Trauma Hiroshima Mon Amour.articulo

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SFC 11 (2) pp. 111–123 Intellect Limited 2011

Studies in French Cinema Volume 11 Number 2

© 2011 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sfc.11.2.111_1

KEYWORDS

ethicsmemorytraumaarchivecommemorationHiroshima mon amour

NINA VARSAVAUniversity of British Columbia

Processions of trauma in

Hiroshima mon amour:

Towards an ethics

of representation

ABSTRACT

This article examines Hiroshima mon amour’s generative meta-representational sensibilities. I suggest that the film exemplifies an ethics of representation that resists the violence of positivist accounts of history. Resnais and Duras deconstruct the commemorative systems that hold traumatic histories in general, and Hiroshima’s singularly traumatic history in particular, in place. The film incites criticism of the injustice that archival discourses enact on the particularities of trauma, and raises questions about the ethics as well as the truth-value of conventional commemorative tropes. I argue that Hiroshima mon amour enacts an Adornian ethic through a representational (self-)deconstruction that complicates, unsettles, but ultimately does not prohibit its own closure. The film demonstrates how the integration of memory, and its incorporation into words and commemorative overtures, facilitates a reduc-tive remembering that is always a kind of forgetting; such integration, I suggest, while to some degree falsifying reality, might be necessary if an individual or a city wishes to go on.

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1. It is worth noting that Resnais and Duras originally planned to open the film with a projection of the mushroom cloud (Kristeva 1989: 231), although in the final production images of the cloud make only a momentary appearance.

The direct expression of the inexpressible is void; where the expres-sion carried, as in great music, its seal was evanescence and transitori-ness, and it was attached to the process, not to an indicative ‘That’s it’. Thoughts intended to think the inexpressible by abandoning thought falsify the inexpressible. They make of it what the thinker would least like it to be: the monstrosity of a flatly abstract object.

(Adorno 1973: 110)

Think the mushroom cloud. The mushroom cloud circulates ubiquitously as a universally understood metonym for Hiroshima as atomic bomb site. The image takes no time for one to recognize, to process, to come to terms with. A vacuous sign, the power that it carries, if any, is not ethical, but aesthetic and perhaps political. In Beclouded Visions: Hiroshima-Nagasaki and the Art of Witness, Kyo Maclear notes that in North America the mushroom cloud has become the defining image of the atomic bombings; for many North Americans, it is in fact the only recollectable image associated with Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Maclear 1999: 52). In promiscuous circulation, the image has been co-opted for an assortment of agendas: a Soviet Jeans advertisement, for example, features the mushroom cloud alongside a model buttoning up a pair of sleek pants (Maclear 1999: 92). The mushroom cloud is also one of most popular poster images amongst American college students (College Happenings 2007); according to Maclear, ‘[t]he collective shiver once induced by this image has passed into a pervasive sense of ennui’ (Maclear 1999: 7). It seems that the abstract image has subsumed one of the most influential and horrific events in modern history. The nuclear holocaust, squeezed into a mushroom cloud, has come to decorate our walls.

In their 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour, Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras examine many of the most widely viewed and attended documen-tary and commemorative representations of the atomic bombings.1 Drawing

Figure 1: The Memorial Museum (courtesy of Criterion).


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attention to the production and circulation involved in these representations, Resnais and Duras rupture the illusion and undermine the totality of conven-tional commemorative sites and practices. They indicate what is left out, pushed aside, or deformed – singular expressions and silences, and immeasurable apertures in knowledge and understanding – and thereby signal the violence that representational enclosure entails. While acknowledging the paradox within which it revolves – that of expressing the inexpressible – Hiroshima mon amour at the same time attests to the legitimate need for a conceptual integra-tion which is always a kind of resignation and consignation.

THE MEMORIAL MUSEUM AND DOCUMENTARY DELIRIUM

In the opening shots of Hiroshima mon amour, two naked bodies – one of a French actress, the unnamed female protagonist, played by Emmanuelle Riva, and one of a Japanese architect, the likewise unnamed male protag-onist, played by Eiji Okada – compose an entangled, grasping embrace. Riva’s character recites to her lover an extensive inventory of everything she has seen in Hiroshima; as she does, the camera jumps from the bodies to shots of the city, presenting visually the French actress’s oral tour. As John W. Moses notes, ‘by following the female protagonist as she tours the city seeing “everything” […]. The tracking camera becomes her eye’ (Moses 1987: 161). An extended dolly shot inside the Hiroshima hospital creates the illusion of a perpetual hallway lined by Japanese nurses; no end is in sight. The shot suggests the interminability of pain, silence and deflection. At the same time, the hospital visit – which includes a series of brief shots through a room full of patients – indicates the institutional walls within which Hiroshima’s surviving victims are enclosed. Silent and without expression, one by one the patients turn from the camera, rejecting its gaze and denying the vision it seeks to record. Here, Resnais intimates the female protagonist’s cursory accumulation of Hiroshima’s nuclear history, and her failure to gain insight into the experi-ences of individual survivors, or to address and contemplate their silences.

The French actress’s tour moves on to the Peace Memorial Museum, where Resnais presents six static shots of the building’s design before revealing any of its contents; we see the museum’s austere exterior, and the defining stairways and hallways it frames. This attention to the museum’s structure – its hard lines and angles, and concrete materiality – reflects its function: that of formalizing Hiroshima’s nuclear history into a straightforward and orderly unit. The brief second shot of the museum’s interior reveals the mushroom cloud transposed directly onto a wall; the billowing image composes a background for additional images of the mushroom cloud, as well as accompanying documents. During her deliberate exposition of the museum, the female protagonist repeatedly declares that she has been there ‘[f]our times’, reminding us that the perspective the film offers here is filtered through the lens of her vision. Adding another layer of mediation to the mix, her view inside the museum often points to other museum-goers, or ‘memory-tourists’, as Maclear would have it (Maclear 1999: 146); the camera’s gaze is directed at the others looking at the collection, rather than at the collection itself. ‘I saw people walking around’, Riva’s character recalls. ‘People walk around, lost in thought, among the photographs […]. I watched the people’. We see a woman and three children holding hands as they visually graze over the items on display, their backs toward us. The quartet here is represented in double – shown twice simultaneously – as its image is reflected in the glass of the row of photographs adjacent to


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it. Showing the reflectivity of the glassed-in images, the camera breaks the illusion of photograph as ‘window to reality’, and undermines its totalizing power. Furthermore, before offering any close-up of a particular photograph, Resnais depicts the way the photographs are arranged – as rows of framed images delineating the museum for systematic viewing. While the camera ultimately eclipses the layers of representation, zooming in on photographs and presenting clips of cinematic reconstructions, its prior attention to mediation demonstrates the film’s deconstructive drive, and conditions the audience’s consciousness, directing us to critically consider the complex mediation of all the representations of Hiroshima with which we are presented.

In lieu of understanding, the French actress clings to historical fact in her conceptual acquisition of Hiroshima, a posture that the museum supports with its plentiful documentary evidence. Her claims to knowledge include an extensive list of artefacts: ‘scorched metal’, ‘[c]harred stones’, ‘masses of hair’, as well as statistics: ‘10,000 degrees’, ‘200,000 dead’, ‘80,000 wounded’. It also includes factual accounts: ‘Rain causes panic’, ‘fishermen die’, ‘an entire city’s food is thrown away’. ‘I saw the newsreels, I saw them’, she persists. In The Politics of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon suggests that the photographic is revered because it is ‘technically tied to the real’ (Hutcheon 2002: 42). In Riva’s tour of the Peace Memorial Museum, the reverence of the visible, in the form of photography, but also artefact and film, is glaring. More broadly though, the French actress’s tour exhibits a reverence that extends beyond visual ‘fact’ to documentary ‘fact’ itself, including the non-visual elements of dates and statistics: numbers, like visible evidence, announce an objective relationship to reality, and, alongside or superimposed on the visual, contrib-ute to the production of the archive’s authority.

Hutcheon comments on the sort of fetishization of fact that the Memorial Museum, as reflected through the female protagonist, exemplifies: ‘The prob-lem is that historians deal with representations, with texts, which they then process. The denial of this act of processing can lead to a kind of fetishizing of the archive, making it into a substitute for the past’ (Hutcheon 2002: 83). The archive does not reveal ‘[w]hich “facts” make it into history’, or ‘whose facts’ (Hutcheon 2002: 68), and it does not invite such questions. In his more feverish interrogation of documentation, Derrida traces what he refers to as the archive’s ‘archontic power’ – literally a ruling power – which, he notes, ‘gathers the functions of unification, of identification, of classification, [and] must be paired with […] the power of consignation’ (Derrida 1996: 3). By ‘consignation’, Derrida wishes not only to convey the conventional meaning of the word – ‘to consign, to deposit’ – but also to evoke ‘the act of consign-ing through gathering together signs. Consignation aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration’ (Derrida 1996: 3). Archivization, then, aims to abol-ish ‘dissociation’, ‘heterogeneity’, ‘secret’ and other potentially disruptive elements (Derrida 1996: 3). The archive processes history through selection and synthesis, and thereby ‘produces as much as […] records the event’ (Derrida 1996: 17). This production of the event inevitably depends upon archival technology, infrastructure and investment, which together deter-mine what material is to be archived and how it is shaped in the process. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would undoubtedly be radi-cally different events today if photography and film had not been available to document them, and also if sites such as the Memorial Museum had not been constructed to house the documentation.



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In her commanding and precise regurgitation of the museum’s contents, Riva’s character dramatizes the archival drive, what Derrida terms ‘mal d’archive’: ‘[We are] in need of archives’, a need that compels us ‘to run after the archive, even if there’s too much of it […]. It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive’ (Derrida 1996: 91). The archi-val imperative is always repressive; it institutes a kind of forgetting through a series of syntheses that depend upon elision. Derrida notes that ‘consignation is never without that excessive pressure (impression, repression, suppression) of which repression […] and suppression […] are at least figures’ (Derrida 1996: 78). Consignation, that ordering of signs associated with an event into a system that ‘makes sense’, but never belonged to the event in the first place, ‘assures the possibility of memorization, of repetition, of reproduction, or of reimpression’ (Derrida 1996: 11), but at the same time requires the repres-sion of the event’s aporias, of its interminable effects, and its unnameable, or even unimaginable, particulars. In the case of the atomic bombings, the singu-larity of each death is funnelled into a grand figure; the singularity of each deformity is collapsed into a photograph. Maclear questions ‘[w]hat […] we call “evidence” when in many instances struggles for signification are perhaps all that is left’ (Maclear 1999: 69). These ‘struggles for signification’ are absent from the Memorial Museum, and prima facie from the account of Riva’s char-acter as well; this is ethically problematic because the evidentiary information does not do justice to the in- or disarticulations, the de-totalizing caesurae that suggest the inexpressible in Hiroshima: ‘Her sense of sureness and certainty are disconcerting because they can only be spoken through a generic language, which too easily obliterates the particularities of trauma’ (Maclear 1999: 148). The French actress’s methods of evidentiary consumption and reiteration, supported by the commemorative and archival systems in place, exhibit what Derrida would call hypomnetic knowing, a ‘re-memoration, recollection, consig-nation’ (Derrida 1981: 91), which here approaches delusional arrogance.

Riva’s character in these opening scenes lacks the kind of ethical sensitiv-ity that Adorno calls for in Negative Dialectics. He holds as an ethical neces-sity the recognition of an object’s singularity, whether that object is a discrete physical thing, an event, or a person. The application of a concept to an object reduces or negates the latter’s singularity. Such negation is inevitable; ethical thinking, though, would address negation, would not conceptualize without an appreciation for the concept’s inability to capture the object:

The concept of the particular is always its negation at the same time; it cuts short what the particular is and what nonetheless cannot be directly named, and it replaces this with identity. This negative, wrong, and yet simultaneously necessary moment is the stage of dialectics.

(Adorno 1973: 173)

Adorno insists that, without leaving the stage of dialectics, which would anyway be an impossible exit, we must make ‘[t]he implicit negativity [of concep-tual thinking] explicit’ (Adorno 2008: 113; original emphasis). Riva’s charac-ter seems to be unaware of the paring violence that her memorization, her conceptualization, inflicts on the particularities of the nuclear holocaust, as well as on the singularity of her Japanese lover. She neglects the ‘gap between words and the thing they conjure’ (Adorno 1973: 53), participating in the kind of uncritical, consignatory system that effaces difference and concomitantly substantiality. Adorno writes that ‘the system, the form of presenting a totality


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to which nothing remains extraneous, absolutizes the thought against each of its contents and evaporates the content in thoughts’ (Adorno 1973: 24).

Drucilla Cornell elucidates Adorno’s ethics in The Philosophy of the Limit: ‘The care for difference needs a generosity that does not attempt to grasp what is other as one’s own’ (Cornell 1992: 57). This care for difference would think against the conceptual compulsion that reduces the other to precon-ceived categories and orders. The silence encompassing Okada’s character’s own history in the film commands attention; it is disquieting, if not deafening. We learn only that his family was in Hiroshima at the time of the bomb, while he was away fighting in the war. The caesura that is the Japanese architect’s personal narrative compels viewers to consider the violence that the French actress’s positivism exacts on a man who has presumably lost his entire family to the atomic bomb. As Cornell writes, ‘the danger of certainty is that it turns against the generous impulse to open oneself up to the Other, and to truly listen, to risk the chance that we might be wrong’ (Cornell 1992: 57). By the time she meets the Japanese architect, the French actress has already formed a consummate conceit of Hiroshima’s nuclear history, and, rather than inquir-ing about his personal history as a Hiroshima native, she recounts her own newly acquired knowledge of the bombings to him. In this case, her certainty succumbs to the very danger that Cornell refers to. In Adorno’s words, Riva seeks, and attains, ‘what we have been drilled to resign ourselves to’ (Adorno 1973: 52). She is a positivist product of historiographical and commemorative traditions that offer up historical ‘evidence’, and through accessible discourses facilitate a resignation of reflection: ‘[R]esignation and delusion are ideologi-cal complements’ (Adorno 1973: 52). We see this complementarity in Riva’s character: the same methods of understanding that instil her delusion regard-ing Hiroshima simultaneously inspire her resignation of reflection. Adorno’s cutting critique of positivism compels a deep distrust in the female protago-nist’s relationship to knowledge. As he says, ‘to break off reflection, to take a

Figure 2: The giant photographs from the peace film (courtesy of Criterion).



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2. Likewise, this might be, at least in part, what drives the Japanese man’s intense desire to hear his French lover’s trauma narrative.

positivist’s pride in [one’s] own naïveté, is nothing else but thoughtless, stub-bornly conceptualized self-preservation’ (Adorno 1973: 127).

A generous reading of Riva’s character would take into consideration how her own traumatic history – the death of her German lover following the war, and her subsequent punishment for involvement with the enemy – might affect her response to other traumatic histories. Her devotion to the Hiroshima archive should not be taken as wholly ignorant of the singular-ity and difference that anti-positivist approaches to history seek to preserve; nor should her superficial acquisition of Hiroshima be taken as wholly disre-spectful. We might infer that her interest in Hiroshima as atomic bomb site is largely motivated by a drive to secure or deepen the repression her own trau-matic remains through a supplantation of suffering;2 alternatively, or simul-taneously, her approach to what she calls ‘Hiroshima’s fate’ might serve as a sort of coping mechanism, a way of elaborating and consolidating what she already knows of the atomic bombing – an event that, as she tells the Japanese man, she has ‘always wept over’.

METACINEMATIC MOTIONS AND THE PROCESS/PRODUCT ANTINOMY

The photographic makes a second appearance in Hiroshima mon amour’s visual economy during the embedded production of the peace film. Resnais portrays a disarray of giant photographs and textual snippets that have been made into portable billboards; men gather up the boards strewn on the street and carry them awkwardly away. Here we see the constructedness of photo-graphic mementos from multiple angles. A side-view exposes their thin mate-riality; back-views show how they have been attached to wooden sticks to aid in manipulation. Photographs in this scene form a cacophony of colliding images. In contrast to the carefully placed and protected photographs in the Memorial Museum, the images represented here – behind the scenes of the peace film – are not treated with respect, but rather as mere slices of card-board. Fabricated and manipulated to meet the needs of a cinematic produc-tion, the photographs are tossed aside, picked up, and shuttled around. All of this action, of course, is to be absent from the final production of the peace film, which will showcase the images, held high above the heads of their carriers, in an elaborate and formal peace parade. This ‘behind-the-scenes’ scene upsets photographic totalization; rather than enlightening portals into the past, photographs are shown as tangible fragments of the present.

In On Photography, Susan Sontag maintains that photographs give us ‘the sense that we can hold the whole world in our hands’ (Sontag 1977: 3). Hiroshima mon amour both indicates and upsets the acquisitive sense of the photograph. Holding photographs in their hands, the peace film’s crew is blinded to the world around them; the photographs are too large to see beyond; they physically subsume reality. As the camera shifts from the mess of tangible images to the French actress and Japanese architect on the outskirts of the peace film’s set, the photographs shortly follow. The conver-sation between the protagonists is interrupted as they are pushed aside into the adjacent bushes by the photographic billboards. The men carrying the photographs either neglect to see that the couple is in their path, or neglect to care. The objects of representation supply their carriers with a myopic vision, and displace the film’s lead characters. Hiroshima mon amour here points to the danger that photographs pose as a means of representation, with their


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potential to facilitate a narrowing view that subsumes alternative modes of seeing and knowing. The prevalence of photographs, both in the Memorial Museum and in the peace film, portrays the integral position of the photo-graphic as representational mode in commemorative sites. When Riva’s and Okada’s characters are overtaken by photographs, the film invokes the violence of memorial practices that embrace the photographic, while leav-ing out–and thereby renouncing the relevance of – personal expressions of memory, however these expressions might struggle and even fail to commu-nicate meaning.

As they move to leave the set of the peace film, the French actress and Japanese architect must navigate their way through an ornate peace parade; in the attempt, they get caught in its forceful current. Not one of the white-shirted marchers acknowledges their presence; the procession marches right through the female and male protagonists, separating the couple, and leaving each of them shaken and disoriented. The well-rehearsed and strictly formal-ized parade goes in one direction only, and leaves no room for contingencies. The protagonists struggle to move against its flow. Their rejection of, and by, the peace parade suggests that there is no room for them – for their stories and relationships – in the memorializing assembly, or in the commemorative genre as a whole. The procession’s violent intolerance invokes the conclu-sive, and exclusive, impetus of commemorative tropes. Maclear situates these tropes within a positivist tradition that holds ‘signs and images of trauma […] in place through a viewing relation founded on absolute certainty and order’ (Maclear 1999: 154). Through their depictions of the museum and the peace parade, Resnais and Duras demonstrate the precedence of definitive facts and photographs – of documentary ‘evidence’ – over personal narratives and reflections of process, in traditional modes of commemoration. If we go with the flow of conventional historiography and commemoration, they suggest, we risk missing the multifarious currents of visions and stories that cannot be contained in evidentiary discourses predicated on easy access.

During the shooting of the peace parade, the aforementioned disarray of photographs is presented as an orderly procession of images. As a public, commemorative production, the parade uses photographs in such a way as to slice up history and offer singular chunks for the audience to consume with little mental processing required. As Sontag asserts, ‘[d]espite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relationship to the world’ (Sontag 1977: 111). From their situation within the peace parade, the photographs are intended to speak for themselves; translating Hiroshima’s nuclear devastation into a manageable visual language for the parade’s audience, they require no explanation and invite no questions. However, by presenting the photographs in their state of ‘behind-the scenes’ disorder preceding the parade, Hiroshima mon amour calls their manageability, their truth, into question. As viewers of the film, and viewers of the parade by way of the film, we are already sensitized to the constructedness of the photo-graphs, their totalizing force having already been deconstructed before our eyes. The giant photographs traversing the peace film constitute mobile signi-fiers with an unstable signification: the images refer to past moments, but that reference is troubled by their present consumption as filmic props.

Resnais and Duras employ ‘real’ documentary material and present irrefutable historical facts, without suggesting that this material conveys truth or leads to genuine understanding. In this sense, the film composes ‘a contradictory turning to the archive and yet a contesting of its authority’



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(Hutcheon 2002: 77). In her synopsis of the screenplay, Duras refers to the film as ‘a sort of false documentary’ (Duras 1961: 10), reflecting on its uneasy relationship to the past. Hiroshima mon amour destabilizes and problema-tizes cinema itself as documentary mode, but also as representational mode in general, through its emphatic staging of the production of the film within the film. Towards the beginning of the frame film, Resnais shows the French actress and the Japanese architect in the former’s hotel room: as Okada’s character watches Riva’s put on a crisp nurse outfit, she informs him that she is acting in ‘a film about peace. What else would you expect in Hiroshima?’ she asks. The question, albeit rhetorical, provokes us to consider the film we are watching as a film in Hiroshima, and raises further self-reflexive questions: what do we expect from a film set in the city? Is there space in Hiroshima for a film about something other than peace?

The production scene of the embedded film opens with a man shouting in Japanese as an overture to the urgent, sinister music that plays through a series of short shots punctuated by jumpcuts. The frenetic construction of the peace film is ironic in its distinctive unpeacefulness, the disconnect demon-strating how a particular representation might not be at all representative of its own construction. The scene includes shots of men manipulating a reflec-tive panel on a roof, anxious onlookers poking out of windows, people paint-ing messages onto billboards on the street, a make-up artist constructing seared skin on an exposed back, and a man steering a video camera as big as he is. Showing what they do – the process of putting together the peace film – Resnais and Duras metonymically incite us to think about what is not shown. The production of the embedded film acts as a synecdoche: a view of the construction of one part of Hiroshima mon amour evokes a consideration of the construction of the film as a whole. As meta-cinema, reflecting on its own mode of representation, the film provokes viewers to think beyond the screen, outside of the final product, to the means of production that went into the creation of the film as a whole.

Although the scene of the peace film’s production occupies only a short segment of Hiroshima mon amour, the female protagonist’s nurse outfit oper-ates as a symbol of performance – of imitating, acting – that is carried through to the film’s end. Freddy Sweet argues that Riva’s double role of actor results in a ‘greater involvement with Riva as a character […] because there is the creation of an illusion that she lives outside of the celluloid world that encloses her’ (Sweet 1981: 19). Sweet suggests that the celluloid world represented within the film in effect subsumes the unrepresented celluloid world of the film. If Riva acts within the peace film, and also exists in a world outside of it – the world where her relationship with Okada unfolds – then that world exter-nal to the peace film must be the ‘real’ one; she could not be acting in both places. And so, as Sweet would have it, Riva’s role as actress within Hiroshima mon amour makes the story as a whole more realistic. I think that the French actress functions in an entirely different way in the film. Riva’s role as a role provokes a consideration of roles, acting and imitation. The meta-cinematic gesture pushes us back, rather than pulling us in, so that we see Riva’s and Okada’s characters as part of a production rather than part of a reality. The female protagonist’s nurse outfit – which she wears throughout the film, only taking it off to sleep with her Japanese lover – signifies her fabrication as a character and, metonymically, the fabrication of the entire film.

Adorno’s negative dialectics ‘calls for the self-reflection of thinking’ that would mitigate the synthesizing, totalizing drive of conceptual thought;


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3. In the original French, the line is: ‘Je te donne à oubli’, which might more literally be translated as ‘I give you to oblivion’, although ‘consign’ here clearly works, and perhaps offers a more apt translation.

‘if thinking is to be true, it must also be a thinking against itself’ (Adorno 1973: 365). Hiroshima mon amour’s representational ethic, I would argue, is rigorously Adornian. The film does not attempt to avoid the dialectical proc-ess altogether, and, after all, it offers in its conclusion a kind of conceptual synthesis. However, Resnais and Duras do not synthesize or consolidate unquestioningly. Rather, they reflect on how totalization affects difference and singularity; they indicate the remainder that the synthesis leaves out, with-out allowing that indication to paralyze the film’s own expression. Adorno suggests that the ethical work that needs to be done involves ‘reflect[ing] on the topics under discussion by […] expanding their definition so it will include the impossibility to nail them down, as well as the compulsion to conceive them’ (Adorno 1973: 212). Pursuing a synthetic logic that is never without self-critical irony, Resnais and Duras carefully integrate the contradic-tory impossibility and compulsion of thinking the other.

NAMING, ENDING, FORGETTING

Maclear commends Resnais for refraining from ‘an absolute vision of Hiroshima’ (Maclear 1999: 146); and the film does indeed demonstrate anti-positivist, deconstructivist sensibilities, which preclude the totalization or idealization of history. However, Hiroshima mon amour also concedes a prac-ticability, and even a necessity for integrationist, commemorative practices in a world that, after all, must go on. Commemoration entails a synthetic, unify-ing and diminishing remembering, a remembering that seeks to bring people together, rather than break them apart; to provide comfort rather than exac-erbate incomprehension. Commemoration, then, also entails a forgetting, a forgetting of the loneliness and particularity of each instantiation of suffering, and of the impossibility of translating nuclear devastation into a system of signs that would reveal historical truth or facilitate ‘truthful’ understanding. Going on might depend upon commemorative institutions and practices, even with – or perhaps because of – their inevitably limiting sign systems. As the Japanese architect solemnly states, in response to a joke that his French lover makes about the peace documentary, ‘Here in Hiroshima, we don’t make fun of films about peace’. As Duras writes in Hiroshima mon amour’s screenplay, ‘all of Hiroshima is there [at the parade], as it always is when the cause of world peace is at stake’ (Duaras 1961: 11). In response to an event that in its monstrosity, magnitude and eternal impact precludes imaginability, artificial and temporary closures are embraced, as means to a nominal remembering, and a substantive forgetting.

The personal testimony that the male protagonist elicits from his French lover leaves her affectively shattered, and ultimately, in an interior monologue, she ‘consign[s]’ her traumatic past ‘to oblivion’,3 a consignation she attempts to accomplish through prescriptive forgetting and formal or generic translation:

Little girl from Nevers […] this evening, I relinquish you to oblivion. […]. As it was with him, forgetting will begin with your eyes. Then, as with him, it will swallow your voice. Then, as with him, it will consume you entirely […]. You will become a song.

The ‘song’ she invokes here is analogical to the commemorative conventions that the film represents, and also analogical to the film itself. No matter how deconstructive, Hiroshima mon amour is a seamlessly edited and masterfully



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4. Caruth discusses the ‘freedom of forgetting’, as exemplified by the female protagonist’s story of Nevers: it is only when she ‘becom[es] reasonable’ that she is allowed to leave the cellar and able to carry on with her life (Caruth 1996: 33). Caruth cites and translates Guy Lecouvette on forgetting in Resnais’s work: he suggests that ‘the work of Resnais rests on one pivot: the necessity of forgetting in order to live, and the fear of forgetting’ (Caruth 1996: 122, n.6). Furthermore, Caruth refers to Sylvain Roumette’s interview with Resnais where he is asked whether ‘forgetting [is] necessary’ (Caruth 1996: 127–28, n.21 ). His response: ‘If one doesn’t forget, one can neither live nor act. […]. Forgetting must become constructive. It is necessary, on the individual plane just as on the collective plane’ (Caruth 1996: 128, n.21).

5. Gronhovd and VanderWolk view this mutual naming as a sort of ‘role-playing [which] accentuates the postmodern nature of the work’ (Gronhovd and VanderWolk 1992: 129).

self-contained artistic production. Resnais and Duras suggest that integration enables forgetting; but they also elucidate the logic of integration as a means to processing a past that overwhelms and confounds memory.4 If we insist on a diametrically anti-positivist approach to history and trauma, we over-look the invaluable ethical work that commemorative practices accomplish, as well as the respect that at least potentially accompanies participation in such practices.

In the final shots of the film, Riva melodramatically expresses a debilitat-ing fear of forgetting her Japanese lover: ‘I’m forgetting you already! Look how I’m forgetting you! Look at me!’ she screams. Her solution to the crisis of memory is to name him: ‘HI-RO-SHI-MA’ – a word that will endure; he names her likewise, by her hometown and site of her traumatic past: ‘Nevers’. Literally coming to terms with each other, both characters here exact a sort of reifying, reductive violence on the other. But there is an irony lining this final scene that pushes against its totalizing impetus, undermining the synthetic unity that the film’s ending prima facie produces. A subtle smile creeps over the French actress’s face just before she names him; and he does not negate her claim on the sign, as he does earlier in the film. Rather, mimicking her almost uncanny facial expression and affected seriousness, he participates in the game she initiates.5 The characters here seem to participate in the kind of ironic ‘clowning’ that Adorno describes:

The un-naïve thinker knows how far he remains from the object of his thinking, and yet he must always talk as if he had it entirely. This brings him to the point of clowning. He must not deny his clownish traits, least of all since they alone can give him hope for what is denied him.

(Adorno 1973: 14; emphasis added)

Figure 3: The French actress’s subtle smile (courtesy of Criterion).


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6. I would like to thank Glenn Deer for his invaluable response to an early version of this article, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their incisive readings.

The final musical sequence, which cuts in as the Japanese man names the French woman, exacerbates the faintly carnivalesque tone of the ending, with ominous staccato notes and an accelerating piano crescendo, culminating in a sustained discordant screeching chord. As Adorno writes, ‘[w]ithout aban-doning [our thought], we can think against [it]’ (Adorno 1973: 141) – through, for example, the kind of self-critical irony that the two protagonists express at the end (and also at several earlier moments) of the film, and that Resnais and Duras carry throughout Hiroshima mon amour. Cathy Caruth argues against any resolution in Hiroshima mon amour, and ‘take[s] issue with the dialectical readings of the film’, which according to her are ‘quite common in the critical literature’ (Caruth 1996: 124, n14). She notes that ‘Resnais himself commented on the tendency toward a dialectic in the film, which he suggests nonethe-less resists any form of resolution’ (Caruth 1996: 125, n14). He asserts in an interview with Michèle Firk that ‘in every sense, it is a film that wishes to be dialectical, and where there remains a perpetual contradiction’ (Caruth 1996: 125, n14). I think that Resnais and Duras hold the dialectical and its decon-struction in sustained tension, achieving (to some extent at least) closure, or synthesis, while at the same time engaging in ironic play that calls into ques-tion synthetic narrative and logic.

I would argue that an apprehension of particular particularities cannot be realized from a sustainable or even bearable subjectivity, and that perhaps this is the reality that the two protagonists accept when they ultimately acquiesce to naming, which at least on some level offers comfort and concili-ation, and perhaps the possibility of going on. When I visited Hiroshima in 2006, the city that I witnessed – the immaculate streets and pristine buildings, the children singing in the park – was irreconcilable with nuclear devasta-tion. Even six decades could not account for the disjunction between the two images I held of Hiroshima: one of annihilated wasteland, the other of shin-ing metropolis. My fellow traveller praised the city for its clean newness in comparison to other Japanese cities. I had to remind him why. When you are there, you forget; you forget even though to the rest of the world ‘Hiroshima’ signifies an event more than a city, and even if the very reason you are there is because of an interest in Hiroshima as atomic bomb site. To a ‘memory-tourist’, the sites of remembering are disconcertingly isolated; they do not pervade the city. But what would it mean if they did? Hiroshima’s present-day success as a city depended upon its rapid reconstruction following nuclear annihilation. Through this reconstruction, Hiroshima has established a position as a thriving centre of industry, technology, and higher learning. While the city exceeds its station as atomic bomb victim and its circulation as metonymy for devastation, Hiroshima nonetheless continues to address its history, maintaining an impassioned and internationally recognized commit-ment to peace.6

REFERENCES

Adorno, T. (1973), Negative Dialectics (trans. E. B. Ashton), New York: Seabury Press.

—— (2008), Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/1966 (ed. R. Tiedemann and trans. R. Livingstone), Cambridge: Polity.

Caruth, C. (1996), ‘Literature and the Enactment of Memory’, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, pp. 25–56.



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College Happenings (2007),‘28 Most Cliche Dorm Room Posters’, College Happenings, www.collegehappenings.com/college/28-most-cliche-dorm-room-posters/. Accessed 2 December 2009.

Cornell, D. (1992), The Philosophy of the Limit, New York: Routledge.____ Derrida, J. (1996), Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (trans. E. Prenowitz),

Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (1981), ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, Dissemination (ed. and trans. B. Johnson), Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, pp. 63–156. Duras, M. (1961), ‘Synopsis’, Hiroshima mon amour (trans. R. Seaver), New

York: Grove, pp. 8–13.Gronhovd, A.-M. and VanderWolk, W. C. (1992), ‘Memory as Ontological

Disruption: Hiroshima Mon Amour as Postmodern Work’, in M. Cranston (ed.), In Language and in Love: Marguerite Duras: The Unspeakable, Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, pp. 119–38.

Hutcheon, L. (2002), The Politics of Postmodernism, New York: Routledge.Kristeva, J. (1989), Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (trans. L. S. Roudiez),

NewYork: Columbia University Press.Maclear, K. (1999), Beclouded Visions: Hiroshima-Nagasaki and the Art of

Witness, New York: SUNY Press.Moses, J. W. (1987), ‘Vision Denied in Night and Fog and Hiroshima Mon

Amour’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 15: 3, pp. 159–63.Sontag, S. (1977), On Photography, New York: Dell.Sweet, F. (1981), The Film Narratives of Alain Resnais, Ann Arbor: UMI

Research.

SUGGESTED CITATION

Varsava, N. (2011), ‘Processions of trauma in Hiroshima mon amour: Towards an ethics of representation’, Studies in French Cinema 11: 2, pp. 111–123, doi: 10.1386/sfc.11.2.111_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS

Nina Varsava is a graduate student in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and currently a visiting researcher at Stanford. Her interests revolve around ethics and contemporary litera-ture, in particular bio- and eco-ethics, and the ethics of representation. Her research has appeared in scholarly journals in the United States and Europe, and her creative writing and journalism have appeared in various Canadian publications.

Contact: Department of English, University of British Columbia, 397 – 1873 East Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1.E-mail: [email protected]



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