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Hiroshima Mon Amour Essay

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In Alain Resnais’ film “Hiroshima mon amour” (1959), the interplay of opposite themes runs throughout, often juxtaposing each other very obviously: war and peace, sex and death, past and present, reality and memory. One of the central themes of the film, the relationship between time and memory, one that Resnais explored in many of his subsequent films, gives rise to the notion of forgetting which becomes a very important element of the film. Resnais addresses the notion of forgetting through the simultaneous conjunction of past and present which becomes a recurring motif throughout the film, suggesting that time is in fact an entirely illusionary phenomenon. Indeed, memory is shown to obliterate any notion of separation through time so that …show more content…

For example, in one particular scene, the woman is reminded of her previous German lover’s hand, in the form of a flashback, as he lay dead on the ground, when in fact we realise she is simply looking at the hand of her current Japanese lover. She then becomes more and more engrossed in her past experiences that she is no longer able to distinguish her present lover from her past one, even addressing the Japanese man as if he were the German soldier from her past. Furthermore, confusions about not only time but also space are created as we see shots of Nevers, the woman’s former french town, intercut with modern-day Hiroshima, implying that the two separate places are in fact one. Now we know how the notion of forgetting is addressed, we must discuss it’s …show more content…

Should we bury our past in order to move on into our future or is it impossible to do so without remembering past tragedy? In fact, the way that the film raises more questions than answers can somehow explain its enduring resonance and deep effect on its audience. We can attempt to explore this key question through the French woman. We can tell that she would like to forget her past but her subconscious won’t allow her to. It is only the stark similarities between the German man and the Japanese man that she begins, without wanting to at first to remember her tragic past. However to some extent, she does resist remembering her past as we see at the end of the film when she decides to end her relationship with the Japanese lover, rather than be reminded of her past. Therefore, one could say that by refusing to remember the pain she experienced through the death of her German lover, she is once again hurt as she feels she has to leave the Japanese man and return to Nevers. Without the opportunity to heal by ignoring your past, the consequences of not doing so are ironically made clear by the woman herself : “It will begin all over again..chaos will prevail..a whole city will fall back in ashes”. By contrast, the Japanese man is willing to share his personal experiences of the

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