Hiroshima Mon Amour (a Study of Memory/Remembering/Forgetting)

For a while, I've been invested in making (somewhat) stable distinctions and delineations between memory, remember, and forgetting. My personal systems and approaches have been invested in investigating how remembering is a distinct entity from memory, and that remembering, through the pool of memory, is a construction; a process of producing tangibility in a void that otherwise wouldn't have substance. Memory, as a resource, is uninterrupted, continuous, and self-sufficient. There is an amount of self-conscious solidarity that Memory has built into it; an ability to exist without the need for persons to remember. Remembering, perhaps, is how we shape Memory to fit our personal narratives, which as happenstance or oppositional to Memory itself. That is, Remembering is an interruption, discontinuous, and reliant on outside resources (usually documents of our past like photographs, letters, or other memorabilia). One way, or perhaps the only way in different forms, that we are able to accommodate Memory through Remembering is by means of embodiment. We inhabit Memory through Remembering. Memory is always there, but we cannot always Remember it. The substance of Memory has so many layers of abstraction that Remembering is always, inherently going to be false, and although Remembering is a testament to its parent, it's tribute is always obscured.

Alain Resnais seemed to understand this quite clearly in his portrait of the devices we use to Remember. It is fascinating how in Hiroshima Mon Amour he investigates the mechanisms of memory in times of (post)trauma. Nevers (although the character is names Elle) embodies her memories of madness and love by vicariously reliving her forbidden love through Hiroshima (Lui). But I shouldn't continue to give a synopsis, but instead discuss how the powerful elements of this film occur through the actual film technique. The post-Eisentein stylistic use of montage is used to resemble a continuity of distance places, a relationship between forgotten places. But in the opening sequence the montage not only expounds these kind of hyperlinked relationships, but also how these relationships are trivial and amount to nothing. "I've seen the hosiptal of Hiroshima," "You've seen nothing."

The power in this opening sequence, the forceful embodiment of the city renders the memories useless. Resnais shows us that to Remember is to destroy memory, and in affect, forget. Nevers tells us that to try and remember more and more enables us to lose those thoughts forever. That in essence, Remembering is forgetting. To settle the past, to reconcile our personal histories, we must forget them, both individually and collectively/culturally (thus Hiroshima). One of the fascinating things is that Nevers has to embody here memories through a new love. She speaks of the dead as living, and speaks of herself (alive) as being dead. She speaks to Hiroshima as if her were her past, alive, moving, breathing, empowering her will, eating her alive. "You're good for me, you're destroying me."

Another incredible undertaking that the movie attempts to make is the process of Forgetting (as I've mentioned a little bit above). Resnais does a beautiful job of showing how we have to remember things, in order to justify our personal interactions. But in these moments of justification, we forget the original purpose for remembering. We know that we must remember, but the reasons for those Memories become superseded by the act of Remembering. We are forever forgetting. But perhaps I can suggest (or Resnais suggests), that Remembering allows us to forget, and in doing so we are able to make new memories. Now Nevers will remember her old love again (perhaps driving her back to madness), but not as she had originally remembered him, but as a by-product of telling his story to a new love. In other words, her first love has now been folded into another love, creating a string of memories tied together by a city, by a moment.

I think the rush of Memory, and the pursuit of Remembering, is poetically outlined in the scene of the march/protest that occurs during the film that Nevers is involved in. Hiroshima and Nevers are struggling to get out of a dense crowd of people, and accidentally get swept into the marching Japanese men that are carrying signs of protest about the stockpiling of nuclear weapons. In this moment the couple attempts to go against the current, as if trying to retrace steps through a past. Hiroshima starts to show a sever look of anguish as Nevers seems complacent, and almost seems to be enjoying this struggle against the current. This reflection upon this scene strikes me as a core element of the film, not only from a character development standpoint, but also from a poetic illustration of two navigational routes through Memory, as well as showing the binaries involved in Memory and Remember; both coexisting in the same realm, but going against each other, and unable to quite reconcile there differences.

Near the end, another amazing montage sequence occurs when Nevers is walking through the streets before her departure. The overwhelming neon is interspersed with the stones of France, the architectures melt into each other, although each are distinct and could be considered polar opposites of each other. The movie starts to show how its own contradictions are what make it so delicate and beautiful. Enemies as lovers, "the morality of others" as "immoral," Power as surrender, War and Peace; these binaries can allow for grey areas, and that they also reflect the relationship between Memory and Remembering.