HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR.

Japan/France, 1959, 88 minutes, Black and white.
Emmanuelle Riva, Eija Okada, Stella Dassas, Pierre Larboud, Bernard Fresson.
Directed by Alain Resnais.

Hiroshima Mon Amour was the first film directed by Alain Resnais. He had previously made a number of celebrated short films, especially Night and Fog with its trenchant look at the experience of the concentration camps and its implicit critiicism of Nazi Germany. A criticism as well as sympathy for the Japanese is evident in this first feature film.

Proposed as a French-Japanese? co-production, playwright and screen-writer Marguerite Duras took a Japanese man and a French woman as symbols of East and West, allies and enemies, men and women and showed in their interaction a parable of the experience of the 20th century. The background of Japanese aggression as well as their victimisation by the dropping of the atomic bomb is crucial. So also is Japan's experience of materialism - a theme very common in Japanese films of the 50s. Resnais was to work on the use of time and memory with various time shifts and the interplay of reality and the imagination in most of his films. After this feature, the most celebrated was his Last Year at Marienbad (1962). A more recent film of Resnais is the look at France in the 30s, Stavisky. Hiroshima Mon Amour was a celebrated film of its time and a piece of sophisticated film-making that has influenced later generations of film-makers but still stands well in its own right.

1. The impact of the film and its themes of love, war, human nature, diversity of cultures, intercommunication of man and woman, cultures?

2. Black and white photography, the contrast of location photography for France and Japan? The various moods of the score and its contribution?

3. The treatment of time? The importance of memory, dreams? Being taught 'the art of seeing'? The way the film put past and future in a particular present? The interrelationship of memory and imagination and anticipation? How are they held within present experience? The visual equivalents of this moving through time?

4. The significance of the prologue: the framework of the love-making, two persons in communication? The earthiness of this opening? The revelation that the woman was French, the man Japanese, the location Hiroshima? The focus on their particular careers as architect and film star? The one-night relationship and what it was building up to? Within this encounter with its short background, intimacy, communication about cultures, about the war, about the destruction of Hiroshima and its rebuilding? The interpretation of the woman and the contradictions of the man? The significance of the tone of voice of the comments of man and woman within this love-making? Spoken aloud, interiorly, a verbal equivalent of interior communication? The remarks about seeing and not seeing? The woman and her comment on the past, on the museums, the newsreels? The way that these were visualised and the documentary film, the people in the museums? Yet the importance of time and change after a decade or more? The rebuilding of Hiroshima, progress and materialism? The questions of ill health and the fact that people in Hiroshima could live -although so many were mutilated? A new birth for Hiroshima and the possibility of forgetting the past? Or should it be forgotten?

5. The significance of Hiroshima as the setting? Modern post-war Hiroshima, indistinguishable from so many other cities, the Americanised style, an international city? Yet a deformed city? The discussion of the effects of the bombing of the city, on the people, on the Japanese memory, on the memory of the enemies?

6. The actress was making a film of peace in Hiroshima. Was this film itself a film of peace? An anti-war and anti-bomb film? The sequences of the film as shown, the protest march? Did they correspond to the mood of this film?

7. How well did the film establish the facts about the particular characters, their encounter, decision to spend the night together? The repercussions for each? The film-making and our seeing this? Their discussions, the architect's coming to the set, his proposal for a longer encounter, his pursuit of the woman?

8. The significance of their places of origin, their names? The woman as focused on Nevers, the man being Hiroshima? The final comments about their names with all that this implied about what had been said of each city? The focus of the title?

9. The film's presentation of tenderness between man and woman, especially the bedroom scenes, the next morning, shower and dressing? The encounter on the film set? The growing tension as the woman fled, the man pursued? His desperation and earnestness within his tenderness?

10. The importance of talking in this film - as self-revelation? The background of each character, age, experience, sadness? The focus on the woman and her memories of Nevers - real and fantasy? Her mother, the German lover, the war situation, her hair being cut, being in the cellar, her madness, screaming, yet living again? The significance of her experience and its memory? Her forgetting the German lover and the fear that she would for get the Japanese love? How much forgetting is in surviving?

11. How heartfelt was her experience of love within Hiroshima? Her wandering the town after speaking about herself, the pursuit of the architect? The various experiences in the night - the Japanese speaking in English at the restaurant, the old lady at the station etc.?

12. The theme of forgetting, what happens to people if they forget? To what purpose have events happened and people been encountered if there is forgetting? The pain of forgetting, the fear of forgetting?

13. How dramatic and perceptive an analysis of war, love? The analogy between the experience of the war and its devastation, rebuilding and forgetting? Love and the possibility of forgetting an intense experience? People changing?

14. The end of the film, how well did we know each of the characters, themselves and their age, experience, what they were doing during the war, when the atomic bomb was dropped? Their two names summing this up?

15. The technical ability in presenting time shifts, image shifts? And the metaphors for mutual comment?

16. The. understanding of a man and a woman? The woman's comment that the Japanese was good for her and he would destroy her? Themes of love, complementarity, cross-cultural and interracial communication? A film about peace?