Modernity and Director's Will
As a representative work of the Left Bank, the vivid modernity and the form that is not easy to understand has always been one of the difficulties in interpreting the film, but the incident of Hiroshima Love, from a rational and logical point of view, Rena left a clue that can enter the film. The possibility of a narrated "story", especially when such stories have few real-world counterparts.
story:
French actress (Emmanuel Riva) meets construction engineer (Eiji Okada) for a few days in Hiroshima to film an anti-war documentary, but it doesn't end there...
In the lingering language of men and women at the beginning, the camera enters the past of Hiroshima, which is exactly Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and gives different perspectives on people and environments that have encountered different experiences after the nuclear explosion, so as to stitch the situation at that time. The picture, defined by Deleuze as "cinematic consciousness", is a narrative field of vision formed by getting rid of the natural observation of the movement of the camera, and then using editing The "movie eye" that belongs to the architectural film alone, shapes and adds a kind of entangled emotion to historical events. Renai's intention is to solidify time, because the nuclear explosion is the moment when time is frozen, the history before and after this Regardless of this moment, the process of the Left Bank's "Writer's Film" using film to historicalize the page can be said to have started at the very beginning of the film.
It can also be said that "Hiroshima Love" is the prototype of Resnais' time concept, and the subsequent "Last Year at Marienbad" and "I Love You, I Love You" are further developments.
At this time-solidified node, a French woman who fell in love with a German man during World War II was brutally persecuted, and she should not have suffered such an unbearable past; a French woman who should have died in the Hiroshima nuclear explosion, but at that time A man who was not in Hiroshima at all. Perhaps there are some clear visible lines here, two different timelines, intersecting at the moment when a man who shouldn't have a future and a woman who shouldn't have a past like that.
Looking back, as a person who thinks that he has proof of the past, and verifies the existence of a person in a time line, the heroine of the past began to unfold the level of memory without judgment and confirmation in the time tunnel, and every flashback of the past, plus The unequivocal denial of the male protagonist makes people even more uncertain about the "truth" of the female protagonist before the two encounters in the past.
At the end of the film, all the boundaries between the definite and the uncertain begin to blur. The heroine and the hero have changed from the names of actresses and architects to their respective place names. Time merges together and continues to walk, but it is not human. Where will the future go, the textual expression hidden behind the image's ideology has never been revealed, but the mission of the two ends here.
In the orthodox concept represented by American Hollywood type films, it is hoped that the audience ignores the form, the orthodox storytelling narrative structure must be transparent, while the reflexivity of modernism strives to reverse the transparency of the narrative. This kind of reflexive means It makes the film lose its weakness that can be seen through at a glance, directly or indirectly triggers thinking and becomes the object of the audience's attention. The reflexive elements in the modernist film make people pay more attention to its form. It denies that our real life has anything to do with what happens on the screen, it confronts us with the subjectivity of the filmmaker, and it also highlights the material reality of cinema as a "movie".
It is precisely with such an opportunity that the conflict in "Hiroshima Love" is an abstract dilemma. It originates from human self-consciousness. Human existence is essential, while consciousness is metaphysical. In traditional films, consciousness is limited by material existence, making conflict concrete; in modernist narrative, conflict is a question raised by consciousness to seek material existence. From materialism to the expression of idealism, the ineffable time has no possibility to restore the real reality, so why not restore the infinite extension of time as it is?
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