Hiroshima Mon Amour, Part 5

Fifth, memory is forgetting.  We must do justice to the past, to the horror of the catastrophe of Hiroshima, through remembering it.  We cannot forget Hiroshima.  But the horrible yet beautiful thing about Hiroshima, she remarks, is that Hiroshima will happen again.  Life returns to Hiroshima, reconstruction must take place.  The love lost in Hiroshima, for the sake of love, which must be remembered, must be forgotten.  Love requires both memory and forgetting.  It requires forgetting in its future and remembering in its past.  Love is only memory so long as life is eternal and the objects of love are infinite.  But outside this orbit, love cannot last, because it must end, and because it must be forgotten, so that memory again can occur.  We must forget in order that we are able to remember.  

Apart from the requirements of love, memory is forgetting insofar as it is a representation separated from the truth.  Memory is finite, limited, it is this memory or that memory.  Even the memories of films and language are not eternal and are not all-enveloping.  All of the technical means we have towards memory lose some part of experience and in this loss and substitution with the memory, we have forgotten part of the original experience. 

Hiroshima Mon Amour, Part 4

Fourth, “Hiroshima, mon amour” concerns the problem of anonymous memories.  Because memories are the remainders of our experience, the idea of an anonymous memory is counterintuitive.  How can what I experienced become anything other than mine?  Images are representations separated from the truth and from life.  Does not this separation imply an impersonality, if I am my experience, how can I be this memory which interrupts the continuity of experience?  What is more, if memories are bodies and she identifies with the bodies of these survivors of Hiroshima, these memories have a core, it is implied, which anyone can possess.  The image, the memory par excellence, calls anyone to possess this memory.  This memory belongs to no one.

The images she calls her own, of Hiroshima, negate the effect of the images of Nevers.  If Hiroshima is hers, then Nevers is also hers, as it is that of every survivor of Hiroshima—for example, him.  With such justification he assumes the role of her lost German lover, when she shares these memories with him.  But if Hiroshima is not hers, because it is merely images, reconstructed, than Nevers is not hers.  And we must becomes skeptical about the truthfulness of her memories.  She says, I lie and I tell the truth.  What reason would I have to lie to you?  She does not say, I am not lying to you.  We naively assumed, approaching the film that the title “Hiroshima, mon amour” refers to what she says to him.  But “Hiroshima, mon amour” means, my love, that is you, the viewer.   She is one women in 1000 women for him.  She is 1000 women in one for him.  He is both her present and her past and her future.  He is her Japanese lover and her dead German love.  

Hiroshima Mon Amour, Part 3

By now, the third problem of “Hiroshima, mon amour” should be obvious, namely, the timelessness of these memories.  Nevers and Hiroshima are memories which are invoked, we might presume, in the present narrative of two lovers about to be separated.  Nevers and Hiroshima are the past and the film unfolds in the present—the future foretells their separation.  But this film disrupts the order which time brings.  Typically, time is the condition of experience, what gives it the semblance of sense and reason.  But we see the future impinges upon the present,

as their separation makes their love tragic; the future makes the present an illusion.  Also, we see, when he becomes the lost German lover, that this loss leads to the possibility that he, in Hiroshima, can be her lover.  The present returns to the past and witnesses how the present nearly never was.  But only this future, this impossibility, allows him to return to her past with her, in the present.

She recalls the moment where she discovered the German lover’s body.  She laid on top of him until he died, until the difference between hers and his bodies disappeared.  She follows him into death, but her death is the death of the mind, madness which is consuming, she recalls, to the point where one understands.  Her madness is an eternity, she says.  She has fallen out of the flow of linear time, discarded in the cellar for the shame she caused.  As well, the time in which the film occurs, this 24 hours of filmic time (90 minutes of our own), is an interruption in the flow of both of their lives (as well as ours), it is a break in the continuity of experience.  It is an opportunity for them to transcend the conditions of their lives: their jobs, their separate marriages.  This is a memory which will have to be forgotten.

Hiroshima Mon Amour, Part 2

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. 

Hiroshima Mon Amour, Part 1

“Hiroshima, mon amour” begins with images of bodies and this visual metaphor will serve as an anchoring theme throughout.  These embracing bodies are slowly being covered with ash. They grow less and less discrete, almost indistinguishable as bodies.  The skin does not melt or burn with the accumulation of ashes; rather, ironically, it begins to sparkle, almost becoming beautiful.  These are the consequences of an atomic bomb, we must conclude; the return of radioactive embers to the earth.  Just as this image begins to sicken us, these bodies disappear and new, healthy bodies, presumably belonging to our nameless narrators, appear.   How burnt, scorched, scarred bodies can return to such health remains a mystery.  All we see is the movement from one image to the next.  

This visual metaphor envelopes the principal problems of “Hiroshima, mon amour”.  First and foremost, memory appears and returns through the body.  Second, all memories are affective; they are imbued with emotions or feelings and desire.  Third, memory has the peculiar quality of timelessness.  Memory is future and past and present and not in any particular order.  Fourth, memory is anonymous.  It belongs to no one, to 1000 women and to 1 woman.  Fifth, memory is forgetting.  

The first problem in “Hiroshima, mon amour”, that of the memory’s appearance or return through the body, we see in numerous dimensions.  The pain implied in the ash covered skin invokes the oldest form of memory, what Nietzsche says is how remembering was created in humans.  Humans remember what causes them pain, like all animals.  If that is so, there is much remembering in this film, as we are repeatedly treated to images of bodies deformed in numerous fashions.

Our female narrator—whom I will henceforth call “her” or “she”—claims these memories as her own.  She says that she saw them and that they are hers.  She claims these memories for herself.  They become her body—their affective dimensions—the pain they experience, is something she identifies with.  I say this emphasizing that bodies are not things but sites of affection and action, of emotion and feeling and desire.  Nothing says this more than the pain we see in these tortured bodies.  

But if affection and action are the signs of bodies, then our experience viewing the film is the production of a memory and a body.  We are implicated in her lie, her claim to have seen these events.  She had not lived them and so her lover says no.  This is not yours.  But she insists, acknowledging that this experience is derived from the museum in Hiroshima.  The audience is implicated in her lie: viewing these bodies is experiencing that torture, assuming those bodies, bearing that memory.  This artifice is uncovered when we see her on the scene of the shooting of a film.  This illusion is so perfect, she will say, because the memories are the event.  And those bodies are our bodies.