'Hiroshima mon amour' (1959)

For several months now I've wanted to say something here about the 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour (directed by Alain Resnais from a screenplay by Marguerite Duras). And that mirrors, to some extent, a problem faced by the creators of the film: the desire to speak about something that cannot be addressed directly.

Coming on the heels of her novel Moderato Cantabile (1958), Hiroshima mon amour again revealed Duras to be a powerfully innovative writer with more surprises up her sleeve than her earliest work had suggested. It was Resnais's first full-length film, and--together with Truffaut's 400 Blows (which, like Hiroshima, was first seen at Cannes in 1959) and Resnais's next film, Last Year at Marienbad--is associated with the emergence of the New Wave of French cinema.

But talking about how Hiroshima mon amour is or isn't a New Wave film, feels as wrong as comparable discussions of whether Moderato Cantabile is or isn't an example of le Nouveau roman. And the same thing could be said about efforts to situate Hiroshima in the respective careers of Resnais and Duras.

It's a film that both have spoken of as being born out of an inability to bring the usual tools of understanding, language and art to bear on the violent disruptions of the Second World War. Instead of making a documentary (or near-documentary) on the bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945 and its aftermath, they decided to film a love story set in the Hiroshima of 1957.

A French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) is finishing work on a 'film about peace' in Hiroshima. The day before she is to return to France, she meets and becomes involved with a Japanese architect (Okada Eiji). When she tells him of everything she's seen in Hiroshima (museum, hospital, people...), he insists: 'You have seen nothing in Hiroshima--nothing.' The problem isn't the difference of nationalities: it's the enormity, the utter incomprehensibility of Hiroshima--and perhaps of war itself--as a phenomenon. The viewer sees, among other things, approximately what the French actress has seen: the Hiroshima of documentaries and tourism. But these images will be joined by others as the film continues....

Although they're both married, the architect asks the actress to stay on with him in Hiroshima. She softens her eventual refusal by telling him her own story of loss in wartime France, a story not even her husband knows. More terrible even than her girlhood loss and subsequent humiliation, however, is her acquired knowledge that the loss of love is not fatal: that we live on and in time forget. This does not mean that we forget the intolerable as a first step to building a new life: the erosion of memory is rather an extension of the ravages of war.

For me, it was time to see the film again, and to return to Duras's published screenplay. Perhaps you'll join me.

Just a Taste of 'A Kiss...'

[WARNING: Today's post contains some material of an adult nature. Please be so advised before you read. I would also appreciate your feedback on how to deal with such material in the future.]

Just because it's Friday: a short excerpt from the end of Book One of A Kiss Before You Leave Me, which is entitled 'Seeing Someone':

It’s hours later. Two cars have made their way from Mitzi’s to Miranda’s, the street winding so elaborately as they approached their destination that the driver of the second car might have plowed into the rear end of the first if he hadn’t known exactly where it would stop. Instead, he’s parked two hundred yards short of the first car. His vision, of course, is perfect, but his view is obstructed by the stand of trees that wraps around three sides of the duplex just ahead. He sees the man in full profile, lounging in the driver’s seat; the woman’s profile appears and disappears by turns. 

At least they don’t appear to be touching. 

And they aren’t going in. 

Yet. 

There’s no way the solitary watcher can hear the conversation in the first car. But he doesn’t need to. It’s bad enough to watch and wait. 

[....] 

The man in the other car sees them go inside, and he feels his terrible solitude, as if for the first time. He tells himself there’s nothing more to see. He’s right, and he’s wrong.... 

Back at his own house, once hers, once theirs, alone, in what was once her favorite chair, he reaches for the phone, snatches up the receiver, punches buttons without having to think or look, listens, waits, breathless, as the call clicks through and the ringing starts, whirring in his ear, one, two, Vince counting, three, four, giving her ten, ten to pick up he decides, she’s there, she’s there, seven, she’s not fucking him yet, eight, not yet, nine, no, ten, she’s fucking him, and he slams the receiver down, seeing nothing in his darkened living room, seeing everything as it happens a dozen streets away, hearing the intake of her breath, tasting mouths, smelling perfume and cologne, Vince’s own breath returning now, fast, urgent, as if to hold it back might mean missing one detail, hungry now, panting, watching, in his way, watching her hands stroke the new man and the man’s stroke her, watching them fumble with wool and silk, push the fabric aside—feeling, tasting, smelling flesh itself—panting now, all three—a part of Vince recoils but he cannot look away, he stares, through the blackness, the streets, the walls that separate them, that close him in and out but cannot save the three of them from this: he sees.

From Sartre's 'Kean': Epigraph 1.3 - Seeing Someone, or Not

As a follow-up to yesterday's post about The Collector, let's talk some more about the amorous observer's inability to see.

Jean-Paul Sartre's Kean (a very free adaptation, first staged in 1953, of an 1836 play by Dumas père) is best known as a bravura star vehicle for actors as different as Anthony Hopkins and Jean-Paul Belmondo. It turns the great Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean (1789-1833) into a specimen of existentialist bad faith: even 'actor', 'man', 'lover' are for Sartre's Kean just so many roles in his repertoire. As the play continues, he will be called upon to step aside and yield Elena, the woman he loves (or 'loves'), to the advances of the Prince of Wales--in exchange for money to pay off his creditors. In an earlier scene (II, 2, 1), however, he explains why he must use his time before she joins him in his dressing room, to think about Elena:

'It's only when I'm alone that I can meditate on the charm of the woman I love.... When she's with me, I won't have a moment to see her: I'll be too busy watching her.'

Watching her, noting her responses, trying to catch her out, stealing glances at her, spying on her--but not for a moment seeing her....

The first section of my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me (the section introduced by the epigraph from Kean) is entitled 'Seeing Someone'. It extends from the first gleam in a matchmaker's eye (roughly speaking) to the culmination of the first date of the pair she's brought together. The reader's attention by this time is not on the matchmaker at all, and not primarily on the new pair (Miranda and Jack), but on an observer who's secretly followed them back to Miranda's place, lingered outside in the dark--watching, spying and all the rest--and who sees, or believes he can see, even in the darkness, through walls, then from blocks away. The section ends:

A part of [him] recoils, but he cannot look away, he stares, through the blackness, the streets, the walls that separate them, that close him in and out but cannot save the three of them from this: he sees.

Or not. The watcher in the shadows can imagine well enough what the other two are doing--can't 'avert his gaze', can't stop imagining, can't not 'know', can't escape that knowledge--but these are all negations relating to a figure who is herself absent. His view of the 'real' Miranda may be even more compromised than Kean's of the 'present' Elena....

From John Fowles, 'The Collector': Epigraph 6.1 - In the Name of Miranda

One of the shortest epigraphs in A Kiss Before You Leave Me may appear at first quite innocent: '...Her name as beautiful as herself, Miranda.' That innocence doesn't last for long, but here I'll pretend to preserve it a bit longer by talking first about my secondary reason for using the quotation and only after that, and cryptically, about my primary reason.

Miranda is of course the name of the apparent protagonist of A Kiss Before You Leave Me, whose beauty animates the so-called 'Miranda paintings' for which she poses. In using the epigraph from John Fowles, I wanted the reader to think, if only for a moment, about the name Miranda (as well as the recurrent subject of 'my' Miranda's beauty).

Miranda is such a popular name today that we may forget that it seems to have been invented by Shakespeare. (He used it, of course, for Prospero's daughter in The Tempest, the source of another epigraph [4.1].) The form 'Miranda' is a Latin gerundive--'a 'verbal adjective' formed from the present participle of a verb, always passive in force; e.g., agenda (neuter plural), literally, '[things that are] to be done'; 'referendum'; 'propaganda'; 'Amanda', '[she who deserves] to be loved'. The meaning of the name Miranda is sometimes given simply as '[she who is] to be admired', but the verb mirari means not only 'admire' but also 'look at', 'marvel at'. I propose that we gloss 'Miranda' as 'she who is to be gazed upon in amazement'. Miranda Kincaid is admirable in every way... and beautiful, yes, astonishingly, wondrously so--but not necessarily to be emulated--especially in her moments of 'passivity'.

Miranda's beauty is a huge topic. Among other things, when other characters find her appealing, her beauty is often all they can see, or at least all they can name. We wonder at times how deeply others understand her, especially those who are attracted to her. Moreover, as the novel goes on, her beauty becomes a commodity of sorts, subjected to commercial exploitation. Some readers may discover a recurring theme of the connection between (a) certain loves' failures to see deeply or to understand and (b) the monetization of beauty or of love itself.

But my primary reason for including the epigraph from John Fowles's 1963 novel The Collector was to remind readers already familiar with it that Miranda is the name of the young woman in that novel. I don't want to say much here about the plot of The Collector, because that might imply a closer parallel between situations in the two books than is actually there. But the least I can say is that my brief reference to Fowles's novel suggests that what presents itself as a passionate love of beauty, a love or 'love' that understands itself as collecting, preserving and protecting the exquisitely beautiful, can also be the enemy of what it admires.