Cinematic Free Indirect Style: Represented Memory in Hiroshima mon amour

Abstract

Cinematic Free Indirect Style:Represented Memory in Hiroshima mon amour Leah Anderst (bio) He: You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing. She: I saw everything. Everything. —Duras 151 These opening lines of Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour inaugurate the film's focus on vision and highlight its distrust of vision as a form of knowledge. She, a French actress, a tourist about to depart, wants to see Hiroshima. She wants to know the city, the remains of its traumatic history; and the monuments it has erected to preserve that history. He, a Japanese architect living in Hiroshima, knows that she cannot "see" the city, cannot know its past through her vision. And so he disputes her vision of Hiroshima; he disputes her knowledge of his city and his past. "From the first moments of Hiroshima mon amour, therefore, the central epistemological question of the film is laid out for us: how and what can we 'know,' through the epistemological instrument of the gaze" (Craig 27). Film narrates by "seeing" scenes and images, and it narrates with sound and with editing. Hiroshima mon amour interrogates not just seeing but also cinematic agency and narration, especially narrative representation of memory and history. This film narrates memory, and it narrates history. In the fabric of its narration, however, in its use of cinematic free indirect style, Hiroshima mon amour creates moments of "plural narration," moments of dual or multi-visioned seeing where narrative agency becomes uncertain, and the film thereby dramatizes the difficulty of capturing history and memory through narrative. Hiroshima mon amour tells the story of the brief love affair between an unnamed Japanese architect played by Eiji Okada and Emmanuelle Riva's unnamed actress on her final day shooting a film that takes place in Hiroshima. The film opens with a [End Page 358] fifteen-minute prefatory sequence, a series of scenes that juxtapose close-up images of the lovers' bodies embracing with images of Hiroshima. The two characters speak over the Hiroshima images, and their voices are "flat and calm, as if reciting" (Duras 15). With its combination of voice-over narration, documentary and fictional images, and a score that at times complements the images and at other times conflicts with them, this opening takes advantage of cinema's multiple tracks to move between perspectives and distinct registers of discourse. This opening establishes the multiple cinematic perspectives that will "see" and narrate this film. The first portion of the opening sequence details what Riva saw while visiting Hiroshima: a hospital, a museum visited four times, and a public square. The image track matches her slow and deliberate voice-over narration. We see the hospital, the museum, and the square while she describes them in voice-over. Among these images are short intercut scenes of the lovers' bodies. Following a shot of the hospital corridor, following an image of Peace Square outside the museum, following explanations and ephemera related to the dropping of the bomb, and following reenactments and archival newsreels documenting the bomb's immediate aftermath, the scene cuts to extreme close-up shots of the intertwined arms of the two lovers. Complementing this visual return is a corresponding return on the sound track. This opening sequence begins with a slow, melancholy series of notes that becomes the musical "theme" of Riva and Okada's relationship. Each time the image cuts away from Riva's descriptions of Hiroshima and back to their lovemaking, the sound track marks the same change, even if only for the duration of two or three notes. In one of the newsreels of this opening, injured children and adults receive care in a crowded hospital, and Riva's voice-over narration remains present over these images. Nurses and doctors lightly dab the victims' deep wounds and burnt skin with small pieces of cotton while Riva speaks. "Hiroshima was blanketed with flowers" she says, "there were cornflowers and gladiolas everywhere, and morning glories and day lilies that rose again from the ashes with an extraordinary vigor, quite unheard of for flowers till then" (Duras 19). As we watch these victims receiving care, Riva describes a city covered in flowers, a city in the process of rebirth...