Hiroshima
I watched "Hiroshima Love" again every other year, and my mood was completely different from before. Alain Resnais's film attracted huge attention at the beginning of its release. It was called "a spiritual atomic bomb". The film completely broke the traditional concept of time and space, changing the logical and linear time into intricate and complex 'mental time', narrated through recollection, imagination, dialogue and monologue.
The newsreel at the beginning is very shocking to the visual impact, showing the huge damage caused by the war naked in front of the eyes. It also explained the background of the story through newsreel - Hiroshima, a city wounded by war. The heroine is also from a city devastated by war - Neville. She comes to Hiroshima to promote peace and meets a Japanese man who reminds her of her painful first love.
"Left Bank" directors have always preferred the theme of "memory and forgetting", and Alain Resnais' "Hiroshima Love" is no exception. For her, the heroine has left her hometown for more than ten years. For her, Neville is full of painful memories. Because of the war, she lost her lover and was forced to leave her hometown. She thought she had forgotten, but coming to Hiroshima, in this city baptized by war, awakened her dormant memories and remembered her deceased lover.
She said: "Like you, I have tried to fight oblivion with all my might. Like you, I have forgotten everything. Like you, I have longed for an inconsolable memory, a memory of shadows and monuments. "The struggle with forgetting itself will only deepen the memory, the more difficult it is to forget the memory that you try to forget. She wanted to forget that deep-rooted memory, but when she met that Japanese man in Hiroshima, the memory left in the corner was shocking again. The real pain will never be forgotten. The physical wounds caused by war can be healed. Mental wounds are like wounds that never scab, you can ignore it, but it's there and it hurts when you touch it.
At night, everything was silent, and at dawn she was about to return to Paris. She couldn't stay in the empty hotel, wandering lonely in the silent night, the camera switched from our vision back to hers, the streets of the city slowly swam in her eyes, the low eaves, the shadows between the walls . She wandered the streets, using aimless walking to relieve the sorrow of parting.
They met again and she was determined to forget, she came to the station and he followed her. Still unable to settle down at the station, she went to the bar again. He sat across from her across a table, they looked at each other in silence, and said nothing to each other. In this long silence, there was an increasing concentration of emotion in the air. The rhythm of the movie is so slow, it makes people feel deeper and deeper, and it is difficult to get out.
Farewell, at her hotel, they were still strangers. She called him-"Hiroshima", he called her-"Neville"
Whether it is memory or forgetting, at this moment, their love has quietly sunk into the history of the two people.
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