Editing, Mon Amour by Craig Hammill
Last Thursday, we screened the 1959 French new wave classic Hiroshima, Mon Amour written by Marguerite Duras and directed by Alain Resnais.
For anyone who has never seen this gut punch masterclass in editing, non-linear storytelling, stream of consciousness moviemaking, Hiroshima, Mon Amour tells the story of two lovers-a French actress and a Japanese architect-across the two days or so of their brief affair in Hiroshima, Japan.
However, in a very immediate sense, we know right away this is not just a movie about an intense love affair (though it is that). We get a near documentary opening about Hiroshima, the atom bomb, the unimaginable horrors the act of dropping the bomb unleashed, all scored to the voice overs of our two leads.
Throughout the entire movie in fact, these voice overs and occasional on-screen dialogues, serve as psychological pinballs and subconscious underground rivers taking the story backwards and forwards in time.
We learn that the Woman still suffers from trauma after her teenage love affair with a WWII German soldier in occupied France. The tragic result lead to his death and her status as an outcast in her own small provincial town.
The movie even opens on mysterious imagery that is at once poetic and sexual and profound and disturbing: entwined naked bodies and limbs that glisten either with sweat or atomic ash or both.
Duras’ and Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour is one of those rare movies that manages to be abstract, poetic, documentary like, and propulsive in its narrative all at once. Many movies are mostly poetry or mostly prose. This mid-twentieth century gem somehow manages to be both.
Re-watching the movie, this Programmer marveled at the ambition of the picture and was stunned even more at the success of execution of the picture. Director Resnais had spent over a decade as a documentary moviemaker (including his masterful unsettling poetic Night and Fog about World War II concentration camps, another unimaginable topic). His approach here is to make sure we get a real three dimensional sense of Hiroshima and the small provincial French town that are our two main locations.
And though Resnais and Duras are constantly cross cutting between the past and the present, the macro and the micro, the abstract and the concrete, the story is easy to follow because of the mastery of the moviemakers. We watch two lovers who know their affair must be and will be brief. They open up to each other but they also, ultimately, move on from each other.
One almost feels as if the movie is a kind of Before Sunrise for the tragic, the history obsessed, the trauma touched, the unsettled. And that is what it is. We wander through nocturnal Hiroshima with our two lovers until they seem to be the only two people left awake in a city that has gone to the land of the dead and come back already.
The possible key cinematic tool here is the editing. Movies have a specific special ability to manifest thought, the subconscious, and association through sight and sound and dialectic comparison of shots that no other art form can quite do. It is the unique characteristic of cinema that even 130 years into its existence feels often neglected or not used to the fullest.
But in Hiroshima Mon Amour, we, as an audience, are treated to one of the pinnacle achievements of editing as an art form in all of movies. It is fascinating that the French specifically in the late 50’s and 60’s (as represented most by the works of Resnais and Jean Luc Goddard) along with the Russians of the 1920’s (Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov) did the most to push and expand the boundaries of how moviemakers could think and conceive of the cut, the edit.
For example, here in Hiroshima Mon Amour, the first ten minutes use the counterpoint of the lovers’ voice overs as they flirtatiously and seriously talk, disagree, debate with images of the atrocities, radiation poisoning, deformities, destruction of the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima.
Later as a kind of rhyme or counterpoint to this stunning sequence in the macro, the lovers’ voice over, specifically the woman’s voice over (as the movie becomes more and more about the woman’s individual trauma as contrasted with the man’s societal trauma) focuses on her doomed love affair. And again we get a contrapuntal, musical editing that shows her descent into madness and alienation after her German lover is killed as a teenager contrasted with her more steely resolve and defensiveness in the 1958 present day with her Japanese lover.
Writing about such sequences ultimately is like trying to describe a meal or sexual experience. . .at some point one must experience it for themselves.
For all the moviemakers out there, you will learn immeasurably from Hiroshima Mon Amour. There are vast lands beyond the fog of the potential of cinema we haven’t even traversed yet.
Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.