Film as a Subversive Art//Hiroshima Mon Amour

There are elements of Hiroshima Mon Amour that undermine "normal" narrativity. The use of flashbacks play with not only the two characters' perceptions of time and the viewer's perception of time but of the construction of time itself. Flashbacks of the affects of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and to the beginning of the lover's relationship disoriented me. An effect of turning backwards actually unsettled any certainty of or for the future. This obliteration of linear time is surrealistic. The bombing of Hiroshima and the war overwhelmingly signify "the reality of a civilization in decline"(Film as a Subversive Art). The film is about personal anxiety (about the self, memory -the importance of remembering) that mirrors anxiety about past events happening again and anxiety about forgetting. In Film as a Subversive Art, Vogel writes "perhaps the most 'shocking' aspect of surrealism is that its imaginary nightmares and monstrous projections of the unthinkable have in our day become realities." I think that this realization is truly the most terrifying; furthermore, these horrific events and traumas affect our own states of being, thoughts, emotions and relationships with other people, as we can see in Hiroshima Mon Amour.

Made in 1959, the kind of sexual and love relationship the man and woman had was a taboo subject. In the beginning of the movie the lovers speak to each other so intimately that I thought they had been familiar for a long time (whatever that means). It was later shown that they had met only the day before.
I do not know if this day-long sexual/love relationship, between a French woman and a Japanese man, was "forbidden", but I also think that at the time the film was made, the relationship was not widely acceptable. It is eventually made clear that what is happening between them can be only a brief affair. The movie is honest about love -it opposes the illusion that it means only pleasure. Love here is lonely, incomplete and ephemeral.

There is another kind of breaking apart of reality in terms of characters. Their "difference" is emphasized by their talking about their hometowns, hers is called Nevers, his is Hiroshima. They once refer to each other by the names of their hometowns. For him Nevers is a vague unknown image. Hiroshima for her is similarly difficult to comprehend (especially the city he grew up in compared to the city after the bombing). Issues the characters deal with are (I'm sure there are many more I'm not including in this brief list): loss of identity (of origin), confusion with memory, and the painful apprehension of the future.