hiroshima, mon amour

yesterday, i watched alain resnais' masterpiece of a movie, his first feature film- a love story set in the most unlikely of places- hi-ro-shi-ma. as the movie progresses, we understand that it is a perfect place to fall in love, especially of the hopeless, doomed kind and any personal tragedy is outshadowed by the tragedy that befell the city in 1945, one that continues to exist despite the city having been resurrected. the opening shot of the arms of entwined lovers covered with a layer of ash that continues to fall slowly and softly like snow finally gives way to a documentary like walk through the events of hiroshima narrated by the film's unnamed heroine. we are shown impassive faces in spotlessly clean hospitals, legs of zombie like hordes of japanese people walking the aisles of a museum and viewing almost surreal objects (a bicycle melted into a pretzel, a bouquet of caps), images of horror- of peeled skin and vaporized bodies and mutilated faces and also signs of life- ants and earthworms crawling out of the earth on day 2. alain was asked to originally make a documentary but after having watched the ones the japanese had made commented that there was nothing left for him to make and asked marguerite duras to write a script with a love story set in hiroshima, a script he would strictly adhere to. in many ways, hiroshima mon amour is a story about remembrance and forgetting, of the unraveling of time, of transference and of catharsis. along with rashomon and citizen kane, it brilliantly uses flashbacks (something which is so obvious and banal today but was relatively uncommon then) to reconstruct the heroine's past which we learn was another tragic love story, l'amour premiere, that most powerful of loves, to a german officer who is killed by a sniper minutes before they meet and dies in her arms.