FRENCH NEW WAVE
Introduction
The 400 Blows, François Truffaut 1959
Hiroshima mon amour, Alain Resnais 1959
Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard 1960
Cleo de 5 à 7, Agnes Varda 1961
Hiroshima mon amour
(Alain Resnais 1959)
One could hardly find a better illustration of the tremendous diversity of New Wave films than by comparing the two that Minister of Culture André Malraux deemed 'good' and 'very good'. Marked by an improvisational tone, Truffaut's first feature is a semi-autobiographical work that deals with the 'little incidents' constituting the fabric of an adolescent's life. Hiroshima mon amour, instead, is a meticulously structured and highly theatrical work that opens on the larger stage of history: it deals not only with the so-called années noires of the Occupation but also with the horrors unleashed when the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Whereas the heart-felt humanism of Les Quatre cents coups arouses the viewer's empathy, the complex narrative of Hiroshima mon amour distances the viewer even as it demands his/her intellectual participation.
To these obvious differences, moreover, must be added another. While Les Quatre cents coups clearly blew a breath of fresh air into what had become the state of French cinema, at the same time it also harked back to earlier films such as Zéro de conduite and Boudu sauve des eaux. Its portrait of children, in particular, prompted comparisons with directors such as Vigo and Rossellini. In the case of Hiroshima mon amour, however, no antecedents came to mind.
Set in Hiroshima, the film depicts a passionate affair between a Japanese man and a young French actress who has come to Hiroshima to make a film in the cause of world peace. The strong desire and love the woman feels for the Japanese man calls forth long-hidden memories of an earlier love affair. For the first time in her life, she tells someone about that earlier passion. Her memories are conveyed not only though what she says but, above all, by flashback sequences. Set in her hometown of Nevers in France, these sequences - which are brief and mysterious at the beginning of the film - gradually intrude upon and eclipse the scenes that unfold in the present. The tale they tell is one of love and transgression, of grief and death.
If Hiroshima mon amour had no visible precedents, it was at least partly because of its intricate mixture of private drama and historical trauma. Penetrated by the ashes of 'atomic death ... and the sweat of love fulfilled', the opening sequence suggests the very personal and dramatically unconventional mixture of documentary (the traces of ash deposited by the atomic bomb) and fiction (the passionate love affair between the Japanese man and the French woman) at the core of the film. In part, this mixture was the result of the collaboration between Duras, known for her novels, and Resnais, known for his documentaries. But it also suggests Resnais' unconventional approach to documentary as he turns his film into a kind of meditation on the nature of representation, the very meaning of the 'document', and the ways in which history is 'documented'. Here, the spectre of conventional documentary or what critic Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier calls the 'documentary illusion' is explicitly evoked - and rejected - within the film itself. The film the young French actress has come to make in Hiroshima is, presumably, the kind of conventional documentary - one that uses the city as a background to document and recreate the terrible aftermath of the bomb - that Resnais had never wanted to make.
But what kind of film can be made about Hiroshima? How can events that resist or defy understanding and representation be documented and represented? Resnais had already posed this question explicitly in his 1955 work about the concentration camps, Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog). But now - taking us to the mixture of documentary and fiction that pervades the film - in Hiroshima mon amour he places it within a fictional context. The opening dialogue between the lovers - in the course of which the Japanese man repeatedly asks the woman what she has 'seen' in Hiroshima - is, in effect, a discussion about the very impossibility of words. For even as he shows us the 'traces' of horror, he reminds us that they are merely the 'shadow' of what occurred. Evoking events that could hardly be more 'real', he takes care to banish any illusion of realism.
As if to underscore Resnais' adamant refusal to 'recreate' a world that defies knowledge and understanding, everything about the film seems designed to keep us at a distance, to remind us that what we are seeing is not 'real'. Just as the incantatory and repetitive language of the lovers has little in common with the cadences of normal speech, they themselves bear little resemblance to the psychologically developed characters of most films. Known only as 'he' and 'she' throughout the film, they are, rather, the very embodiment of historical experience and suffering.
Introduction
The 400 Blows, François Truffaut 1959
Hiroshima mon amour, Alain Resnais 1959
Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard 1960
Cleo de 5 à 7, Agnes Varda 1961
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