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N Hiroshima Mon Amour art and avant-garde cinema’s abiding fascination with memory expresses itself through relatively immobile camerawork, lengthy, photograph-like shots, and brief flashback sequences evocative of involuntary memory. As mentioned, here real photographic evidence and footage from the atomic bomb are interspersed with a fictive, personal discourse, and in her edited volume from 2010 Susannah Radstone explains that: Hiroshima Mon Amour also talks of the fear of forgetting yet the simultaneous impossibility of forgetting individual and national traumas. This cinematic tour de force has captivated viewers and critics alike who have written extensively on a film that explores the abstract landscape of individual and collective memory and identity (thematically, the film shares commonalities with the also historically concerned Night and Fog (1955), Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and Muriel, or The Time of Return, from 1963). Resnais’ positively acclaimed French New Wave film (first shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959 and also nominated for an Oscar that year) effectively and purposefully interweaves real documentary footage of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August, 1945, with images of Post-war Hiroshima and two lovers’ narrated recollections of war that serve to humanize the filmic text. The paper highlights the fluid relationship between the protagonists and their environment, as well as the semi-documentary aspects of a film that establishes an effective dialogue between past and present. In doing so, he unveils the many layers of historical unease that dwell behind Hiroshima’s currently peaceful condition.
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In a film partly dealing with the traumas of the 1945 atomic bomb and its aftermath, Resnais visually and narratively juxtaposes wartime Hiroshima and the city twelve years after the event: as stated in Duras’ original filmscript, “he time is summer, 1957-August-at Hiroshima” (8). Discourses on memory and forgetting, individual and collective memory will also frame a filmic analysis where Paul Ricoeur is given particular theoretical attention. This, in Bruno’s words helps create an affective “map of love” (243) or a “body-city on a tender map” (242). With partial reference to Giuliana Bruno’s views on imaginary cities and urban cartography, the screened urban space will here be read as an emotive map in which the individual love story between the protagonists unfolds against the backdrop of their almost equally intimate relationship with the historically abused city of Hiroshima. The film is based on Marguerite Duras’ script from 1958 and remains faithful to this original text. The focus of this article is Alain Resnais’ representation of collective and individual memory and identity in Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). Memory and Identity in the Emotive Map of Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)