The second half of the film relieves us of these troubling reflections and engorges our ludic desires for a narrative in which we can forget ourselves (but now we have simply become the body which is the film). In the second part of the film we see her recall her “own” memories, memories of love and madness and as such invokes the second of the five problems which “Hiroshima, mon amour” suffers: namely, that all images or bodies or memories are accompanied by emotions, by feelings, and by desire.
Her memories of Nevers, the other site of “Hiroshima, mon amour”, are troubled memories of youth. She fell in love, a young French girl, during the war, with a German soldier. This is an impossible love. These images return to her and bring anger and frustration, bitter sadness. She cannot recall these images without emotion. The image itself is her desire for a past which is lost. The image, by its very nature, invokes desire, because it is loss itself. The illusion feigning the real. But these desires and these emotions are real because they hurt. He becomes her lost lover and accompanies her through these memories; he shares her pain in this loss, just as he lost her when he died, just like he will lose her when she leaves.
But if the image, the memory, is loss or lack and is then desire, this puts the images from the beginning of the film in a different light. How do we experience horror? Do we recoil from horror or does horror reveal a yearning in us? She must sate the necessity of remembering Hiroshima, but is this necessity an ethical obligation—what we might presume—or is it because her love demands it of her? He is her Hiroshima.
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