Hiroshima, Mon Amour
Restored print imported from Europe exclusively for tonight's IFS show
French actress Elle (Emmanuelle Riva) is staying in Hiroshima for a few days shooting a movie about peace. There she meets a Japanese architect named Lui (Eiji Okada) with whom she has a one night stand. Despite the fact that both of them are married they find themselves falling love with one another.
In a short time Elle shreds her usual romantic indifference and begins to recall the tragedy of her lost first love with a German soldier during the occupation of France in World War II. In minute detail she recalls the joy and then pain of that love. And over the course of two days she falls in love with her interlocutor.
The film’s simplicity is belied by the fact that it compares and contrasts the tragedy of Hiroshima with the tragedy of young love. Resnais and screenwriter Marguerite Duras never explicitly compare the two. Instead they explore the nature of forgetting and remembering with regard to human emotions.
The beauty and power of the film comes primarily from the editing, which from the film’s first cut, is both brilliant and evocative. In the first 15 minutes Resnais uses a poetic, elliptical editing structure that shuffles black and white images of amorous close-ups, newsreel footage, and reconstructed war footage together to draw us into the theme of memory.
The film posits the very simple question, "How can we forget tragedy?" Yet it never directly answers that question so much as skirts the issue and lets the audience decide for themselves the beauty, horror, and reflection of memory. Directed by Alain Resnais. (M. Langdon, FilmCritic.com)
Our thanks to the British Film Institute for giving us access to their restored 35mm print.
Hiroshima, Mon Amour
Wed November 2, 2005, 7:00 & 9:00, Muenzinger Auditorium
90min, France, 1959, in French w/English subtitles, R, Black and White
Tickets
10 films for $60 with punch card
$9 general admission.
$7 w/UCB student ID,
$7 for senior citizens
$1 discount to anyone with a bike helmet
Free on your birthday! CU Cinema Studies students get in free.
Parking
Pay lot 360 (now only $1/hour!), across from the buffalo statue and next to the
Duane Physics tower, is closest to Muenzinger. Free parking can be found after 5pm at the meters
along Colorado Ave east of Folsom stadium and along University Ave west of Macky.
RTD Bus
Park elsewhere and catch the HOP to campus
International Film Series
(Originally called The University Film Commission)
Established 1941 by James Sandoe.
First Person Cinema
(Originally called The Experimental Cinema Group)
Established 1955 by Carla Selby, Gladney Oakley, Bruce Conner and Stan Brakhage.
C.U. Film Program
(AKA The Rocky Mountain Film Center)
First offered degrees in filmmaking and critical studies in 1989 under the guidance of Virgil
Grillo.
Celebrating Stan
Created by Suranjan Ganguly in 2003.
C.U. Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts
Established 2017 by Chair Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz.