[On July 16,
1945, the first
atomic bomb was tested at Trinity Site, New Mexico, an explosion with
numerous aftereffects and meanings. This week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of
such Trinity connections, leading up to this special weekend post on a foreign
film that’s also profoundly American.]
On two ways an
overtly foreign film sheds light on American histories.
The groundbreaking
French New Wave film Hiroshima Mon Amour
(1959) may be the most non-American text on which I’ve ever focused in this
space. Directed by French filmmaker Alain
Resnais, best known for his Holocaust epic Night and
Fog (1955), with a screenplay by French novelist Marguerite
Duras, and telling the story of the Hiroshima atomic bombing and its
aftermath through the lenses of a French actress and a Japanese architect,
including flashbacks to her wartime experiences in France and his during and
after the bombing, the film is hugely historical, international, and thoughtful,
relevant and meaningful to any viewer to be sure. But it nonetheless feels as
if there are literally dozens of critical and theoretical lenses that could be
applied to it before an AmericanStudies perspective would come to mind.
Yet there are
both specific and overarching connections we can make between this foreign film
and American histories, without even having to engage (as I hope I have all
week) with the atomic bomb’s manifold national resonances. On the specific
level, the film’s flashbacks for its female protagonist (known only as She)
highlight the ways in which her individual experiences of the war in France
(and particularly her relationship with a German soldier and its destructive
consequences) defy easy national categorizations and divisions. Those
flashbacks, in turn, allow her to connect with the Hiroshima victims in a subtle
but powerful way (that I won’t spoil here), adding one more international border-crossing
to her identity and the film. I’ve
written before about how fully war both depends on and constructs such national
categories and divisions, and about the catastrophic results of such
constructions (such as the Japanese
internment, to name only one example). The more we can consider instead
experiences like those of the Revolutionary
era loyalists, who crossed their war’s boundaries just as the film’s
heroine does, the more of a full and accurate sense of war we’ll have in our
collective memories.
On a more
overarching level, Duras’s
screenplay offers a sustained and nuanced engagement with the conjoined
themes of history and memory, and more exactly with how much the past’s
presence—individual and collective, which are in the film not two separate
threads but one intertwined pattern—impacts and shapes every part of our
present, even (if not especially) our most intimate relationships. That concept
is of course obvious and inescapable in Hiroshima, where not only the bomb’s
destructions but the half-life
of its radiation means that the past will be literally present (if seemingly
not, as that linked article notes, overtly damaging) for hundreds of years to
come. But the film makes clear that the past’s echoes are just as strong for
its French protagonist, and that indeed she is profoundly affected by both her
own personal and national pasts and by those she has encountered in her new
city. Anyone who has read this blog for even a few posts knows how much work I
believe we Americans have to do when it comes not only to engaging with our
histories (particularly
our darkest ones), but also and just as importantly grappling with all
their effects and meanings in our present identities and communities. I can
think of few texts that portray these themes more evocatively and successfully
than Hiroshima Mon Amour.
Next series
starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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