Drama film: Hiroshima mon amour

Résumé du document

Ode to love and requiem for war, the incantatory threnody of Hiroshima mon amour lulls the senses and the spirit of the spectator grabbed by the literary and cinematographic poesy fruit of the collaboration between the writer Marguerite Duras and the cineaste Alain Resnais. Rewarded for its release by the Prix International de la Critique during the Festival de Cannes as well as the Prix Méliès, the masterpiece has not always been judged for its true worth since the commentators have often restricted their interpretation to the intrigue of love. We will proceed to a filmic analysis in which we will point out the veritable themes of the movie (1.) before effectuating a cinematographic analysis in which we will expose the different techniques used to accentuate the play of contrasts that shows beneath the entire work (2.). Eventually, we will work on a theoretical analysis in which we will collate the various texts discussed during the course to complement the books and articles that deal with the same dialectic between memory and oblivion (3.).

Extraits

[...] The man slaps her face in order to interrupt the instant of coexistence of two incommensurable universes and times where Nevers vampirizes Hiroshima. All the special effects work towards an extraordinary aesthetical finition typical of the Nouvelle Vague genre, which does not exclude a philosophical dimension in the movie Theoretical analysis The projet of Hiroshima mon amour comes from the request that has been adressed in 1957 to Alain Resnais of effectuating a documentary about the dropping of the atomic bomb at the end of World War II. [...]

[...] On the surface, the plot is straightforwardly centred on a highly referential doomed affair between a French actress and a Japanese architect set against the backdrop of the eponymous city. Their chance encounter takes place in a café on her penultimate night in Hiroshima. Although they are both enjoy a happy conjugal situation, their relationship goes beyond a simple physical attraction in the sense that they establish an overwhelming passionate complicity that occurs merely infrequently when two individuals have the opportunity to mesh into a unified whole. [...]

[...] - René PREDAL, L'itinéraire d'Alain Resnais, Paris: Lettres Modernes p About memory - Henri BERGSON, Matière et mémoire: essai sur la relation du corps à l'esprit, Geneva: Skira p. - Sigmud FREUD, Introduction à la psychanalyse, Paris: Payod p. - Pierre NORA, Les lieux de mémoire, t and Paris: Gallimard p. - Paul RICOEUR, La mémoire, l'histoire et l'oubli, Paris: Seuil p Articles - Michael S. ROTH, Freud's use and abuse of the past in The ironist's cage: memory, trauma and the contruction of History, p. 1-23 and 186-200 - Michael S. [...]

[...] The insertion of newsreel footage into the fiction imparts a certain aura of realism to the movie and thereby endows it to some extent with an intellectual credibility. The extreme discrepancy between the erotic atmosphere in which the lovers are coiled and the agonized climate in which the victim are dying reflects the ephemeral nature of existence. The abruptness of the visual discontinuity is intensified by the impression of slowness communicated by the alternating scenes: on the one hand, the languor and lasciviousness of the interlaced bodies; on the other hand, the feebleness and apathy of the charred corpses. [...]

[...] The thematic concentrates on their bodies since it derives towards other tunes as soon as the camera centres on their faces. The theme thereafter appears again several times with musical modulations that measure the degree of evoked or lived plenitude. The theme is a positive phrasing interpreted in a particularly lyric manner since the arpeggios are held. It can be heard the first time during the prologue with the shots on the Ota estuary. It comes again on the morrow of their first love night with the river on background of the scene. [...]