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Salient: Victoria University Students' Newspaper. Vol. 24, No. 9. 1961

Hiroshima Mon Amour

Hiroshima Mon Amour

Hiroshima mon Amour, the first feature film of the brilliant young French director, Alain Resnais, has of late, been the direct cause of much heated controversy in cinema circles. Now that the film has been publicly screened in Wellington, an appraisal of it is given below, by Murray White.

There has never been a movie, about which so much arrant, crapulent thesis has been written and allowed to pass unchecked, the likes of Hiroshima mon Amour. To date, there have been few brave dissenters from the chorus of acclamation; nobody has yet stopped for a sufficient time to reappreciate the value of this movie—its place in the format of the art, its merits and demerits. When it first appeared last year, it created an uproar; quite frankly, there wasn't a platitude or effective adjective left in the dictionary that hadn't been equated, by someone, with the film. In fact, so much esoteric, nonsensical rubbish, ranging in ignorance of presentation from the extremely existentialist to the fawning parrot viewpoints, has appeared (cf. Sight and Sound and the New Zealand Listener), one wonders whether the object in point is, actually a film, or some moral message wrapped in celluloid, addressed to the world, from God: in point of fact it is wholly neither, but a shallow compromise. I am confident in the proposition that Hiroshima has been unduly praised because blind dedication caused through an imbalance of ignorance over reason, has been permitted to go unquestioned and unexamined.

This sort of fraternal adoption into the fold is nothing new; when the original avant-garde film makers began work immediately after the first World War, churning out such spurious creations as Man Ray's Le Ratour a la Raison for the dadaist club, Cavalcanti's Rien que les Heures for the impressionists and Bunuel's and Dali's Un Chien Andalou for the surrealists, they were accepted as memorable tomes, a bras ouverts, possessing a deep significance. Resnais himself, is the product of a post-War renaissance in French art and intellectualism, and may be considered complementary to his dejected, rebellious, predecessors. H has attempted some dozen films and a feu remarkable shorts, of which Van Gogh is perhaps the best known. His Nuit et Brouiliard was accepted as "surrealistic and cosmic" (?) and indeed, foreruns much of what is in Hiroshima. With this latter film however, he has become world famous, and I must return to the examination of the film proper.

I have stated my assurance that in Hiroshima's case, praise for ignorance' sake, has relegated the film to its present position. I incline to this attitude for a number of reasons: firstly, it is not an easy film to understand; its theme, originality in editing style, and overall abstruse conception makes it immensely difficult to follow and equate with known standards. It is furthermore, the initiator of a cult of cinema that has become known as "nouvelle varge"; a meaningless term that has caught on, and become synonymous with singularity of approach, a contemporaneous understanding of human problems, and, consequently, esotericism, which has resulted in appeal (an almost photo-tropic appeal for the myopic intellectual set). A third point in this issue, is that what Resnais has achieved in the eyes of so many, results not from any embellishment of his own peculiar talents and experience, but rather, from a curious admixture of script, music, editing. direction and morality; the diffuseness of which has marred the film terribly. It is not so much a case of whether the film is of brilliant craftsmanship and insight: the point in question rests on understanding; does the movie have fluidity, is it comprehensible, then, is it sincere?

The script, written by Marguerite Duras, was intended as a novel. Resnais explained this as: desiring a model screenplay in which only theme and idea were to be considered; camera, construction of scenes and characterisation to be ignored at this stage. Hence one sees the tragedy—a script of poetic inspiration, but of remarkable incongruity to the visual pattern. In places, banality tends to cover beauty with obscurity. A case in point being in the opening sequence, where, to the girl's querulous plea that she appreciates the horrors that were Hiroshima, the man persistently reiterates with: Non, tu n'as rien vu a Hiroshima, rien. Relevant? Up to a stage; but pushing the same line (as Mme. Duras does, again in the film) clouds rather than obverts the double-sided issue, Resnais is raising.

The editing may be olamed responsible for the film's disgusting lack of cohesion and orderliness. Resnais has not been successful in his use of "past-present relativity"; the cross-cutting is imaginative, quite original but never, really convincing. Once married to the script of course, matters of translation become impossible. I did not see the relevance of the opening sequence; in which Resnais has shown some of the grimmer aspects of human existence. Is he trying to counter-play this against tne cross-cultural love theme? If so, it is an unsuccessful attempt at presenting conflicts of ideal and genuine, love and hate. He fails short too, in this realistic approach to a theme of ideal love in a state of constant conflict—his approach is too superficial, and far too ephemeral for the film's perennial topicality. I should say this was the result of misunderstanding of thematic interpretation by script-writer, editors and director.

Having no intention to discourse into the plot outline, or issues of morality involved in the film, I will stop here. I should be quite content to accept the film as a startling new innovation in cinematic technique: but I would go no further. It is not deserving of the praise bestowed so unconvincingly upon it; but it does not stand de trap, as regards inventiveness and experimentation in the cinema. Rather, Hiroshima mon Amour has heralded a new wave, but it is in the valley of the wave of contemporary approach that it lies—it appears certain to have spawned other films of similar design; which may, unlike this, eventually ride the crest.