MovieChat Forums > Hiroshima mon amour (1960) Discussion > Originally Supposed to be a Documentary?

Originally Supposed to be a Documentary?

posted 17 years ago by InsertWittyFilmReference
4 replies | jump to latest

I read that this film was originally intended to use documentary footage of the bomb and its destruction to recreate the experience. Why do you think Resnais would have chosen to use a romance-based narrative to represent the destruction instead of documentary footage?

Maybe the opening scene answers that question. We see tracking shots through the Atomic Bomb museum and a woman saying, "I've seen everything. I've seen the mangled steel, the lipless child, the bouquet of bottlecaps." and then the male voice replies, "You've seen nothing." Because to experience the bomb is to be dead. We can only see the products of the destruction but not the destruction itself. Resnais may have noticed this and refused to make a documentary in fear of illusioning the audience with a fake, replicated experience. So he decided to create a personal narrative in an attempt to represent the tragedy at Hiroshima.

Thoughts? I'm really interested in discussing this film but my friends dismissed it as pretentious. So I need help from intelligent IMDB'ers

[–] Father-McKenzie 17 years ago

Would have been so much better as a documentary. The first 15 minutes or so were so compelling, but the rest of the movie was pretty dull.

[–] www.wedd 16 years ago

Just read the part in Peter Cowie's book Revolution: The Explosion of World Cinema in the 60s (which is why I'm looking at this film now), and Resnais himself says that he was originally invited to make something about the atomic bomb (don't think it was necessarily a doc), working with Chris Marker. This fell through, and Resnais ultimately wasn't interested in making something directly about the bomb, so chose to make something about the spectre of it hanging over everyday lives at the time.

[–] Krustallos 16 years ago

I just saw a screening at the BFI introfduced by Philip Kemp. He said the producers originally invoited Resnais to make a documentary, because he'd made "Nuit et Brouillard", but he'd felt that would be repeating himself. I think it was only once he'd had the idea of working with Marguerite Duras that the idea of combining the Hiroshima images with a love story emerged.

And the producers only wanted to make a film with a Japanese element because they had some yen tied up by exchange controls and that was the only way they could spend it.

This film seemed remarkably unpretentious to me on second viewing, in fact. And very beautiful indeed.

I used to want to change the world. Now I just want to leave the room with a little dignity.

[–] cinephile_12 16 years ago

This project was initially supposed to be a documentary but Resnais and the film's producers had a difficult time with writing a screenplay for it: among the problems (for example) was the magnitude of the subject being too great for the screen. Resnais brought in Duras and a feature-length film was born.

As as far as the whole 'pretenious' thing: the only kind of people that find flms like these pretentious are the pretentious and the un-imaginative. These are the people that don't know the true definiton of art. It's like calling a Monet: 'swirls of paint' - honestly. This film dares to compare the utter destruction of a city to the destruction of a woman's heart. It is far from baseless and unsubstantial. Just because the film doesn't look like it was directed by Ingmar Bergman (aka overly conventional), doesn't mean that every drawn-out frame, every poetic line, every ambiguous character is superfluous. Tell your friends to get it together and recognize it for the materpiece that it is (note: that doesn't mean they have to like it, just that it is far from ostentatious). And then perhaps you'll have something to discuss with them even if it is what they didn't like about it and what they would change to make it better (if possible...) :)

p h u c k a b e e s !