silver nitrate notes

Hiroshima mon amour and the Two Cameras

12 feb 2025

Alain Resnais (1922-2014) had made short documentaries (Night and Fog, 1956) before his first feature. The Japanese co-production that became Hiroshima mon amour (1959) was originally intended as another documentary, this one about the aftermath of the bomb. Resnais wrote to Marguerite Duras for a treatment. Duras returned him a screenplay about a French actress and a Japanese architect, meeting in Hiroshima in 1957, beginning a two-day affair, haunted respectively by the memory of a German lover during the occupation and the loss of family in the bombing. The documentary was not made. The Duras-Resnais film was.

Two cinematographers shot the film. Sacha Vierny (1919-2001) photographed the French scenes and the contemporary Hiroshima. Takahashi Michio photographed the Japanese archival and reconstruction sequences. What Resnais does with the two cinematographers, editing across their work without marking the transitions, is build a film whose visual register cannot be pinned to one place.

The famous opening sequence, intercutting the actress's and architect's bodies in a hotel bed with archival footage of Hiroshima victims, is Resnais's first experiment with a kind of editing he would spend his career refining. Bodies in an embrace, dissolved through ash. Hands on skin, dissolved through the melted skin of atomic-burn photographs. The argument is not analogy. The argument is that a sensual present and a catastrophic past can be photographed using the same grammar of skin and light, and that the audience is required to sit with that photography until it means something.

Vierny would go on to photograph most of Resnais's later features, including Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and to become one of the defining cinematographers of the Left Bank wing of the New Wave. In Hiroshima mon amour his work is, formally, the opposite of what Decaë was doing for Truffaut at the same time on The 400 Blows. Decaë was photographing the street from a handheld car. Vierny was photographing two people in a hotel room at a distance of about six feet, mostly in available fluorescent light, with a fixed camera. The New Wave, at its beginning, had two registers: Decaë's mobile documentary and Vierny's formal interior.

The dialogue, written by Duras, is sometimes more novel than screenplay. Sentences begin and do not end. Two characters speak in a register that is neither French nor Japanese nor quite conversational. Much of the text is the actress repeating phrases to the architect, who repeats them back. The repetitions mean different things as the film proceeds. By the last reel, when she calls him Hiroshima and he calls her Nevers (her hometown), they have become the cities they are from, because cities are the only containers large enough to hold what they are each trying to say.

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sources
[1] Wilson, Emma. Alain Resnais. Manchester UP, 2006.
[2] Kline, T. Jefferson. Screening the Text: Intertextuality in New Wave French Cinema. Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.
[3] Duras, Marguerite. Hiroshima mon amour, trans. Richard Seaver. Grove, 1961.
[4] Monaco, James. Alain Resnais. Oxford UP, 1979.