Tu n'as rien vu à Hiroshima: Desire, Spectatorship and the Vaporized Subject in Hiroshima Mon Amour

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Notes

¹All screenplay quotations are from Hiroshima mon amour: scenario et dialogue by Marguerite Duras; Paris: Gallimard, 1986.

²In her article “Destruction and Reconstruction in Hiroshima mon amour,” Godelieve Merken-Spaas points out that “Resnais breaks from linear structure and sequential development. The sequence is no longer the semantic substructure of the filmic narrative; Resnais interweaves film fragments which are not recognizable as present moments and flashbacks. Sound and image are not necessarily synchronized; narrative units are suspended abruptly and unexpected takes inserted” (245).

³Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, in her very interesting essay “Film Readers of the Text” (Diacritics, Spring 1985) talks about the film in terms of “the operation of transference by which atomic violence changes into atomized writing” (19).

⁴John W. Moses, in his brief but very interesting article “Vision Denied in Night and Fog and Hiroshima Mon Amour,” also points out this ambiguity. He describes the series of “non narrative links”—such as the cut between the woman's hand caressing the man's body and the shriveled hand of a bomb victim that thematically and visually connect the past and present (163).

⁵Moses also states that “from the first, Resnais undermines the power of his images. The opening paradox initiates the subversion by introducing counterpoint between soundtrack and image track. Subsequent exchanges between the two voices continue this counterpoint” (163).

⁶The cross is, of course, suggestive of far more than modern medicine. The film is also a sustained critique of traditional Christian morality, which becomes absurd in the context of Hiroshima. Both protagonists, but especially the woman, live outside conventional morality; it is sexual moralism, combined with nationalism, which forces the Frenchwoman into the dissolution of self in the cellar at Nevers.

⁷The parallels between the river scenes in Hiroshima mon amour and the final Po delta segment of Paisà are striking.

⁸Bert Cardullo, in his essay “The Symbolism of Hiroshima mon amour,” makes the point that this linguistic substitution of the Japanese man for the German soldier, has a denaturalizing effect, encouraging us to see the film on a symbolic rather than a literal level. He also argues that the relationship between the Frenchwoman and the Japanese man represents the difficult rapprochement between former enemies after the war (39–41).

⁹Riva is the name of the actress who plays the woman.

¹⁰The “disorder” here also refers, on a more prosaic level, to the social conditions in Vichy France immediately after the Germans departed.

¹¹The reference of “son” is ambiguous here. Does it refer to Nevers, which has previously been “addressed” as “tu,” in the second person, rather than the third? Or is it a reference to a “him,” the German soldier? What memory is it that is so crucial here?

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SIOBHAN S. CRAIG

Siobhan Craig is assistant professor of English and teaches film and literary theory at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Her current project is a book, entitled “Rubble Trouble: History, Subjectivity and Desire in the Ruins of Fascism,” which, through the symbolic detritus of war, explores the crises of historiography, epistemology and subjectivity in the films of several European directors.