coffee-and-cigarette films

A personal loss of identity is the most desirable experience one can know.

- Marguerite Duras, discussing the theme of much of her fiction

At the end of the film it is as though, through them, all of Hiroshima is in love with all of Nevers, [and pre-existing differences of nation, race, history, and philosophy are] put into question by universal factors of eroticism, love and unhappiness.

- Marguerite Duras

[In Hiroshima, Mon Amour] There is a similarity between the personal and the larger social tragedies, but they are not congruent. Ultimately the couple can identify on a personal level, but the larger social barriers are insurmountable.

- Alan Casty, Santa Monica City College

Of course the French New Wave is not new anymore, and tastes change. Students may find that the the semi-verite flavor of the camera work, the use of montage (the films often being composed by auteur directors in the editing room), black and white, a measured (slow) pace, and lots of talking are more suited for pensively smoking Gitanes and drinking thick cups of coffee than the fist-of-popcorn-with-32-ounce-Coke movies of the 21st century.

It's not Schwarzenegger.

But the script that Marguerite Duras wrote in 1958 for director Alain Renais launched one of the most widely-praised films of all time. One reviewer called it "a thousand films in one." If there is little action, there is certainly no absence of thought in the movie: it's a love story, certainly; it's an anti-war protest that serves as an elegy for the victims of the bombing of Hiroshima, and it's "a grim picture of how everyday human relationships--even inside the same community--are deformed and made vicious by war" (Mack).

This week's discussion questions cover a lot of ground (the quotations at the beginning of this page should give you some useful ideas).

I'll just look closely at the movie's opening shot.

The film opens with an extreme close-up of shimmering skin (though it's not immediately apparent that it is skin). The screenplay describes

[As the film opens, two pair of bare shoulders appear, little by little. All we see are these shoulders--cut off from the body at the height of the head and hips--in an embrace, and as if drenched with ashes, rain, dew, or sweat, whichever is preferred. The main thing is that we get the feeling that this dew, this perspiration, has been deposited by the atomic "mushroom" as it moves away and evaporates.] (2505)

The "whichever is preferred" charges the viewer with interpreting what he/she sees. It's ambiguous, open to interpretation. The tight focus and closeness of the image are out of context for the viewer. We look for some clues to help us understand what we're seeing. The voices describe some of the horrors of the bombing of Hiroshima at the end of WWII. There are images of hospital corridors and evidence of the bomb blast pictured at the Peace Museum, newsreel clips showing the aftermath, the devastation.

Meanwhile, SHE says, "I think looking closely at things is something that has to be learned" (2512). SHE says she's seen everything; HE argues she's seen nothing. Perhaps they're both right. Like so much modern fiction this film is, on one level, looking beneath the surface of things, discovering implications, making connections, filtering information through individual consciousnesses (points of view) and conscience (belief). And once again the koinos kosmos (common view) is at odds with the idios kosmos (individual view).

As the camera pulls back we see the image of lovers, not radiated corpses. But the connection, the love/death, is already established in our minds. The love affair is shaped by the events of WWII in some way that we must discover along with SHE and HE.

HE discovers that SHE does indeed see; she shares his survivor's guilt, shares his sense of betrayal and despair. Her story of her love for the German soldier (with whom she identifies; eventually she will confuse the architect for that same German soldier) parallels the love of HE/SHE and is doomed for the same reasons.

It's a story of looking closely and even understanding what divides us, what has programmed us; at the same time, it suggests that the programming is so wedded to our being, that it's near-impossible to overcome it.

The camera moves; we have more information; death is replaced with erotic love. Still, the collision of images of devastation hang before our eyes. The lovers move through the film in a sort of dance, circling but never quite touching one another; the city (like the little Japanese woman near the movie's end) watches them and separates them. Hi-ro-shi-ma and Ne-vers-in-France (the larger communities) keep HE and SHE (the individuals) from ever joining one another.

Uzumaki (and not Rashoman)

Uzumaki, literally spiral or vortex, is a horror manga made into a very strange film (worth seeing). Naruto Uzumaki (the long-running shonen star) means "spiral fish cake"--a reference to those white-and-pink swirly garnishes often found on ramen dishes.

In 1951 Akira Kurosawa's Rashoman (1950) won the Golden Lion Grand Prix, a 1952 honorary Academy Award, and the 1952 Best Foreign Film Golden Globe award. The title means "ruined castle gate," and this is the title of a different Akutagawa short story. Kurosawa used the setting from that second story, but the plot and characters are taken from "In a Grove."

If this all seems a bit confusing and dis-jointed, well, that's the point. Western fiction is often described as following a linear path; the Aristotelean plot diagram shows a line that rises to a climax and then continues to the denouement (the tying up of loose ends). Japanese fiction is sometimes said to follow a spiral path, circling the main story element trying to get closer and closer to the meaning or central truth. Akutagawa's "In a Grove" presents just such a spiral. At the center is the one clear fact--the samurai is dead. But whodunnit?

As though we were witnessing a trial, we are introduced to several testimonies. The relative worth of each is variable (what use, for instance, is the surely-biased testimony of the wife's mother who was nowhere near the scene?).

Evidence from the three principles--the brigand, the wife, the samurai (whose spirit speaks through a medium; by the way, this is a convention in Asian literature, and there is no guarantee that spirits speak the truth)--seems especially relevant, but the details are so different from each witness that the truth recedes with each new version of the killing. And it just gets worse. While in Western literature it is conventional to point blame away from oneself, each of these three confesses to the killing--the brigand says it was the result of a fair fight; the wife says she stabbed her husband as he was tied to a tree; the samurai says he committed seppuku (ritual suicide).

How can we get at the truth?

Literary critic Beverly Whitaker Long suggested there are four kinds of statements that can be make about literary texts: 1) certainties (things that clearly happen in the text), 2) probabilities (things clearly implied though not directly stated), 3) possibilities (a viable alternative among several alternatives all of which are hard to prove), 4) distortions (things that have nothing to do with the text). As you dance around the central fact of this story (the samurai is dead), you may wonder what exactly you can know.

Maybe that is what it all means, that confusion as you circle around but never quite reach the truth just might be the point. At the very least, it might give you pause when you think about what passes for evidence in a real courtroom.

Note: anecdotal evidence is generally considered the least scientific, least reliable kind of evidence.