in Hiroshima", as one of the characteristics of modern cinema, is its expression method. It is contrary to the linear representational method of traditional cinema, but brings the literary language of the "new novel", the interlaced stream of consciousness and symbolism of time and space into the film.
The film's language style is distinctly characteristic of the style of the author, Margaret Duras herself. Large sections of inner monologues, prayer-style overlapping sentences, and aria-style recitations are indeed rare in ordinary films. Alan Ray is an exploratory and innovative director who has mastered the perfect balance between vision and language, and uses pictures to express people's subconscious activities, forming a novel stream of consciousness technique that intersects time and space in the film.
In order to make the meaning of the work deep and subtle, the author uses many symbolic techniques.
Atomic dust and dewdrops of sweat on the opening screen symbolize human love struggling with death. Even the backdrop of the opening credits is symbolic; a thriving plant spreads out like a spider on a grain of sand. This is a symbol of the rest of Hiroshima's life.
This shot later appears in the cut-in newsreel shot of the female voice reciting. The use of this set of footage shots from the atomic bombings of August 6, 1945, was also transformed from realism to symbolism.
Ants and earthworms emerge from the ground, and the female voice recites, "The next day, some animals came out of the ashes, deep in the ground. ...... Also, on the 15th day, Hiroshima was full of flowers... Morning glory blooms in the morning and lilies bloom during the day emerge vibrantly from the ashes. Before that, I had never heard that flowers had such a great vitality..." This passage in the film is a direct quotation from the author's news report about Hiroshima at that time. But here, the author gives it a symbolic meaning.
Stills from the film Hiroshima Love Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Eiji Okada (right)
Because of these characteristics, coupled with the ability of two actors, Emma-Riva (1927-2017) and Eiji Okada (1920-1995), to accurately grasp the characters, making this film an innovative and classic in the history of cinema. In 1979, the French Academy of Cinematic Arts and Technology ranked the film as the 7th in the "Top Ten Best French Films".
Alan René never hid his love for traditional cinema, especially the silent film era of the 1930s. He has expressed this more than once, compared to his love of silent films, his interest in experimental films in the 1920s is hardly worth mentioning, and he is even willing to explain his "Love of Hiroshima" in this way: "Personally, I think I made a 'traditional style' film with a 30s style and used the editing experience I learned. ”
The film Hiroshima Mon amour (1959) american standard collection The Criterion Collection Blu-ray Edition cover