广岛之恋

在写雷乃论文的同时又一次打开了这部电影：在一年半前第一次看《广岛之恋》的时候，我带着困惑、好奇反复揣摩。虽然也并没有看懂个所以然，但是却被杜拉斯和雷乃所共同创造的广岛深深吸引。

Tu me plais. Quel événement. Tu me plais. Quelle lenteur tout à coup. Quelle douceur. Tu ne peux pas savoir. Tu me tues. Tu me fais du bien. (I like you. How unlikely. I like you. How slowly all of a sudden. How sweet. You do not know. You destroy me. You are so good for me.)

直到今天我才彻彻底底地了解到《广岛之恋》是那样的独特。女人的独白伴随着摇晃的镜头穿越广岛，而我们也跟随着在镜头中寻找丢失的记忆。对于电影中的男人和女人来说，记忆从来就不只是个人的。如德勒兹曾分析道：“对于这两个人来说，编织在一起的记忆未曾不是一种忘却记忆的方式。记忆仿佛已经脱离了个人而流动在一个属于’世界’的空间内。”电影中的广岛即是属于男人的广岛，也是属于女人的讷韦尔小镇，亦可称的上是属于我们任何人的印象中的城市。

穿越广岛，我们惊讶于它闪耀的霓虹灯、高耸的电塔、甚至还放着《卡萨布兰卡》的电影院 — 战后迅速的重建将记忆、历史与伤痛推到博物馆内。镜头移动下的博物馆展品显得那样平淡无奇：

”Quatre fois au musée à Hiroshima. (Four times at the musuem in Hiroshima.)”

女人四次造访广岛的和平纪念馆，却仍是一个“局外人”：她只能在跟着大巴车、听着导游的讲解浏览广岛，仿佛日本将它的过去锁在了这座博物馆，而女人只有在博物馆内才得以一瞥日本“自我审查”过后的记忆。“纪念博物馆”讽刺般地成为了“反纪念博物馆”。正如雷乃在自己1956年的纪录片《夜与雾》中说道：

“no description, no picture can restore their true dimension: endless fear.”

但是当镜头穿过狭小、肮脏的菜场街道时，女人却在这个时候感受到了真正的爱情、一种与城市融为一体的感觉：仿佛摇晃的镜头本身正颤动着宏伟的雕像、权威的博物馆和不朽的遗迹。如果说博物馆象征着官方审查过后的记忆合集，那镜头穿越过的、那流动的风景才是城市真正的记忆所在。我们在行走在城市的过程中，即发现了官方、公开的记忆，也在探寻着那些极为私人的记忆，那些隐藏在一个个小店铺招牌背后的情感。而这些才是城市真正的血肉所在。女人穿越着街道并说道“城市是为爱情量身定制”。只有在这个时刻，她才真正发现城市的情感正蕴藏在自己走过一块块砖瓦下。

直到今天，人们在提到“文学性电影”“左岸派”“意识流”等等词汇的时候，都会无数次的提到阿伦·雷乃与大半个世纪之前拍摄的《广岛之恋》。本片无论从当时还是现在的角度，都是极其先锋的作品

《广岛之恋》讲了一个简单的故事:一个法国女演员和日本建筑师在广岛短暂邂逅并分离，镜头忠实的记叙下了这短短一天之中的事情，并且在片头插入了对广岛的纪实性摄影，在男女主人公一起吃饭的地方加入女主的回忆。这个看似简单的故事，其实承载之着阿伦·雷乃对于许多问题的阐述与思考

战争与和平

许多人第一次观看《广岛之恋》时，会认为这是一部为广岛乃至为日军侵略洗白的电影(比如在b站评论区就有人认为这是一部白左性质的小资电影)。但是当我们深入其间，就会发现阿伦雷乃的本意。

在影片开头，导演就使用了一个具有象征性的镜头:灰尘落到了男女赤裸的肌肤上。这个“灰尘”无疑代指了原子弹爆炸后的辐射尘，在这一幕里辐射尘犹如天降的死亡，为爱情也为生命蒙上了阴影。

接下来对广岛的纪实性影像可谓是触目惊心，它在控诉着战争，控诉着战争的伤害。同时也赞扬生命，战后第一天从土里爬出来的虫子，有三条腿却仍在废墟里奔跑的狗，承受疾病却顽强活着的人们，畸形的婴儿……这些“第一天，第三天，第十五天”的末世场景。阿伦·雷乃用这证明，无论现实如何凄惨，生命始终延续。

导演在本段已经清晰的表达了自己的观点:战争是可怖的，而从苦难中生存下来的生命是伟大的。

在电影中段，又出现了反原子弹的游行，注意这里的标语不止在为广岛申冤，也是在对西方国家大量制造原子弹的反对。质疑本片政治立场的人到此就可以闭嘴了。

在雷乃的其他作品，比如《莫里埃尔》中，也反映了导演的反战倾向。莫里埃尔是在阿尔及利亚战争中被法国士兵蹂躏至死的女孩，导演却顶着舆论的压力 ，讲战争受害者的名字作为作品的名字，这还不能体现雷乃的政治立场吗？

回忆与遗忘

记忆，一向是阿伦·雷乃作品的主题，在《去年在马里昂巴德》中，男女主在一起回忆已经模糊的过去，《莫里埃尔》中，海伦一直遭受着回忆中爱情微小细节的折磨。但是《广岛之恋》中的记忆是酷烈的，是浓重的，是带有伤害性的。

片头女主回忆广岛的情景时，反复地重复“我看到了”“我记住了”，，而男主数次否认她的话，这里是二人在争夺关于广岛的回忆，女主是思想意义上的侵略者(这一点在后文也会提到)。记忆，是人的武器，是侵略的一种手段。只能说雷乃是天才，他将记忆如同烙铁般让人痛苦的感觉体现了出来

二人在江边吃饭时，女主回忆起自己的初恋，她爱上了一个德国军人。她夹在自己的爱与对法西斯的恨中，既想记住，又想忘却，这也是她在过去发疯的原因，她困在曾经的疯狂与现在的热恋中，无法逃脱。

《广岛之恋》也是一部女性主义经典，它解构女性的爱情与思想，那个同时自由又受困的法国女人，同时迷惘又清醒的女演员，都是鲜活的立体的。导演身为男性，在描述女性上也可以说是无比精准，也带有对女性的同情与关系。最后挣脱出囚笼的女人，也是导演的美好祝愿

《广岛之恋》是一部梦片，观影过程犹如进入一场封尘以久的梦境，雷乃通过他高超的剪辑技巧，往返于记忆与现实之间。攀登于大师编制的时间楼梯上，一边追溯，一边再造。看着记忆是如何运作的，如何影像人的心理与行动

广岛是一座伤城，承载着痛苦与悲伤，一座连市民自己都试图忘却和城市。一座想忘记的城与一对想忘记的人，城市与人紧密的联系在一起。作者选择广岛作为叙事地点的作用又一次显现出来。

土地与人

刚刚提到了一点选择广岛作为叙事地点的好处，但是没有完全回答“为什么选择广岛，要叫广岛之恋”的原因。

广岛是男主，内维尔是女主。地缘是横亘与二人之间的永恒的屏障，地图上二者相距甚远，心理上二者无法交流，而作为两个地点象征的主人公，也只能越行越远。地域的间隔是永恒的间隔，内维尔是个人的苦难，广岛是集体的悲哀，其伤感于无声处已经弥漫了整部电影，注定了分离的结局。

别忘了，女主的初恋是德国士兵!在内维尔，德军是侵略者，而法国是被战胜国。而女主现在所在的广岛，原本是侵略者，现在却是伤害累累的破败城市。

女主在广岛是“入侵者”，她用眼睛，用心灵，用记忆，入侵了广岛的现在。她的初恋是人物与国家的双重入侵，而现在她又对广岛如法炮制。女主既是入侵者，又是被入侵者。雷乃应用这种身份的反差，来营造“对倒感”和“荒谬感”，让其成为本片的基调，让人不自觉的陷入其中

所有名字里带有地名的电影，都可以说与地点分不开:《游览意大利》通过夫妇二人对于意大利风景的观看，引出对婚姻乃至战后社会状态的思考；《德州巴黎》是误导观众，德州，巴黎看似相距甚远，实际上就在其间，可以说是对人物关系的又一次比喻；《我是古巴》，本事就是对于古巴革命的记叙……《广岛之恋》则登峰造极，将地缘与人的关系推上了更高的境界，不止是心理上的，还是一种水乳交融的依存

男主是广岛，在沉默里，在苦难中，在孤独里，也在女主感官的侵蚀的下。女主说自己是内维尔，是再也回不去的，是曾被占领的，是记忆中无数次回顾的，是迷惘的，也是必将清醒的。

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综上所述，广岛之恋是一部几乎于完美的影像作品，应当放到博物馆中被永恒珍藏。

其内部思想的深度和广度，对人情感思维的解剖，都可以说是影像的巅峰。阿伦雷乃是第一个将每一秒都讲到如此美丽的人

选这部1959年的《广岛之恋》确实让我看见了很多，由名字来判断，我一直认为是香港的电影，毕竟莫文蔚那首广岛之恋不管隔了多久还是经典，我这个年纪的人都知道，我会知道广岛之恋也是因为我母亲她喜欢在车上放这首歌。不过这两个独立的作品不是完全没有交集，广岛之恋的词曲者张洪量正是看了亚伦·雷奈的《广岛之恋》才创作出这首相差20年的作品。 也是这部作品，让我一下看到了很多不了解的词汇。 有人说这部电影是法国新浪潮的主要催化剂，那法国新浪潮是什么呢？ 法国新浪潮是影评人对于1950年代末至1960年代的一些法国导演团体所给予的称呼，他们主要受到意大利新写实主义与古典好莱坞电影的影响。法国新浪潮的特色在于，导演不只主导电影，更成为电影的作者和创作人。风格特色包括快速切换场景镜头等创新剪接手法，或是像 “跳接” ，在整体叙事上制造突兀不连贯效果。 简单来说：导演要身兼编剧，画面常有快速切换场景，整理叙事不连贯。 我第一次看，真的什么也没看明白，毕竟不是我们所常接触的叙事类型，我印象中唯一看过的黑白电影是奥黛丽赫本的《窈窕淑女》，《窈窕淑女》的叙事方法也是偏现代主流，所以我当时看也看得很入迷。 电影一开始就是一对隐隐约约的躯体，后来可以看到他们的身体上被一层泥还是什么东西包覆住了，还有闪闪发亮的金粉撒在他们身上，非常隐晦的表现，我甚至都看不出来到底是什么人。不过我猜想，那应该不是男女主角，而是广岛受难的人们。 亚伦·雷奈在广岛原子弹爆炸后，隔了十年拍了一部《广岛之恋》，之后这个作品也在影展轰炸了整个影坛，在仅隔十年就勇于拍这个题材，仇恨仅隔十年不会被遗忘，而身为二战同盟国的法国导演却拍下了广岛的疮痍。 而电影几乎花了十几分钟，从男女角的对话中，带到了开满悲惨之花的广岛，他们战争后重建的博物馆，和他们因为战争而畸形的儿童与成人。 现在很多的主流电影也会以这种方式来交代背景，以过去的历史资料以及 视频 来交代时空背景，多半都是用火箭发射或者国家领导人发言等画面，不过这些都不及《广岛之恋》来的触目惊心。 这部电影的对白不是一般的多，它不出现空泛而无意义的台词，它恰好的如法国新浪潮所追求的那样，如文学般深远的对白。 我觉得整部电影都很讽刺，从男女主角的身分上来看，女主角是法国人，是当时二战同盟国的国家；男主角是日本人，是当时轴心国的国家。且两人都已结婚，正常来说是对立的关系，毕竟日本才在十年前遭受原子弹攻击，多少对西方国家的人仇恨，而身为日本人的男主角若跟西方国家的女人在一起，也不免会被他的同胞以道德的理由厌恶。综合以上观点，两人在一起是对婚姻以及国家的不道德。

1959年，时任《手册》主编埃里克·侯麦组织了一场就《广岛之恋》的讨论会，参加的包括：埃里克·侯麦、让-吕克·戈达尔、Jean Domarchi、 雅克·多尼奥-瓦克罗兹、皮埃尔·卡斯特、雅克·里维特。这个英文版发表于Jim Hillier编辑的《电影手册，1950年代》结集一书中，翻译为Liz Heron。

In Cahiers no. 71 some of our editorial board held the first round-table discussion on the then critical question of French cinema Today the release of Hiroshima mon amour is an event which seems important enough to warrant a new discussion.

Rohmer: I think everyone will agree with me if I start by saying that Hiroshima is a film about which you can say everything.

Godard: So let's start by saying that it's literature.

Rohmer: And a kind of literature that is a little dubious, in so far as it imitates the American school that was so fashionable in Paris after 1945.

Kast: The relationship between literature and cinema is neither good nor clear. I think all that one can say is that literary people have a kind of confused contempt for the cinema, and film people suffer from a confused feeling of inferiority. The uniqueness of Hiroshima is that the Marguerite Duras—Alain Resnais collaboration is an exception to the rule I have just stated.

Godard: Then we can say that the very first thing that strikes you about this film is that it is totally devoid of any cinematic references. You can describe Hiroshima as Faulkner plus Stravinsky, but you can't identify it as such and such a film-maker plus such and such another.

Rivette: Maybe Resnais's film doesn't have any specific cinematic references, but I think you can find references that are oblique and more profound, because its a film that recalls Eisenstein, in the sense that you can see some of Eisensteinis ideas put into practice and, moreover, in a very new way.

Godard: When I said there were no cinematic references, I meant that seeing Hiroshima gave one the impression of watching a film that would have been quite inconceivable in terms of what one was already familiar with in the cinema. For instance, when you see India you know that you'll be surprised, but you are more or less anticipating that surprise. Similarly, I know that Le Testament du dotter Cordeher will surprise me, just as Eljna et les hornmes did. However, with Hiroshima I fee] as if I am seeing something that I didn't expect at all.

Rohmer: Suppose we talk a bit about Toute la memoire du monde. As far as I'm concerned it is a film that is still rather unclear. Hiroshima has made certain aspects of it clearer for me, but not all.

Rivette: It's without doubt the most mysterious of all Resnais's short films. Through its subject, which is both very modern and very disturbing, it echoes what Renoir said in his interviews with us, that the most crucial thing that's happening to our civilization is that it is in the process of becoming a civilization of specialists. Each one of us is more and more locked into his own little domain, and incapable of leaving it. There is no one nowadays who has the capacity to decipher both an ancient inscription and a modern scientific formula. Culture and the common treasure of mankind have become the prey of the specialists. I think that was what Resnais had in mind when he made Toute la memoir e du monde. He wanted to show that the only task necessary for mankind in the search for that unity of culture was, through the work of every individual, to try to reassemble the scattered fragments of the universal culture that is being lost. And I think that is why Toute la memoir du monde ended with those higher and higher shots of the central hall, where you can see each reader, each researcher in his place, bent over his manuscript, yet all of them side by side, all in the process of trying to assemble the scattered pieces of the mosaic, to find the lost secret of humanity; a secret that is perhaps called happiness.

Domarchi: When all is said and done, it is a theme not so far from the theme of Hiroshima. You've been saying that on the level of form Resnais comes close to Eisenstein, but it's just as much on the level of content too, since both attempt to unify opposites, or in other words their art is dialectical.

Rivette: Resnais's great obsession, if I may use that word, is the sense of the splitting of primary unity - the world is broken up, fragmented into a series of tiny pieces, and it has to be put back together again like a jigsaw. I think that for Resnais this reconstitution of the pieces operates on two levels. First on the level of content, of dramatization. Then, I think even more importantly, on the level of the idea of cinema itself. I have the impression that for Alain Resnais the cinema consists in attempting to create a whole with fragments that are a priori dissimilar. For example, in one of Resnais's films two concrete phenomena which have no logical or dramatic connection are linked solely because they are both filmed in tracking shots at the same speed.

Godard: You can see all that is Eisensteinian about Hiroshima because it is in fact the very idea of montage, its definition even.

Rivette: Yes. Montage, for Eisenstein as for Resnais, consists in rediscovering unity from a basis of fragmentation, but without concealingthe fragmentation in doing so; on the contrary, emphasizing it by emphasizing the autonomy of the shot.

It's a double movement - emphasizing the autonomy of the shot and simultaneously seeking within that shot a strength that will enable it to enter into a relationship with another or several other shots, and in this way eventually form a unity. But don't forget, this unity is no longer that of classic continuity. It is a unity of contrasts, a dialectical unity as Hegel and Domarchi would say. (Laughter.)

Doniol-Valcroze: A reduction of the disparate.

Rohmer: To sum up. Alain Resnais is a cubist. I mean that he is the first modern film-maker of the sound film. There were many modern filmmakers in silent films: Fisenstein, the Expressionists, and Dreyer too. But I think that sound films have perhaps been more classical than silents. There has not yet been any profoundly modern cinema that attempts to do what cubism did in painting and the American novel in literature, in other words a kind of reconstitution of reality out of a kind of splintering which could have seemed quite arbitrary to the uninitiated. And on this basis one could explain Resnais's interest in Guernica, which is one of Picasso's cubist paintings for all that it isn't true cubism but more like a return to cubism - and also the fact that Faulkner or Dos Passos may have been the inspiration, even if it was by way of Marguerite Duras.

Kast: From what we can see, Resnais didn't ask Marguerite Duras for a piece of second-rate literary work meant to be 'turned into a film', and conversely she didn't suppose for a second that what she had to say, to write, might be beyond the scope of the cinema. You have to go very far back in the history of the cinema, to the era of great naïveté and great ambitions - relatively rarely put into practice - to someone like a Delluc, in order to find such a will to make no distinction between the literary purpose and the process of cinematic creation.

Rohmer: From that point of view the objection that I made to begin with would vanish - one could have reproached some film-makers with taking the American novel as their inspiration - on the grounds of its superficiality. But since here it's more a question of a profound equivalence, perhaps Hiroshima really is a totally new film. That calls into question a thesis which I confess was mine until now and which I can just as soon abandon without any difficulty (laughter), and that is the classicism of the cinema in relation to the other arts. There is no doubt that the cinema also could just as soon leave behind its classical period to enter a modern period. I think that in a few years, in ten, twenty or thirty years, we shall know whether Hiroshima was the most important film since the war, the first modern film of sound cinema, or whether it was possibly less important than we thought. In any case it is an extremely important film, but it could be that it will even gain stature with the years. It could be, too, that it will lose a little.

Godard: Like La Regle du feu on the one hand and films like Quai des brumes or Le Jour se !eve on the other. Both of Carne's films are very, very important, but nowadays they are a tiny bit less important than Renoir's film.

Rohmer: Yes. And on the grounds that I found some elements in Hiroshima less seductive than others, I reserve judgment. There was something in the first few frames that irritated me. Then the film very soon made me lose this feeling of irritation. But I can understand how one could like and admire Hiroshima and at the same time find it quite jarring in places.

Doniol-Valcroze: Morally or aesthetically?

Godard: Its the same thing. Tracking shots are a question of morality.'

Kass: It's indisputable that Hiroshima is a literary film. Now, the epithet 'literary' is the supreme insult in the everyday vocabulary of the cinema. What is so shattering about Hiroshima is its negation of this connotation of the word. It's as if Resnais had assumed that the greatest cinematic ambition had to coincide with the greatest literary ambition. By substituting pretension for ambition you can beautifully sum up the reviews that have appeared in several newspapers since the film came out. Resnais's initiative was intended to displease all those men of letters —whether they're that by profession or aspiration — who have no love for anything in the cinema that fails to justify the unforrnulated contempt in which they already hold it. The total fusion of the film with its script is so obvious that its enemies instantly understood that it was precisely at this point that the attack had to be made: granted, the film is beautiful, but the text is so literary, so uncinematic, etc., etc. In reality I can't see at all how one can even conceive of separating the two.

Godard: Sacha Guitry would be very pleased with all that.

Donioi-Vaicroze: No one sees the connection,

Godard: But it's there. The text, the famous false problem of the text and the image. Fortunately we have finally reached the point where even the literary people, who used to be of one accord with the provincial exhibitors, are no longer of the opinion that the important thing is the image. And that is what Sacha Guitry proved a long time ago. I say 'proved' advisedly. Because Pagnol, for example, wasn't able to prove it, Since Truffaut isn't with us I am very happy to take his place by incidentally making the point that Hiroshima is an indictment of all those who did not go and see the Sacra Guitry retrospective at the Cinematheque. 2

Doniol-Valcroze: If that's what Rohmer meant by the irritating side of the film, I acknowledge that Guitry's films have an irritating side. […] Essentially, more than the feeling of watching a really adult woman in a film for the first time, I think that the strength of the Emmanuelle Riva character is that she is a woman who isn't aiming at an adult's psychology, just as in Les 400 Coups little Jean-Pierre Laud wasn't aiming at a child's psychology, a style of behaviour prefabricated by professional scriptwriters, Emmanuelle Riva is a modern adult woman because she is not an adult woman, Quite the contrary, she is very childish, motivated solely by her impulses and not by her ideas. Antonioni was the first to show us this kind of woman.

Romer: Have there already been adult women in the cinema? Domarchi: Madame Bovary.

Godard: Renoir's or Minnelli's?

Domarchi: It goes without saying. (Laughter.) Let's say Elena, then.

Rivette: Elena is an adult woman in the sense that the female character played by Ingrid Bergman3 is not a classic character, but of a classic modernism, like Renoir's or Rossellini's. Elena is a woman to whom sensitivity matters, instinct and all the deep mechanisms matter, but they are contradicted by reason, the intellect. And that derives from classic psychology in terms of the interplay of the mind and the senses. While the Emmanuelle Riva character is that of a woman who is not irrational, but is not-rational. She doesn't understand herself. She doesn't analyse herself. Anyway, it is a bit like what Rossellini tried to do in Stromboli. But in Stromboli the Bergman character was clearly delineated, an exact curve. She was a 'moral' character. Instead of which the Emmanuelle Riva character remains voluntarily blurred and ambiguous. Moreover, that is the theme of Hiroshima: a woman who no longer knows where she stands, who no longer knows who she is, who tries desperately to redefine herself in relation to Hiroshima, in relation to this Japanese man, and in relation to the memories of Revers that come back to her. In the end she is a woman who is starting all over again, going right back to the beginning, trying to define herself in existential terms before the world and before her past, as if she were one more unformed matter in the process of being born.

Godard: So you could say that Hiroshima is Simone de Beauvoir that works. Domarchi: Yes. Resnais is illustrating an existentialist conception of psychology.

Doniol-Valcroze: As in Journey into Autumn or So Close to Life,4 but elaborated and done more systematically.

[…]

Domarchi: In fact, in a sense Hiroshima is a documentary on Emmanuelle Riva. I would be interested to know what she thinks of the film.

Rivette: Her acting takes the same direction as the film, It is a tremendous effort of composition. I think that we are again locating the schema I was trying to draw out just now: an endeavour to fit the pieces together again; within the consciousness of the heroine, an effort on her part to regroup the various elements of her persona and her consciousness in order to build a whole out of these fragments, or at least what have become interior fragments through the shock of that meeting at Hiroshima. One would be right in thinking that the film has a double beginning after the bomb; on the one hand, on the plastic level and the intellectual level, since the film's first image is the abstract image of the couple on whom the shower of ashes falls, and the entire beginning is simply a meditation on Hiroshima after the explosion of the bomb. But you can say too that, on another level, the film begins after the explosion for Emmanuelle Riva, since it begins after the shock which has resulted in her disintegration, dispersed her social and psychological personality, and which means that it is only later that we guess, through what is implied, that she is married, has children in France, and is an actress —in short, that she has a structured life. At Hiroshima she experiences a shock, she is hit by a 'bomb' which explodes her consciousness, and for her from that moment it becomes a question of finding herself again, re-composing herself. In the same way that Hiroshima had to be rebuilt after atomic destruction, Emmanuelle Riva in Hiroshima is going to try to reconstruct her reality. She can only achieve this through using the synthesis of the present and the past, what she herself has discovered at Hiroshima and what she has experienced in the past at levers.

Doniol-Valcroze: What is the meaning of the line that keeps being repeated by the Japanese man at the beginning of the film: 'No, you saw nothing at Hiroshima'?

Godard: It has to be taken in the simplest sense. She saw nothing because she wasn't there. for was he. However, he also tells her that she has seen nothing of Paris, yet she is a Parisian. The point of departure is the moment of awareness, or at the very least the desire to become aware, I think Resnais has filmed the novel that the young French novelists are all trying to write, people like Butor, Robbe-Grillet, Bastide and of course Marguerite Duras. I can remember a radio programme where Regis Bastide was talking about Wild Strawberries and he suddenly realized that the cinema had managed to express what he thought belonged exclusively in the domain of literature, and that the problems which he, as a novelist, was setting himself had already been solved by the cinema without its even needing to pose them for itself. I think it's a very significant point.

Kast: We've already seen a lot of films that parallel the novel's rules of construction. Hiroshima goes further. We are at the very core of a reflection on the narrative form itself. The passage from the present to the past, the persistence of the past in the present, are here no longer determined by the subject, the plot, but by pure lyrical movements. In reality, Hiroshima evokes the essential conflict between the plot and the novel. Nowadays there is a gradual tendency for the novel to get rid of the psychological plot. Alain Resnais's film is completely bound up with this modification of the structures of the novel. The reason for this is simple. There is no action, only a kind of double endeavour to understand what a love story can mean. First at the level of individuals, in a kind of long struggle between love and its own erosion through the passage of time. As if love, at the very instant it happens, were already threatened with being forgotten and destroyed. Then, also, at the level of the connections between an individual experience and an objective historical and social situation. The love of these anonymous characters is not located on the desert island usually reserved for games of passion. It takes place in a specific context, which only accentuates and underlines the horror of contemporary society. 'Enmeshing a love story in a context which takes into account knowledge of the unhappiness of others,' Resnais says somewhere. His film is not made up of a documentary on Hiroshima stuck on to a plot, as has been said by those who don't take the time to look at things properly. For Titus and Berenice in the ruins of Hiroshima are inescapably no longer Titus and Berenice.

Rohmer: To sum up, it is no longer a reproach to say that this film is literary, since it happens that Hiroshima moves not in the wake of literature but well in advance of it.5 "There are certainly specific influences: Proust, Joyce, the Americans, but they are assimilated as they would be by a young novelist writing his first novel, a first novel that would be an event, a date to be accorded significance, because it would mark a step forward.

Godard: The profoundly literary aspect perhaps also explains the fact that people who are usually irritated by the cinema within the cinema, while the theatre within the theatre or the novel within the novel don't affect them in the same way, are not irritated by the fact that in Hiroshima Emmanuelle Riva plays the part of a film actress who is in fact involved in making a film.

Doniol-Valcroze: I think it is a device of the script, and on Resnais's part there are deliberate devices in the handling of the subject. In my opinion Resnais was very much afraid that his film might be seen as nothing more than a propaganda film. He didn't want it to be potentially useful for any specific political ends. This may be marginally the reason why he neutralized a possible 'fighter for peace' element through the girl having her head shaved after the Liberation. In any case he thereby gave a political message its deep meaning instead of its superficial meaning.

Domarchi: It is for this same reason that the girl is a film actress. It allows Resnais to raise the question of the anti-atomic struggle at a secondary level, and, for example, instead of showing a real march with people carrying placards, he shows a filmed reconstruction of a march during which, at regular intervals, an image comes up to remind the viewers that it is a film they are watching.

Rivette: It is the same intellectual strategy as Pierre Klossowski used in his first novel, La Vocation suspenclue. He presented his story as the review of a book that had been published earlier, Both are a double movement of consciousness, and so we come back again to that key word, which is at the same time a vogue word: dialectic — a movement which consists in presenting the thing and at the same time an act of distancing in relation to that thing, in order to be critical — in other words, denying it and affirming it. To return to the same example, the march, instead of being a creation of the director, becomes an objective fact that is filmed twice over by the director. For Klossowski and for Resnais the problem is to give the readers or the viewers the sensation that what they are going to read or to see is not an author's creation but an element of the real world. Objectivity, rather than authenticity, is the right word to characterize this intellectual strategy, since the film-maker and the novelist look from the same vantage-point as the eventual reader or viewer. […] since we are in the realm of aesthetics, as well as the reference to Faulkner I think it just as pertinent to mention a name that in my opinion has an indisputable connection with the narrative technique of Hiroshima: Stravinsky. The problems which Resnais sets himself in film are parallel to those that Stravinsky sets himself in music. For example, the definition of music given by Stravinsky — an alternating succession of exaltation and repose — seems to me to fit Alain Resnais's film perfectly. What does it mean? The search for an equilibrium superior to all the individual elements of creativity. Stravinsky systematically uses contrasts and simultaneously, at the very point where they are used, he brings into relief what it is that unites them. The principle of Stravinsky's music is the perpetual rupture of the rhythm. The great novelty of The Rite of Spring was its being the first musical work where the rhythm was systematically varied. Within the field of rhythm, not tone, it was already almost serial music, made up of rhythmical oppositions, structures and series. And I get the impression that this is what Resnais is aiming at when he cuts together four tracking shots, then suddenly a static shot, two static shots and back to a tracking shot. Within the juxtaposition of static and tracking shots he tries to find what unites them. In other words he is seeking simultaneously an effect of opposition and an effect of profound unity.

Godard: It's what Rohmer was saying before. It's Picasso, but it isn't Matisse.

Domarchi: Matisse — that's Rossellini. (Laughter.)

Rivette: I find it is even more Braque than Picasso, in the sense that Braque's entire sure is devoted to that particular reflection, while Picasso's is tremendously diverse. Orson Welles would be more like Picasso, while Alain Resnais is close to Braque to the degree that the work of art is primarily a reflection in a particular direction.

Godard: When I said Picasso I was thinking mainly of the colours.

Rivette: Yes, but Braque too. He is a painter who wants both to soften strident colours and make soft colours violent. Braque wants bright yellow to be soft and Manet grey to be sharp. Well now, we've mentioned quite a few 'names', so you can see just how cultured we are, Cahiers du Cinema is true to form, as always. (Laughter.)

Godard: There is one film that must have given Alain Resnais something to think about, and what's more, he edited it: La Pointe courte.

Rivette: Obviously. But I don't think it's being false to Agnès Varda to say that by virtue of the fact that Resnais edited La Pointe courte his editing itself contained a reflection on what Agnes Varga had intended. To a certain degree Agnèsvarda becomes a fragment of Alain Resnais, and Chrismarker too.

Doniol-Valcroze: Now's the time to bring up Alain Resnais's 'terrible tenderness' which makes him devour his own friends by turning them into moments in his personal creativity. Resnais is Saturn. And that's why we all feel quite weak when we are confronted with him.

Rohmer: We have no wish to be devoured. It's lucky that he stays on the Left Bank of the Seine and we keep to the Right Banks.

Godard: When Resnais shouts 'Action', his sound engineer replies 'Saturn' riga tourne', i.e. 'it's rolling]. (Laughter.) Another thing — I'm thinking of an article by Roland Barthes on Les Cousins where he more or less said that these days talent had taken refuge in the right. Is Hiroshima a left-wing film or a right-wing film?

Rivette: Let's say that there has always been an aesthetic left, the one Cocteau talked about and which, furthermore, according to Radiguet, had to be contradicted, so that in its turn that contradiction could be contradicted, and so on As far as I'm concerned, if Hiroshima is a left-wing film it doesn't bother me in the slightest.

Rohmer: From the aesthetic point of view modern art has always been positioned to the left. But just the same, there's nothing to stop one thinking that it's possible to be modern without necessarily being left-wing. In other words, it is possible, for example, to reject a particular conception of modern art and regard it as out of date, not in the same but, if you like, in the opposite sense to dialectics. With regard to the cinema one shouldn't consider its evolution solely in terms of chronology. For example, the history of the sound film is very unclear in comparison with the history of the silent film, That's why even if Resnais has made a film that's ten years ahead of its time, it's wrong to assume that in ten years' time there will be a Resnais period that will follow on from the present one.

Rivette: Obviously, since if Resnais is ahead of his time he does it by remaining true to October, in the same way that Picasso's Las Meninas is true to Velazquez.

Rohmer: Yes. Hiroshima is a film that plunges at the same time into the past, the present and the future. It has a very strong sense of the future, particularly the anguish of the future.

Rivette: It's right to talk about the science-fiction element in Resnais. But it's also wrong, because he is the only film-maker to convey the feeling that he has already reached a world which in other people's eyes is still futuristic. In other words he is the only one to know that we are already in the age where science-fiction has become reality. In short, Alain Resnais is the only one of us who truly lives in 1959. With him the word 'science-fiction' loses all its pejorative and childish associations because Resnais is able to see the modern world as it is. Like the science-fiction writers he is able to show us all that is frightening in it, but also all that is human. Unlike the Fritz Lang of Metropolis or the Jules Verne of Ong cents millions de la Begum, unlike the classic notion of science-fiction as expressed by a Bradbury or a Lovecraft or even a Van Vogt all reactionaries in the end - it is very obvious that Resnais possesses the great originality of not reacting inside science-fiction. Not only does he opt for this modern and futuristic world, not only does he accept it, but he analyses it deeply, with lucidity and with love. Since this is the world in which we live and love, then for Resnais it is this world that is good, just and true.

Domarchi: That brings us back to this idea of terrible tenderness that is at the centre of Resnais's reflection. Essentially it is explained by the fact that for him society is characterized by a kind of anonymity. The wretchedness of the world derives from the fact of being struck down without knowing who is the aggressor. In Nuit et brouillard the commentary points out that some guy born in Carpentras or Brest has no idea that he is going to end up in a concentration camp, that already his fate is sealed, What impresses Resnais is that the world presents itself like an anonymous and abstract force that strikes where it likes„ anywhere, and whose will cannot be determined in advance. It is out of this conflict between individuals and a totally anonymous universe that is born a tragic vision of the world. That is the first stage of Resnais's thought. Then there comes a second stage which consists in channelling this first movement. Resnais has gone back to the romantic theme of the conflict between the individual and society, so dear to Goethe and his imitators, as it was to the nineteenth-century English novelists, But in their works it was the conflict between a man and palpable social forms that was clearly defined, while in Resnais there is none of that, The conflict is represented in a completely abstract way; it is between an and the universe. One can then react in an extremely tender way towards this state of affairs. I mean that it is no longer necessary to be indignant, to protest or even to explain. It is enough to show things without any emphasis, very subtly. And subtlety has always characterized Alain Resnais.

Rivette: Resnais is sensitive to the current abstract nature of the world. The first movement of his films is to state this abstraction. The second is to overcome this abstraction by reducing it through itself, if I may put it that way; by juxtaposing with each abstraction another abstraction in order to rediscover a concrete reality through the very act of setting them in relation to one another.

Godard: That's the exact opposite of Rossellini's procedure - he was outraged because abstract art had become official art.9 So Resnais's tenderness is metaphysical, it isn't Christian. There is no notion of charity in his films.

Rivette: Obviously not. Resnais is an agnostic. If there is a God he believes in, it's worse than St Thomas Aquinas's. His attitude is this: perhaps God exists, perhaps there is an explanation for everything, but there's nothing that allows us to be sure of it.

Godard: Like Dostoevsky's Stavrogin, who, if he believes, doesn't believe that he believes, and if he doesn't believe, doesn't believe that he doesn't believe. Besides, at the end of the film does Emmanuelle Riva leave, or does she stay? One can ask the same question about her as about Agnes in Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, when you ask yourself whether she lives or dies.

Rivette: That doesn't matter. It's fine if half the audience thinks that Emmanuelle Riva stays with the Japanese man and the other half thinks that she goes back to France.

Domarchi: Marguerite Duras and Resnais say that she leaves, and leaves for good.

Godard: believe them when they make another film that proves it to me.

Rivette: I don't think it really matters at all, for Hiroshima is a circular film. At the end of the last reel you can easily move back to the first, and so on. Hiroshima is a parenthesis in time. It is a film about reflection, on the past and on the present. Now, in reflection, the passage of time is effaced because it is a parenthesis within duration. And it is within this duration that Hiroshima is inserted. In this sense Resnais is dose to a writer like Borges, who has always tried to write stories in such a way that on reaching the last line the reader has to turn back and re-read the story right from the first line to understand what it is about — and so it goes on, relentlessly. With Resnais it is the same notion of the infinitesimal achieved by material means, mirrors face to face, series of labyrinths. It is an idea of the infinite but contained within a very short interval, since ultimately the 'time' of Hiroshima can just as well last twenty-four hours as one second.