Cinema
Hiroshima mon amour
Alain Resnais · 1959
Synopsis
In Hiroshima, a French actress who has come to shoot a film about peace spends a night with a Japanese architect. During the thirty-six or so hours before her departure, they talk about the city and the bomb, and then, pressed by her lover, she tells him what she has never told anyone: in Nevers, under the Occupation, her first love for a German soldier, and what followed.
Context
The film was at first meant to be a short documentary on the atomic weapon; Resnais, who did not want to remake his film on the camps, proposed a fiction and entrusted the screenplay to Marguerite Duras. Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada play the two roles; the photography is by Sacha Vierny in France and Michio Takahashi in Japan. Kept out of the official selection at Cannes in 1959 so as not to offend the American government, it received the International Critics' Prize there.
Who it is for
A film of an hour and a half, carried by Duras's text spoken aloud, in which the past breaks in without warning in the middle of the present.
Prizes and reception
Duras was nominated for the Oscar for best original screenplay; the Criterion Collection has published it in a 4K restoration.
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