Hiroshima Mon Amour

The award-winning screenplay for the classic film the New York Post hailed as “overwhelming . . . a motion picture landmark.” One of the most influential works in the history of cinema, Alain Renais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour gathered international acclaim upon its release in 1959 and was awarded the International Critics’ Prize at the Cannes Film festival and the New York Film Critics’ Award. Ostensibly the story of a love affair between a Japanese architect and a French actress visiting Japan to make a film on peace, Hiroshima Mon Amour is a stunning exploration of the influence of war on both Japanese and French culture and the conflict between love and inhumanity.

Audacious and genre-defying, Black and Blue is steeped in melancholy, in the feeling of being blue, or, rather, black and blue, with all the literality of bruised flesh. Roland Barthes and Marcel Proust are inspirations for and subjects of Carol Mavor's exquisite, image-filled rumination on efforts to capture fleeting moments and to comprehend the incomprehensible. At the book's heart are one book and three films—Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, Chris Marker's La Jetée and Sans soleil, and Marguerite Duras's and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour—postwar French works that register disturbing truths about loss and regret, and violence and history, through aesthetic refinement. Personal recollections punctuate Mavor's dazzling interpretations of these and many other works of art and criticism. Childhood memories become Proust's "small-scale contrivances," tiny sensations that open onto panoramas. Mavor's mother lost her memory to Alzheimer's, and Black and Blue is framed by the author's memories of her mother and effort to understand what it means to not be recognized by one to whom you were once so known.

Released in 1959, Alain Renais's film, Hiroshima Mon Amour, was awarded the International Critics' Prize at the Cannes Film festival and the New York Film Critics' Award. The story of a love affair between a Japanese architect and a French actress visiting Japan to make a film on peace, Hiroshima Mon Amour is also an exploration of the influence of war on both Japanese and French culture and the conflict between love and humanity. This book contains the complete script of the film, as well as Miss Duras' original synopsis and notes.

Jacket description/back: One of the most influential works in the history of cinema, Alain Renais's Hiroshima Mon Amour gathered international acclaim upon its release in 1959 and was awarded the International Critics' Prize at the Cannes Film festival and the New York Film Critics' Award. Ostensibly the story of a love affair between a Japanese architect and a French actress visiting Japan to make a film on peace, Hiroshima Mon Amour is a stunning exploration of the influence of war on both Japanese and French culture and the conflict between love and humanity.

National, disciplinary, and linguistic boundaries all play a role in academic study and nowhere is this more apparent than in traditional humanities scholarship surrounding the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How would our understanding of this seminal event change if we read Japanese and Euro-American texts together and across disciplines? In Producing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Yuko Shibata juxtaposes literary and cinematic texts usually considered separately to highlight the “connected divides” in the production of knowledge on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, shedding new light on both texts and contexts in the process. Shibata takes up two canonical works—American journalist John Hersey’s account, Hiroshima, and French director Alain Resnais’ avant-garde film, Hiroshima Mon Amour—that are traditionally excluded from study in Japanese literature and cinema. By examining Hersey’s Hiroshima in conjunction with The Bells of Nagasaki (Nagai Takashi) and Children of the A-Bomb (Osada Arata), both Japanese bestsellers, Shibata demonstrates how influential Hersey’s Hiroshima has been in forging the normative narrative of the hibakusha experience in Japan. She also compares Hiroshima Mon Amour with Kamei Fumio’s documentary, Still It’s Good to Live, whose footage Resnais borrowed to depict atomic bomb victimhood. Resnais’ avant-garde masterpiece, she contends, is the palimpsest of Kamei’s surrealist documentary; both blur the binaries between realist and avant-garde representations. Reading Hiroshima Mon Amour in its historical context enables Shibata to offer an entirely new analysis of Renais’ work. She also delineates how Japanese films came to produce the martyrdom narrative of the hibakusha in the early postwar period. Producing Hiroshima and Nagasaki allows us to trace the complex and entangled political threads that link representations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, reminding us that narratives and images deploy different effects in different places and times. This highly original approach establishes a new kind of transnational and transpacific studies on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and raises the possibility of a comparative area studies to match the age of world literature.