The Pagan Agenda

Rating:

‘I remember Hiroshima’
‘You remember nothing’

The seemingly unprovoked pang of despair, a curious phenomenon of heightened sensitivity not unlike what the Japanese refer to as ‘mono no aware’. I think of it as a sensation of rebooting in response to some unknown complication in the machinery of life. For me the pang consists of both a deep-felt sadness and paradoxically a residual pleasure. I feel I am not alone in deriving a certain pleasure from the sadness, especially in a society like ours where the presence of a heightened emotional state alone is something to celebrate, a twitch of life to hold onto before apathy envelops us once again. When confronted with an existential pang I am compelled to excite it further by watching melancholic films. Again I do not think I am alone in this ritual, though it may be an exclusive club of masochists. If you are one of these masochists may I recommend the following: the next time the pang hits isolate yourself within a darkened room, preferably curled up in a blanket, and wallow in the melancholic opus that is Alain Resnais’ ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’

Now not any ‘weepy’ film will do in these cases; I want to make it clear that I choose ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’ deliberately for what it does that so many films of the same ilk fall short of. This is not an exploitive melodrama which seeks only to trigger emotions without first earning the sentiment through the narrative. While much of the film will have an effect over you on a lower immediacy level (to borrow from Kierkegaard) by the sheer poignancy of the images and poetry it supplies, the art-experience potential of the film depends principally on the cerebral journey one takes to unlock the very meanings of love, loss, guilt, and madness. The substance keeps pace with the style, and Resnais has done a miraculous job of keeping the film wavering on the cusp of pretense in order to take advantage of the psychological effects which come from transgressions of narrative norms without going so far as to disrupt the trance the film is able to sustain. That said, ‘Hiroshima’ is punctuated with breathless visuals that are so fantastically beautiful and emotionally charged that they seem to push the envelope of what cinema is capable of. I am here thinking specifically of the climax scene in the Casablanca bar which with mere visuals alone is able to evoke the entire culmination of the narrative without need of dialogue.

Elsewhere the dialogue drifts into the lyrical giving scenes a degree of ambiguity which requires active participation on the viewer’s part to interpret. There are moments particularly in the opening scenes where it seems the film has foregone concerns of narrative altogether in order to push the limits of the effects of words, sounds and images, however Resnais is a first rate master of cinema able to orchestrate the emotional import of the story in a way unlike any other. One should not be deterred by these opening scenes and think the entire film is to be so opaque, it very quickly finds a pace once the principle characters have been introduced and stays on this human level. The montage sequence Resnais uses to bring us into the story is, I think, primarily a device to enhance the emotional import of the pillow talk that is to be the catalyst for the French woman and Japanese man falling in love. The use of metaphor gives the narrative a monumental significance, situating the meaning of Hiroshima and Nevers, France within the relationship of these two people. Endless scholarly papers could be written on the significance of ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’, but as Resnais states in the Criterion Collection interview it is his intention that the viewer actively constructs the narrative rather than seek out a pre-established one. This may be why the professor at Berkeley of whom I am listening to via podcast has not been able to find any direct proof that Resnais was referencing Kierkegaard in his characterizations of the French woman and the Japanese man as representations of the ‘knight of infinite resignation’ and the ‘knight of faith’, though the reading is very compelling.

As a knight of infinite resignation the french woman has devoted herself to an eternal defining commitment, namely the dead German, and her confrontation with the possibility of new love with the Japanese man seeks to not only affect her emotionally but in some very real way destroy her entire world, hence, as the professor notes, the sigh of complete and utter despair as she looks at herself in the mirror of the hotel bathroom. The logic of her resignation from the love of the Japanese man according to this Kierkegaardian reading of the film is if she is able to break her commitment to the German, something she has held as eternal, than there is no hope for any commitments, and the sword of Damocles hangs over every relationship, including the ones to come. If that is true, then that is a very significant sigh, the sighs of sighs, in existential terms a sigh of despair.

For me, the story evokes Dostoevsky’s short story ‘White Nights’, which was also made into a beautifully shot black and white film, ‘La Notti Bianche’ by Luchino Visconti. Incidentally, this would make a great double feature with Hiroshima. Both involve strangers meeting in exotic locales and having very intimate and life-altering experiences over the duration of a short amount of time. In both the male characters struggle to possess the affection of female characters as they themselves struggle to hold on to unrequited loves from their pasts. I hazard to guess what sort of emotional shape one would be in after a double feature of this caliber, but that is the desired effect after all.