HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR: TRAUMA & MEMORY
Over a decade after the Second World War — while many of the people of France began to reflect on the traumatic memories of this global conflict — the nation was simultaneously grappling with a colonial war, the Franco-Algerian War (1954–1962). During this time, a film that initially had restrictions imposed on it due to its contentious subject matter, debuted alongside the novelle vague cultural trend at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival.
A collaboration between Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), provides a depiction of the traumas caused by violent conflict through the exploration of a love affair, in post-war Hiroshima, between a Japanese architect and a French actress who share their lived experiences of the Second World War.
The poetic way in which the story is presented provides a digestible narration of the horror, devastation, pain and suffering associated with the events of Hiroshima and the Nazi occupation — that if addressed directly — might not have made it onto the screens in a time of such political and national instability for one of the world’s most powerful nation.
A glimpse of the opening scene and we immediate see that although the film was intended as a love story, its temporal and spatial characteristics effectively compose the history and representation of traumatic wartime memories rooted within its cultural context.
The surrealism of two bodies intertwining under a layer of ash. Then a sequence of documentary style footage overlaid with a voiceover of the woman conceiving of what she has witnessed in Hiroshima and the man negating the woman’s experiences by politely insisting that she saw nothing. Her experiences, perceived to exist subjectively over his reality, diverts the need for him to re-examine his association to the event; resulting in the internalisation or repression of the actuality of his memories.
While the woman and man’s individual memories of the events differ, their experiences formulate a multi-dimensional representation of this historical event. A memory that exists outside the social parameters and the collective consciousness, but is important nonetheless, for its manifestation in the public sphere helps to shape social memories by bringing to surface repressed traumatic memories on an individual and collective level that require evaluation and exploration into its meaning to overcome the trauma.
In this respect, the woman’s perspective is the central focus in the film as it is her memory and trauma, that is repressed, forgotten, and remembered, and her experiences that uniquely connect and contextualises multiple wars. The woman’s verbalisation of her traumatic memories is an essential step in the process of confronting her past and dealing with the trauma.
The use of flashbacks where it is revealed that the woman’s former lover is an enemy of France, offers a view into the woman’s struggle to overcome the guilt, shame, and the loss she has experienced in witnessing the death of her former lover and the undignified events that followed for women who were accused of ‘sexual collaboration’ during the German occupation of France. Significantly, this included the execution of the tondue practice of shaving women’s hair for the purpose of public humiliation.
Flashbacks can also intimate the returning of repressed traumatic memories. This cinematic technique is shown in a scene where the woman observes (from a distance) her Japanese lover laying on the bed faced down and hand twitching. This is contrasted with a similar shot of a past event where the woman’s former lover is laying on the ground lifeless but the hand identically twitching.
In this example, it is understood that the two spatially separated events and its parallel manifestation have in fact stimulated and retrieved memories that were forgotten and now remembered. For the woman, remembering the past has brought to light traumas that are embedded deep within, not yet healed, and persisting in the present.
Hiroshima’s representation of wartime trauma is an important cultural site of memory and embodiment of the collective memory. It provokes viewers to deeply look into the meanings and memories associated with violent conflicts, provides a uniquely feminine perspective on memory and trauma, and its links to multiple wars establishes cultural connections and stimulates a global awareness of the impacts of historical traumas.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dudai, R. (2014), Trauma in translation: Crossing the boundaries between psychoanalysis and film, The journal for movies and mind, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 41–60.
McCormack, J (2011), Social Memories in (post) colonial France: Remembering the Franco-Algerian. Journal of Social History, vol. 44, no. 4, pp. 1129–1138.
Moshen, C. (1998), Place, memory and subjectivity, in Marguerite Duras’ Hiroshima mon amour, Romanic Review, vol. 89, no. 4, pp. 567–582.
Mucci, C. (2014), Trauma, healing and reconstruction of truth, American Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 74, no. 1, pp. 31–47.
Sanos, S. (2016), ‘My Body was aflame with His Memory’: War, Gender and Colonial Ghosts in Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Gender & History, vol. 28, no.3, pp. 728–753.
