A Film Canon

If Night And Fog dealt with an historical event that eluded cinematic remembrance, Hiroshima, Mon Amour deals with an event that totally defies it. As a result, the slight, impressionistic narrative - a woman (Emmanuelle Riva) and man (Eiji Okada) have a brief, melancholy affair in post-war Hiroshima - feels like a mere extrapolation of, or allegory for, the documentary that Resnais failed to make. This occupies roughly the first third of the film, evoking Hiroshima as a zone where time no longer exists, memory is impossible, and representation has been exhausted and eviscerated by an unending present, in place of which Resnais proposes a ritualistic formalism, devoid of any claim to linearity, narrativity or temporality, and suggests cinema as its most appropriate vehicle, if only because it has the most mnemonic qualifications to jettison. Not only does this equate responding to Hiroshima with escaping classical cinema - the woman flees the film about Hiroshima she is working on, only to end up with the man in a replica of Harry's Bar - but it translates Night And Fog's staccato disjunctions into a relationship in which every utterance partakes of the disorienting obliterations of post-orgasmic conversation; or, alternatively, in which neither party can remember the other in their presence, let alone in the midst of consummation ("Your eyes are green, aren't they?"). This is enhanced by Marguerite Duras' hypnotic, repetitive and, above all, concrete script, as well as the woman's eventual identification of the affair with 'Nevers'; the fluid, shimmering, spectatorial cinemascape that first betrayed her belief in the coherence of time, to release her moments before the first bomb dropped.