Scene Analysis Of Hiroshima Mon Amour

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Scene Analysis of Hiroshima Mon Amour
Hiroshima Mon Amour directed by Alain Resnais is recognized as one of the most important drivers of the French New Wave. A story concerns love and war, suffering and forgetting. The story depicts a French actress and a Japanese architect who fall in love in Hiroshima, a city that suffered an atomic bomb attack and rebuilt after the cataclysm of WWII. With the development of their relationship, the dusty memory of women is released gradually. It is also the story of two lovers who face similarly inescapable histories. The director uses several cinematic techniques like parallel montage，non-linear narrative，documentary style shooting，the plentiful use of dialogue to tell the story making up of memories and reality.
The director organizes the dialogue through parallel montage where there is a large number of short shots are put together with the elements condensed to synthesize places and history. After the Lui tells his French lover “You have not seen anything in Hiroshima", but she answers that she saw everything including the hospital and the museum. The man insinuates everything she had seen represented the scattered fragments of reality. The reconstructed images and archive images of the tragedy follow one another highlighting the theme of the catastrophe to the audience (Mohsen 571). As such, the film emphasizes about the need for love given that human beings can destroy with their actions as is the case of Hiroshima.
The story unfolds in a non-linear manner where there are continuous allusions to the war yet the film also shows shots of peaceful Hiroshima while here are flashbacks and narrations. We know about the terrible story of Nevers from the woman’s perspective and recollection of her memory, but still Hiroshima is mysterious despite archival images and present day reconstructions. The story that can be continuously questioned based on the accuracy of the protagonists. It is clear that the woman suffered while in France, but the story goes back and forth in the past and present that there is no clear plot development. However, by telling the story in a circular manner delves into the lives of the two lovers in two cities, where there is transition from a traumatic past to the future.
The director chose to alternate images, such focusing on different places in Hiroshima like a documentary, the two lovers, reconstructed images of the Hiroshima catastrophe and the archive images of the tragedy. When focusing on the documentary-like scenes the camera is directed towards the museum’s objects and other images, the protagonist’s voice addressing the lover and audience, which explains the images at the hospital and the museum of Hiroshima. When the film focuses on the city this shows how the different places and how people are connected to history. Resnais tells the story of Hiroshima through arrival messages, dialogue between the lovers and fictionalized footage of the place, the documentary-like shots allow him to explore how the place changed Later on in the film Elle state...