Hiroshima Mon Amour
Page 2
I was hot at Peace Square. Ten thousand degrees at Peace Square. I know it. The temperature of the sun at Peace Square. How can you not know it? . . . The grass, it's quite simple. . .
HE: You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.
(More shots of the museum. Then a shot of Peace Square taken with a burned skull in the foreground. Glass display cases with burned models inside. Newsreel shots of Hiroshima.)
SHE: The reconstructions have been made as authentically as possible.
The films have been made as authentically as possible.
The illusion, it's quite simple, the illusion is so perfect that the tourists cry.
One can always scoff, but what else can a tourist do, really, but cry?
I've always wept over the fate of Hiroshima. Always.
(A panorama of a photograph taken of Hiroshima after the bomb, a “new desert” without reference to the other deserts of the world.)
HE: No. What would you have cried about?
(Peace Square, empty under a blinding sun that recalls the blinding light of the bomb. Newsreels taken after August 6, 1945. Ants, worms, emerge from the ground. Interspersed with shots of the shoulders. The woman's voice begins again, gone mad, as the sequence of pictures has also gone mad.)
SHE: I saw the newsreels.
On the second day, History tells, I'm not making it up, on the second day certain species of animals rose again from the depths of the earth and from the ashes.
Dogs were photographed.
For all eternity.
I saw them.
I saw the newsreels.
I saw them.
On the first day.
On the second day.
On the third day.
HE (interrupting her): You saw nothing. Nothing.
(A dog with a leg amputated. People, children. Wounds. Burned children screaming.)
SHE: . . . on the fifteenth day too.
Hiroshima was blanketed with flowers. 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.*
I didn't make anything up.
HE: You made it all up.
SHE: Nothing.
Just as in love this illusion exists, this illusion of being able never to forget, so I was under the illusion that I would never forget Hiroshima.
Just as in love.
(Surgical forceps approach an eye to extract it. More newsreel shots.)
I also saw the survivors and those who were in the wombs of the women of Hiroshima.
(Shots of various survivors: a beautiful child who, upon turning around, is blind in one eye; a girl looking at her burned face in the mirror; a blind girl with twisted hands playing the zither; a woman praying near her dying children; a man, who has not slept for several years, dying. [Once a week they bring his children to see him. ] )
I saw the patience, the innocence, the apparent meekness with which the temporary survivors of Hiroshima adapted themselves to a fate so unjust that the imagination, normally so fertile, cannot conceive it.
(And again a return to the perfect embrace of the bodies.)
Listen. . .
I know. . .
I know everything.
It went on.
HE: Nothing. You know nothing.
(A spiraling atomic cloud. People marching in the streets in the rain. Fishermen tainted with radioactivity. Unedible fish. Thousands of unedible fish buried.)
SHE: Women risk giving birth to malformed children, to monsters, but it goes on.
Men risk becoming sterile, but it goes on.
People are afraid of the rain.
The rain of ashes on the waters of the Pacific.
The waters of the Pacific kill.
Fishermen of the Pacific are dead.
People are afraid of the food.
The food of an entire city is thrown away.
The food of entire cities is buried.
An entire city rises up in anger.
Entire cities rise up in anger.
(Newsreels: demonstrations.)
Against whom, the anger of entire cities?
The anger of entire cities, whether they like it or not, against the inequality set forth as a principle by certain people against other people, against the inequality set forth as a principle by certain races against other races, against the inequality set forth as a principle by certain classes against other classes.
(Processions of demonstrators. “Mute” speeches from loudspeakers.)
SHE (softly): . . . Listen to me.
Like you, I know what it is to forget.
HE: No, you don't know what it is to forget.
SHE: Like you, I have a memory. I know what it is to forget.
HE: No, you don't have a memory.
SHE: Like you, I too have tried with all my might not to forget. Like you, I forgot. Like you, I wanted to have an inconsolable memory, a memory of shadows and stone.
(The shot of a shadow, “photographed” on stone, of someone killed at Hiroshima.)
For my part, I struggled with all my might, every day, against the horror of no longer understanding at all the reason for remembering. Like you, I forgot. . . .
(Shops with hundreds of scale models of the Palace of Industry, the only monument whose twisted skeleton remained standing after the bomb—and was afterward preserved. An empty shop. A busload of Japanese tourists. Tourists on Peace Square. A cat crossing Peace Square.)
Why deny the obvious necessity for memory? . . .
(A sentence punctuated by shots of the framework of the Palace of Industry.)
. . . Listen to me. I know something else. It will begin all over again.
Two hundred thousand dead.
Eighty thousand wounded.
In nine seconds. These figures are official. It will begin all over again.
(Trees. Church. Merry-go-round. Hiroshima rebuilt. Banality.)
There will be ten thousand degrees on the earth. Ten thousand suns, they will say. The asphalt will burn.
(Church. Japanese advertising poster.)
Chaos will prevail. A whole city will be raised from the earth and fall back in ashes. . . .
(Sand. A package of “Peace” cigarettes. A fat plant spread out like a spider on the sand.)
New vegetation will rise from the sands. . . .
(Four “dead” students chat beside the river. The river. The tides. The daily piers of Hiroshima rebuilt.)
Four students await together a fraternal and legendary death.
The seven branches of the delta estuary in the Ota river drain and fill at the usual hour, exactly at the usual hours, with water that is fresh and rich with fish, gray or blue depending on the hour or the season. Along the muddy banks people no longer watch the tide rising slowly in the seven branches of the delta estuary of the river Ota.
(The incantatory tone ceases. The streets of Hiroshima, more streets. Bridges. Covered lanes. Streets. Suburbs. Railroad tracks. Suburbs. Universal banality.)
SHE: . . . I meet you.
I remember you.
Who are you?
You destroy me.
You're so good for me.
How could I have known that this city was made to the size of love?
How could I have known that you were made to the size of my body?
You're great. How wonderful. You're great.
How slow all of a sudden.
And how sweet.
More than you can know.
You destroy me.
You're so good for me.
You destroy me.
You're so good for me.
Plenty of time.
Please.
Take me.
Deform me, make me ugly.
Why not you?
Why not you in this city and in this night so like the others you can't tell the difference?
Please. . .
(With exaggerated su
ddenness the woman's face appears, filled with tenderness, turned toward the man's.)
SHE: It's extraordinary how beautiful your skin is.
(He sighs.)
You. . .
(His face appears. He laughs ecstatically, which has nothing to do with their words. He turns.)
HE: Yes, me. You will have seen me.
(The two naked bodies reappear. Same voice of the woman, muted, but this time not declamatory.)
SHE: Are you completely Japanese or aren't you completely Japanese?
HE: Completely. I am Japanese.
You're eyes are green. Correct?
SHE: I think so . . . yes . . . I think they're green.
HE (softly, looking at her): You are like a thousand women in one. . . .
SHE: It's because you don't know me. That's why.
HE: Perhaps that's not the only reason.
SHE: It's a rather nice idea, being a thousand women in one for you.
(She kisses his shoulder and snuggles into the hollow of that shoulder. Her head is facing the open window, facing Hiroshima, the night. A man passes in the street and coughs. [We don't see him, only hear him.] She raises herself.)
SHE: Listen. . . . It's four o'clock. . . .
HE: Why?
SHE: I don't know who it is. Every day he passes at four o'clock. And he coughs.
(Silence. They look at each other.)
You were here, at Hiroshima. . . .
HE (laughing, as he might at a childish question): No. . . Of course I wasn't.
SHE (caressing his naked shoulder again): That's true. . . . How stupid of me. (Almost smiling.)
HE (serious, hesitant): But my family was at Hiroshima. I was off fighting the war.
SHE (timidly, smiling now): A stroke of luck, eh?
HE (not looking at her, weighing the pro and con): Yes.
SHE: Lucky for me too.
(Pause.)
HE: What are you doing at Hiroshima?
SHE: A film.
HE: What, a film?
SHE: I'm playing in a film.
HE: And before coming to Hiroshima, where were you?
SHE: In Paris.
(A longer pause.)
HE: And before Paris? . . .
SHE: Before Paris? . . . I was at Nevers. Ne-vers.
HE: Nevers?
SHE: It's in the province of Nièvre. You don't know it.
(Pause. Then he asks, as though he had just discovered a link between Hiroshima and Nevers:)
HE: And why did you want to see everything at Hiroshima?
SHE (trying to be sincere): Because it interested me. I have my own ideas about it. For instance, I think looking closely at things is something that has to be learned.
*With only a schematic initial text to go on, Resnais brought back a great number of documents from Japan. Thus the initial text was modified and considerably enlarged during the cutting of the film.
†With a return, at regular intervals, to the bodies.
*This sentence is taken almost verbatim from John Hersey's admirable report on Hiroshima. All I did was apply it to the martyred children.
Part II
(A swarm of bicycles passes in the street, the noise growing louder, then fading. She is on the balcony of the hotel, in a dressing gown. She is looking at him. She holds a cup of coffee in her hand. He is still asleep, lying on his stomach, his arms crossed, bare to the waist.
She looks very intently at his hands, which tremble slightly, as children's hands do sometimes when they are asleep. He has very beautiful, very virile hands.
While she is looking at them, there suddenly appears, in place of the Japanese, the body of a young man, lying in the same position, but in a posture of death, on the bank of a river, in full daylight. [The room is in semi-darkness.] The young man is near death. He too has beautiful hands, strikingly like those of the Japanese. The approach of death makes them jerk violently.
The shot is an extremely brief one.
She remains frozen, leaning against the window. He awakes and smiles at her. She doesn't return his smile immediately. She continues to look at him attentively, without moving. Then she takes the coffee over to him.)
SHE: Do you want some coffee?
(He assents, takes the cup. Pause.)
SHE: What were you dreaming about?
HE: I don't remember. . . . Why?
(She has become herself again, extremely nice.)
SHE: I was looking at your hands. They move when you're asleep.
HE (examining his hands, perhaps moving his fingers): Maybe it's when you dream without knowing it.
SHE (calmly, pleasantly, but seeming to doubt his words): Hmm, hmm.
(They're together in the shower of the hotel room. In a gay mood. He puts his hand on her forehead and arches her head back.)
HE: You're a beautiful woman, do you know that?
SHE: Do you think so?
HE: I think so.
SHE: A trifle worn out, no?
HE (laughing): A trifle ugly.
SHE (smiling at his caress): Don't you mind?
HE: That's what I noticed last night in that café. The way you're ugly. And also. . .
SHE (very relaxed): And also? . . .
HE: And also how bored you were.
SHE (her curiosity aroused): Tell me more. . . .
HE: You were bored in a way that makes men want to know a woman.
SHE (smiling, lowering her eyes): You speak French very well.
HE (gaily): Don't I though! I'm glad you finally noticed how well I speak French. (Pause.) I hadn't noticed that you didn't speak Japanese. . . . Have you ever noticed that it's always in the same sense that people notice things?
SHE: No. I noticed you, that's all.
(Laughter.)
(After the bath. Her hair is wet. She is munching slowly on an apple. She is on the balcony, dressed in a bathrobe; she looks at him, stretches, and as if to “pinpoint” their situation, says slowly, as though savoring the words:)
SHE: To-meet-in-Hiroshima. It doesn't happen every day.
(Already dressed—his shirt collar open—he joins her on the balcony and sits down opposite her. After a moment's hesitation, he asks:)
HE: What did Hiroshima mean for you, in France?
SHE: The end of the war, I mean, really the end. Amazement . . . at the idea that they had dared . . . amazement at the idea that they had succeeded. And then too, for us, the beginning of an unknown fear. And then, indifference. And also the fear of indifference. . . .
HE: Where were you?
SHE: I had just left Nevers. I was in Paris. In the street.
HE: That's a pretty French word, Nevers.
SHE (after a pause): It's a word like any other. Like the city.
(She moves away. They begin to talk, about ordinary things.)
(He's seated on the bed; he lights a cigarette, looks at her intently, then asks:)
HE: Have you met many Japanese at Hiroshima?
SHE: I've met some, yes . . . but no one like you. . . .
HE (smiling, gay): I'm the first Japanese in your life?
SHE: Yes.
(Her laughter off-camera. She reappears while she is getting dressed.)
SHE: Hi-ro-shi-ma.
HE (lowering his eyes, calmly): The whole world was happy. You were happy with the whole world. (Continuing, in the same tone:) I heard it was a beautiful summer day in Paris that day, is that right?
SHE: Yes, it was a beautiful day.
HE: How old were you?
SHE: Twenty. And you?
HE: Twenty-two.
SHE: The same age, really.
HE: Yes, practically.
(She appears completely dressed, just as she is putting on her Red Cross nurse's kerchief. She bends down beside him with a sudden gesture, or lies down beside him. She plays with his hand, kisses his bare arm. They talk about ordinary things.)
SHE: What do you do in life?
HE: Architecture. And politics to
o.
SHE: Oh, so that's why you speak such good French.
HE: That's why. To read about the French Revolution.
(They laugh. Any precise indications about his politics would be absolutely impossible, since he would be immediately tagged. And besides, it would be naive. Nor should it be forgotten that only a man of liberal opinions would have made the preceding remark.)
HE: What's the film you're playing in?
SHE: A film about Peace. What else do you expect them to make in Hiroshima except a picture about Peace?
(A noisy swarm of bicycles passes.)
HE: I'd like to see you again.
SHE (gesturing negatively): At this time tomorrow I'll be on my way back to France.
HE: Is that true? You didn't tell me.
SHE: It's true. (Pause.) There was no point in telling you.
HE (serious, taken aback): Is that why you let me come up to your room last night? . . . Because it was your last day at Hiroshima?
SHE: Not at all. The thought never even crossed my mind.
HE: When you talk, I wonder whether you lie or tell the truth.
SHE: I lie. And I tell the truth. But I don't have any reason to lie to you. Why? . . .
HE: Tell me . . . do things like . . . this happen to you often?
SHE: Not very often. But it happens. I have a weakness for men. (Pause.) I have doubtful morals, you know. (She laughs.)
HE: What do you call having doubtful morals?
SHE: Being doubtful about the morals of other people.
(He laughs heartily.)
HE: I'd like to see you again. Even if the plane is leaving tomorrow. Even if you do have doubtful morals.
(Pause. A feeling of love returning.)
SHE: No.
HE: Why?
SHE (with irritation): Because.
(He doesn't pursue the conversation.)
SHE: Don't you want to talk to me any more?
HE (after a pause): I'd like to see you again.
(They are in the hotel corridor.)
HE: Where are you going in France? To Nevers?
SHE: No. To Paris. (A pause.) I don't ever go to Nevers any more.
HE: Not ever?
SHE (grimacing as she says it): Not ever. (Then, caught in her own trap, she adds:) In Nevers I was younger than I've ever been. . . .