111

SFC 11 (2) pp. 111123 Intellect Limited 2011

Studies in French Cinema
Volume 11 Number 2
2011 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sfc.11.2.111_1
KEYWORDS
ethics
memory
trauma
archive
commemoration
Hiroshima mon amour
NINA VARSAVA
University of British Columbia
Processions of trauma in
Hiroshima mon amour:
Towards an ethics
of representation
ABSTRACT
This article examines Hiroshima mon amours generative meta-representational
sensibilities. I suggest that the film exemplifies an ethics of representation that resists
the violence of positivist accounts of history. Resnais and Duras deconstruct the
commemorative systems that hold traumatic histories in general, and Hiroshimas
singularly traumatic history in particular, in place. The film incites criticism of the
injustice that archival discourses enact on the particularities of trauma, and raises
questions about the ethics as well as the truth-value of conventional commemorative
tropes. I argue that Hiroshima mon amour enacts an Adornian ethic through a
representational (self-)deconstruction that complicates, unsettles, but ultimately does
not prohibit its own closure. The film demonstrates how the integration of memory,
and its incorporation into words and commemorative overtures, facilitates a reduc-
tive remembering that is always a kind of forgetting; such integration, I suggest,
while to some degree falsifying reality, might be necessary if an individual or a city
wishes to go on.
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Nina Varsava
112
1. It is worth noting that
Resnais and Duras
originally planned to
open the film with
a projection of the
mushroom cloud
(Kristeva 1989: 231),
although in the final
production images
of the cloud make
only a momentary
appearance.
The direct expression of the inexpressible is void; where the expres-
sion carried, as in great music, its seal was evanescence and transitori-
ness, and it was attached to the process, not to an indicative Thats it.
Thoughts intended to think the inexpressible by abandoning thought
falsify the inexpressible. They make of it what the thinker would least
like it to be: the monstrosity of a flatly abstract object.
(Adorno 1973: 110)
Think the mushroom cloud. The mushroom cloud circulates ubiquitously as
a universally understood metonym for Hiroshima as atomic bomb site. The
image takes no time for one to recognize, to process, to come to terms with.
A vacuous sign, the power that it carries, if any, is not ethical, but aesthetic
and perhaps political. In Beclouded Visions: Hiroshima-Nagasaki and the Art
of Witness, Kyo Maclear notes that in North America the mushroom cloud
has become the defining image of the atomic bombings; for many North
Americans, it is in fact the only recollectable image associated with Hiroshima
and Nagasaki (Maclear 1999: 52). In promiscuous circulation, the image has
been co-opted for an assortment of agendas: a Soviet Jeans advertisement,
for example, features the mushroom cloud alongside a model buttoning up
a pair of sleek pants (Maclear 1999: 92). The mushroom cloud is also one
of most popular poster images amongst American college students (College
Happenings 2007); according to Maclear, [t]he collective shiver once induced
by this image has passed into a pervasive sense of ennui (Maclear 1999: 7).
It seems that the abstract image has subsumed one of the most influential
and horrific events in modern history. The nuclear holocaust, squeezed into a
mushroom cloud, has come to decorate our walls.
In their 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour, Alain Resnais and Marguerite
Duras examine many of the most widely viewed and attended documen-
tary and commemorative representations of the atomic bombings.
1
Drawing
Figure 1: The Memorial Museum (courtesy of Criterion).
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Processions of trauma in Hiroshima mon amour
113
attention to the production and circulation involved in these representations,
Resnais and Duras rupture the illusion and undermine the totality of conven-
tional commemorative sites and practices. They indicate what is left out, pushed
aside, or deformed singular expressions and silences, and immeasurable
apertures in knowledge and understanding and thereby signal the violence
that representational enclosure entails. While acknowledging the paradox
within which it revolves that of expressing the inexpressible Hiroshima mon
amour at the same time attests to the legitimate need for a conceptual integra-
tion which is always a kind of resignation and consignation.
THE MEMORIAL MUSEUM AND DOCUMENTARY DELIRIUM
In the opening shots of Hiroshima mon amour, two naked bodies one of a
French actress, the unnamed female protagonist, played by Emmanuelle
Riva, and one of a Japanese architect, the likewise unnamed male protag-
onist, played by Eiji Okada compose an entangled, grasping embrace.
Rivas character recites to her lover an extensive inventory of everything she
has seen in Hiroshima; as she does, the camera jumps from the bodies to
shots of the city, presenting visually the French actresss oral tour. As John W.
Moses notes, by following the female protagonist as she tours the city seeing
everything []. The tracking camera becomes her eye (Moses 1987: 161).
An extended dolly shot inside the Hiroshima hospital creates the illusion of
a perpetual hallway lined by Japanese nurses; no end is in sight. The shot
suggests the interminability of pain, silence and deflection. At the same time,
the hospital visit which includes a series of brief shots through a room full of
patients indicates the institutional walls within which Hiroshimas surviving
victims are enclosed. Silent and without expression, one by one the patients
turn from the camera, rejecting its gaze and denying the vision it seeks to
record. Here, Resnais intimates the female protagonists cursory accumulation
of Hiroshimas nuclear history, and her failure to gain insight into the experi-
ences of individual survivors, or to address and contemplate their silences.

The French actresss tour moves on to the Peace Memorial Museum, where
Resnais presents six static shots of the buildings design before revealing any of
its contents; we see the museums austere exterior, and the defining stairways
and hallways it frames. This attention to the museums structure its hard lines
and angles, and concrete materiality reflects its function: that of formalizing
Hiroshimas nuclear history into a straightforward and orderly unit. The brief
second shot of the museums interior reveals the mushroom cloud transposed
directly onto a wall; the billowing image composes a background for additional
images of the mushroom cloud, as well as accompanying documents. During
her deliberate exposition of the museum, the female protagonist repeatedly
declares that she has been there [f]our times, reminding us that the perspective
the film offers here is filtered through the lens of her vision. Adding another
layer of mediation to the mix, her view inside the museum often points to
other museum-goers, or memory-tourists, as Maclear would have it (Maclear
1999: 146); the cameras gaze is directed at the others looking at the collection,
rather than at the collection itself. I saw people walking around, Rivas
character recalls. People walk around, lost in thought, among the photographs
[]. I watched the people. We see a woman and three children holding
hands as they visually graze over the items on display, their backs toward
us. The quartet here is represented in double shown twice simultaneously
as its image is reflected in the glass of the row of photographs adjacent to
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Nina Varsava
114
it. Showing the reflectivity of the glassed-in images, the camera breaks the
illusion of photograph as window to reality, and undermines its totalizing
power. Furthermore, before offering any close-up of a particular photograph,
Resnais depicts the way the photographs are arranged as rows of framed
images delineating the museum for systematic viewing. While the camera
ultimately eclipses the layers of representation, zooming in on photographs and
presenting clips of cinematic reconstructions, its prior attention to mediation
demonstrates the films deconstructive drive, and conditions the audiences
consciousness, directing us to critically consider the complex mediation of all
the representations of Hiroshima with which we are presented.
In lieu of understanding, the French actress clings to historical fact in her
conceptual acquisition of Hiroshima, a posture that the museum supports
with its plentiful documentary evidence. Her claims to knowledge include an
extensive list of artefacts: scorched metal, [c]harred stones, masses of hair,
as well as statistics: 10,000 degrees, 200,000 dead, 80,000 wounded. It also
includes factual accounts: Rain causes panic, fishermen die, an entire citys
food is thrown away. I saw the newsreels, I saw them, she persists. In The
Politics of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon suggests that the photographic
is revered because it is technically tied to the real (Hutcheon 2002: 42). In
Rivas tour of the Peace Memorial Museum, the reverence of the visible, in
the form of photography, but also artefact and film, is glaring. More broadly
though, the French actresss tour exhibits a reverence that extends beyond
visual fact to documentary fact itself, including the non-visual elements of
dates and statistics: numbers, like visible evidence, announce an objective
relationship to reality, and, alongside or superimposed on the visual, contrib-
ute to the production of the archives authority.
Hutcheon comments on the sort of fetishization of fact that the Memorial
Museum, as reflected through the female protagonist, exemplifies: The prob-
lem is that historians deal with representations, with texts, which they then
process. The denial of this act of processing can lead to a kind of fetishizing
of the archive, making it into a substitute for the past (Hutcheon 2002: 83).
The archive does not reveal [w]hich facts make it into history, or whose
facts (Hutcheon 2002: 68), and it does not invite such questions. In his more
feverish interrogation of documentation, Derrida traces what he refers to as
the archives archontic power literally a ruling power which, he notes,
gathers the functions of unification, of identification, of classification, [and]
must be paired with [] the power of consignation (Derrida 1996: 3). By
consignation, Derrida wishes not only to convey the conventional meaning
of the word to consign, to deposit but also to evoke the act of consign-
ing through gathering together signs. Consignation aims to coordinate a single
corpus, in a system or synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity
of an ideal configuration (Derrida 1996: 3). Archivization, then, aims to abol-
ish dissociation, heterogeneity, secret and other potentially disruptive
elements (Derrida 1996: 3). The archive processes history through selection
and synthesis, and thereby produces as much as [] records the event
(Derrida 1996: 17). This production of the event inevitably depends upon
archival technology, infrastructure and investment, which together deter-
mine what material is to be archived and how it is shaped in the process. The
atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would undoubtedly be radi-
cally different events today if photography and film had not been available to
document them, and also if sites such as the Memorial Museum had not been
constructed to house the documentation.
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Processions of trauma in Hiroshima mon amour
115
In her commanding and precise regurgitation of the museums contents,
Rivas character dramatizes the archival drive, what Derrida terms mal
darchive: [We are] in need of archives, a need that compels us to run after
the archive, even if theres too much of it []. It is to have a compulsive,
repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive (Derrida 1996: 91). The archi-
val imperative is always repressive; it institutes a kind of forgetting through a
series of syntheses that depend upon elision. Derrida notes that consignation
is never without that excessive pressure (impression, repression, suppression)
of which repression [] and suppression [] are at least figures (Derrida
1996: 78). Consignation, that ordering of signs associated with an event into
a system that makes sense, but never belonged to the event in the first place,
assures the possibility of memorization, of repetition, of reproduction, or of
reimpression (Derrida 1996: 11), but at the same time requires the repres-
sion of the events aporias, of its interminable effects, and its unnameable, or
even unimaginable, particulars. In the case of the atomic bombings, the singu-
larity of each death is funnelled into a grand figure; the singularity of each
deformity is collapsed into a photograph. Maclear questions [w]hat [] we
call evidence when in many instances struggles for signification are perhaps
all that is left (Maclear 1999: 69). These struggles for signification are absent
from the Memorial Museum, and prima facie from the account of Rivas char-
acter as well; this is ethically problematic because the evidentiary information
does not do justice to the in- or disarticulations, the de-totalizing caesurae that
suggest the inexpressible in Hiroshima: Her sense of sureness and certainty
are disconcerting because they can only be spoken through a generic language,
which too easily obliterates the particularities of trauma (Maclear 1999: 148).
The French actresss methods of evidentiary consumption and reiteration,
supported by the commemorative and archival systems in place, exhibit what
Derrida would call hypomnetic knowing, a re-memoration, recollection, consig-
nation (Derrida 1981: 91), which here approaches delusional arrogance.
Rivas character in these opening scenes lacks the kind of ethical sensitiv-
ity that Adorno calls for in Negative Dialectics. He holds as an ethical neces-
sity the recognition of an objects singularity, whether that object is a discrete
physical thing, an event, or a person. The application of a concept to an object
reduces or negates the latters singularity. Such negation is inevitable; ethical
thinking, though, would address negation, would not conceptualize without
an appreciation for the concepts inability to capture the object:
The concept of the particular is always its negation at the same time; it
cuts short what the particular is and what nonetheless cannot be directly
named, and it replaces this with identity. This negative, wrong, and yet
simultaneously necessary moment is the stage of dialectics.
(Adorno 1973: 173)
Adorno insists that, without leaving the stage of dialectics, which would
anyway be an impossible exit, we must make [t]he implicit negativity [of concep-
tual thinking] explicit (Adorno 2008: 113; original emphasis). Rivas charac-
ter seems to be unaware of the paring violence that her memorization, her
conceptualization, inflicts on the particularities of the nuclear holocaust, as
well as on the singularity of her Japanese lover. She neglects the gap between
words and the thing they conjure (Adorno 1973: 53), participating in the kind
of uncritical, consignatory system that effaces difference and concomitantly
substantiality. Adorno writes that the system, the form of presenting a totality
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Nina Varsava
116
to which nothing remains extraneous, absolutizes the thought against each of
its contents and evaporates the content in thoughts (Adorno 1973: 24).
Drucilla Cornell elucidates Adornos ethics in The Philosophy of the Limit:
The care for difference needs a generosity that does not attempt to grasp
what is other as ones own (Cornell 1992: 57). This care for difference would
think against the conceptual compulsion that reduces the other to precon-
ceived categories and orders. The silence encompassing Okadas characters
own history in the film commands attention; it is disquieting, if not deafening.
We learn only that his family was in Hiroshima at the time of the bomb, while
he was away fighting in the war. The caesura that is the Japanese architects
personal narrative compels viewers to consider the violence that the French
actresss positivism exacts on a man who has presumably lost his entire family
to the atomic bomb. As Cornell writes, the danger of certainty is that it turns
against the generous impulse to open oneself up to the Other, and to truly
listen, to risk the chance that we might be wrong (Cornell 1992: 57). By the
time she meets the Japanese architect, the French actress has already formed
a consummate conceit of Hiroshimas nuclear history, and, rather than inquir-
ing about his personal history as a Hiroshima native, she recounts her own
newly acquired knowledge of the bombings to him. In this case, her certainty
succumbs to the very danger that Cornell refers to. In Adornos words, Riva
seeks, and attains, what we have been drilled to resign ourselves to (Adorno
1973: 52). She is a positivist product of historiographical and commemorative
traditions that offer up historical evidence, and through accessible discourses
facilitate a resignation of reflection: [R]esignation and delusion are ideologi-
cal complements (Adorno 1973: 52). We see this complementarity in Rivas
character: the same methods of understanding that instil her delusion regard-
ing Hiroshima simultaneously inspire her resignation of reflection. Adornos
cutting critique of positivism compels a deep distrust in the female protago-
nists relationship to knowledge. As he says, to break off reflection, to take a
Figure 2: The giant photographs from the peace film (courtesy of Criterion).
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Processions of trauma in Hiroshima mon amour
117
2. Likewise, this might be,
at least in part, what
drives the Japanese
mans intense desire to
hear his French lovers
trauma narrative.
positivists pride in [ones] own navet, is nothing else but thoughtless, stub-
bornly conceptualized self-preservation (Adorno 1973: 127).
A generous reading of Rivas character would take into consideration
how her own traumatic history the death of her German lover following
the war, and her subsequent punishment for involvement with the enemy
might affect her response to other traumatic histories. Her devotion to the
Hiroshima archive should not be taken as wholly ignorant of the singular-
ity and difference that anti-positivist approaches to history seek to preserve;
nor should her superficial acquisition of Hiroshima be taken as wholly disre-
spectful. We might infer that her interest in Hiroshima as atomic bomb site is
largely motivated by a drive to secure or deepen the repression her own trau-
matic remains through a supplantation of suffering;
2
alternatively, or simul-
taneously, her approach to what she calls Hiroshimas fate might serve as a
sort of coping mechanism, a way of elaborating and consolidating what she
already knows of the atomic bombing an event that, as she tells the Japanese
man, she has always wept over.
METACINEMATIC MOTIONS AND THE PROCESS/PRODUCT
ANTINOMY
The photographic makes a second appearance in Hiroshima mon amours
visual economy during the embedded production of the peace film. Resnais
portrays a disarray of giant photographs and textual snippets that have been
made into portable billboards; men gather up the boards strewn on the street
and carry them awkwardly away. Here we see the constructedness of photo-
graphic mementos from multiple angles. A side-view exposes their thin mate-
riality; back-views show how they have been attached to wooden sticks to
aid in manipulation. Photographs in this scene form a cacophony of colliding
images. In contrast to the carefully placed and protected photographs in the
Memorial Museum, the images represented here behind the scenes of the
peace film are not treated with respect, but rather as mere slices of card-
board. Fabricated and manipulated to meet the needs of a cinematic produc-
tion, the photographs are tossed aside, picked up, and shuttled around. All of
this action, of course, is to be absent from the final production of the peace
film, which will showcase the images, held high above the heads of their
carriers, in an elaborate and formal peace parade. This behind-the-scenes
scene upsets photographic totalization; rather than enlightening portals into
the past, photographs are shown as tangible fragments of the present.
In On Photography, Susan Sontag maintains that photographs give us
the sense that we can hold the whole world in our hands (Sontag 1977: 3).
Hiroshima mon amour both indicates and upsets the acquisitive sense of the
photograph. Holding photographs in their hands, the peace films crew
is blinded to the world around them; the photographs are too large to see
beyond; they physically subsume reality. As the camera shifts from the mess
of tangible images to the French actress and Japanese architect on the
outskirts of the peace films set, the photographs shortly follow. The conver-
sation between the protagonists is interrupted as they are pushed aside into
the adjacent bushes by the photographic billboards. The men carrying the
photographs either neglect to see that the couple is in their path, or neglect to
care. The objects of representation supply their carriers with a myopic vision,
and displace the films lead characters. Hiroshima mon amour here points to
the danger that photographs pose as a means of representation, with their
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Nina Varsava
118
potential to facilitate a narrowing view that subsumes alternative modes of
seeing and knowing. The prevalence of photographs, both in the Memorial
Museum and in the peace film, portrays the integral position of the photo-
graphic as representational mode in commemorative sites. When Rivas
and Okadas characters are overtaken by photographs, the film invokes the
violence of memorial practices that embrace the photographic, while leav-
ing outand thereby renouncing the relevance of personal expressions of
memory, however these expressions might struggle and even fail to commu-
nicate meaning.
As they move to leave the set of the peace film, the French actress and
Japanese architect must navigate their way through an ornate peace parade;
in the attempt, they get caught in its forceful current. Not one of the white-
shirted marchers acknowledges their presence; the procession marches right
through the female and male protagonists, separating the couple, and leaving
each of them shaken and disoriented. The well-rehearsed and strictly formal-
ized parade goes in one direction only, and leaves no room for contingencies.
The protagonists struggle to move against its flow. Their rejection of, and by,
the peace parade suggests that there is no room for them for their stories
and relationships in the memorializing assembly, or in the commemorative
genre as a whole. The processions violent intolerance invokes the conclu-
sive, and exclusive, impetus of commemorative tropes. Maclear situates these
tropes within a positivist tradition that holds signs and images of trauma []
in place through a viewing relation founded on absolute certainty and order
(Maclear 1999: 154). Through their depictions of the museum and the peace
parade, Resnais and Duras demonstrate the precedence of definitive facts
and photographs of documentary evidence over personal narratives and
reflections of process, in traditional modes of commemoration. If we go with
the flow of conventional historiography and commemoration, they suggest,
we risk missing the multifarious currents of visions and stories that cannot be
contained in evidentiary discourses predicated on easy access.
During the shooting of the peace parade, the aforementioned disarray
of photographs is presented as an orderly procession of images. As a public,
commemorative production, the parade uses photographs in such a way as to
slice up history and offer singular chunks for the audience to consume with
little mental processing required. As Sontag asserts, [d]espite the illusion of
giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an
acquisitive relationship to the world (Sontag 1977: 111). From their situation
within the peace parade, the photographs are intended to speak for themselves;
translating Hiroshimas nuclear devastation into a manageable visual language
for the parades audience, they require no explanation and invite no questions.
However, by presenting the photographs in their state of behind-the scenes
disorder preceding the parade, Hiroshima mon amour calls their manageability,
their truth, into question. As viewers of the film, and viewers of the parade by
way of the film, we are already sensitized to the constructedness of the photo-
graphs, their totalizing force having already been deconstructed before our
eyes. The giant photographs traversing the peace film constitute mobile signi-
fiers with an unstable signification: the images refer to past moments, but that
reference is troubled by their present consumption as filmic props.
Resnais and Duras employ real documentary material and present
irrefutable historical facts, without suggesting that this material conveys
truth or leads to genuine understanding. In this sense, the film composes
a contradictory turning to the archive and yet a contesting of its authority
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Processions of trauma in Hiroshima mon amour
119
(Hutcheon 2002: 77). In her synopsis of the screenplay, Duras refers to the
film as a sort of false documentary (Duras 1961: 10), reflecting on its uneasy
relationship to the past. Hiroshima mon amour destabilizes and problema-
tizes cinema itself as documentary mode, but also as representational mode
in general, through its emphatic staging of the production of the film within
the film. Towards the beginning of the frame film, Resnais shows the French
actress and the Japanese architect in the formers hotel room: as Okadas
character watches Rivas put on a crisp nurse outfit, she informs him that she
is acting in a film about peace. What else would you expect in Hiroshima?
she asks. The question, albeit rhetorical, provokes us to consider the film we
are watching as a film in Hiroshima, and raises further self-reflexive questions:
what do we expect from a film set in the city? Is there space in Hiroshima for
a film about something other than peace?
The production scene of the embedded film opens with a man shouting
in Japanese as an overture to the urgent, sinister music that plays through a
series of short shots punctuated by jumpcuts. The frenetic construction of the
peace film is ironic in its distinctive unpeacefulness, the disconnect demon-
strating how a particular representation might not be at all representative of
its own construction. The scene includes shots of men manipulating a reflec-
tive panel on a roof, anxious onlookers poking out of windows, people paint-
ing messages onto billboards on the street, a make-up artist constructing
seared skin on an exposed back, and a man steering a video camera as big
as he is. Showing what they do the process of putting together the peace
film Resnais and Duras metonymically incite us to think about what is not
shown. The production of the embedded film acts as a synecdoche: a view of
the construction of one part of Hiroshima mon amour evokes a consideration
of the construction of the film as a whole. As meta-cinema, reflecting on its
own mode of representation, the film provokes viewers to think beyond the
screen, outside of the final product, to the means of production that went into
the creation of the film as a whole.
Although the scene of the peace films production occupies only a short
segment of Hiroshima mon amour, the female protagonists nurse outfit oper-
ates as a symbol of performance of imitating, acting that is carried through
to the films end. Freddy Sweet argues that Rivas double role of actor results
in a greater involvement with Riva as a character [] because there is the
creation of an illusion that she lives outside of the celluloid world that encloses
her (Sweet 1981: 19). Sweet suggests that the celluloid world represented
within the film in effect subsumes the unrepresented celluloid world of the
film. If Riva acts within the peace film, and also exists in a world outside of it
the world where her relationship with Okada unfolds then that world exter-
nal to the peace film must be the real one; she could not be acting in both
places. And so, as Sweet would have it, Rivas role as actress within Hiroshima
mon amour makes the story as a whole more realistic. I think that the French
actress functions in an entirely different way in the film. Rivas role as a role
provokes a consideration of roles, acting and imitation. The meta-cinematic
gesture pushes us back, rather than pulling us in, so that we see Rivas and
Okadas characters as part of a production rather than part of a reality. The
female protagonists nurse outfit which she wears throughout the film, only
taking it off to sleep with her Japanese lover signifies her fabrication as a
character and, metonymically, the fabrication of the entire film.
Adornos negative dialectics calls for the self-reflection of thinking that
would mitigate the synthesizing, totalizing drive of conceptual thought;
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120
3. In the original French,
the line is: Je te donne
oubli, which might
more literally be
translated as I give you
to oblivion, although
consign here clearly
works, and perhaps
offers a more apt
translation.
if thinking is to be true, it must also be a thinking against itself (Adorno
1973: 365). Hiroshima mon amours representational ethic, I would argue, is
rigorously Adornian. The film does not attempt to avoid the dialectical proc-
ess altogether, and, after all, it offers in its conclusion a kind of conceptual
synthesis.

However, Resnais and Duras do not synthesize or consolidate
unquestioningly. Rather, they reflect on how totalization affects difference and
singularity; they indicate the remainder that the synthesis leaves out, with-
out allowing that indication to paralyze the films own expression. Adorno
suggests that the ethical work that needs to be done involves reflect[ing]
on the topics under discussion by [] expanding their definition so it will
include the impossibility to nail them down, as well as the compulsion to
conceive them (Adorno 1973: 212). Pursuing a synthetic logic that is never
without self-critical irony, Resnais and Duras carefully integrate the contradic-
tory impossibility and compulsion of thinking the other.
NAMING, ENDING, FORGETTING
Maclear commends Resnais for refraining from an absolute vision of
Hiroshima (Maclear 1999: 146); and the film does indeed demonstrate anti-
positivist, deconstructivist sensibilities, which preclude the totalization or
idealization of history. However, Hiroshima mon amour also concedes a prac-
ticability, and even a necessity for integrationist, commemorative practices in
a world that, after all, must go on. Commemoration entails a synthetic, unify-
ing and diminishing remembering, a remembering that seeks to bring people
together, rather than break them apart; to provide comfort rather than exac-
erbate incomprehension. Commemoration, then, also entails a forgetting, a
forgetting of the loneliness and particularity of each instantiation of suffering,
and of the impossibility of translating nuclear devastation into a system of
signs that would reveal historical truth or facilitate truthful understanding.
Going on might depend upon commemorative institutions and practices, even
with or perhaps because of their inevitably limiting sign systems. As the
Japanese architect solemnly states, in response to a joke that his French lover
makes about the peace documentary, Here in Hiroshima, we dont make fun
of films about peace. As Duras writes in Hiroshima mon amours screenplay,
all of Hiroshima is there [at the parade], as it always is when the cause of
world peace is at stake (Duaras 1961: 11). In response to an event that in its
monstrosity, magnitude and eternal impact precludes imaginability, artificial
and temporary closures are embraced, as means to a nominal remembering,
and a substantive forgetting.
The personal testimony that the male protagonist elicits from his French
lover leaves her affectively shattered, and ultimately, in an interior monologue,
she consign[s] her traumatic past to oblivion,
3
a consignation she attempts to
accomplish through prescriptive forgetting and formal or generic translation:
Little girl from Nevers [] this evening, I relinquish you to oblivion.
[]. As it was with him, forgetting will begin with your eyes. Then, as
with him, it will swallow your voice. Then, as with him, it will consume
you entirely []. You will become a song.
The song she invokes here is analogical to the commemorative conventions
that the film represents, and also analogical to the film itself. No matter how
deconstructive, Hiroshima mon amour is a seamlessly edited and masterfully
SFC_11.2_Versava_111-123.indd 120 4/7/11 6:38:04 PM
Processions of trauma in Hiroshima mon amour
121
4. Caruth discusses the
freedom of forgetting,
as exemplified by the
female protagonists
story of Nevers: it
is only when she
becom[es] reasonable
that she is allowed
to leave the cellar
and able to carry on
with her life (Caruth
1996: 33). Caruth
cites and translates
Guy Lecouvette on
forgetting in Resnaiss
work: he suggests that
the work of Resnais
rests on one pivot: the
necessity of forgetting
in order to live, and
the fear of forgetting
(Caruth 1996: 122, n.6).
Furthermore, Caruth
refers to Sylvain
Roumettes interview
with Resnais where
he is asked whether
forgetting [is]
necessary (Caruth
1996: 12728, n.21 ).
His response: If one
doesnt forget, one can
neither live nor act.
[]. Forgetting must
become constructive.
It is necessary, on the
individual plane just as
on the collective plane
(Caruth 1996: 128, n.21).
5. Gronhovd and
VanderWolk view this
mutual naming as a
sort of role-playing
[which] accentuates
the postmodern nature
of the work (Gronhovd
and VanderWolk
1992: 129).
self-contained artistic production. Resnais and Duras suggest that integration
enables forgetting; but they also elucidate the logic of integration as a means
to processing a past that overwhelms and confounds memory.
4
If we insist
on a diametrically anti-positivist approach to history and trauma, we over-
look the invaluable ethical work that commemorative practices accomplish,
as well as the respect that at least potentially accompanies participation in
such practices.
In the final shots of the film, Riva melodramatically expresses a debilitat-
ing fear of forgetting her Japanese lover: Im forgetting you already! Look
how Im forgetting you! Look at me! she screams. Her solution to the crisis
of memory is to name him: HI-RO-SHI-MA a word that will endure; he
names her likewise, by her hometown and site of her traumatic past: Nevers.
Literally coming to terms with each other, both characters here exact a sort of
reifying, reductive violence on the other. But there is an irony lining this final
scene that pushes against its totalizing impetus, undermining the synthetic
unity that the films ending prima facie produces. A subtle smile creeps over
the French actresss face just before she names him; and he does not negate
her claim on the sign, as he does earlier in the film. Rather, mimicking her
almost uncanny facial expression and affected seriousness, he participates in
the game she initiates.
5
The characters here seem to participate in the kind of
ironic clowning that Adorno describes:
The un-nave thinker knows how far he remains from the object of his
thinking, and yet he must always talk as if he had it entirely. This brings
him to the point of clowning. He must not deny his clownish traits, least
of all since they alone can give him hope for what is denied him.
(Adorno 1973: 14; emphasis added)
Figure 3: The French actresss subtle smile (courtesy of Criterion).
SFC_11.2_Versava_111-123.indd 121 4/7/11 6:38:05 PM
Nina Varsava
122
6. I would like to thank
Glenn Deer for his
invaluable response to
an early version of this
article, as well as two
anonymous reviewers
for their incisive
readings.
The final musical sequence, which cuts in as the Japanese man names the
French woman, exacerbates the faintly carnivalesque tone of the ending, with
ominous staccato notes and an accelerating piano crescendo, culminating in
a sustained discordant screeching chord. As Adorno writes, [w]ithout aban-
doning [our thought], we can think against [it] (Adorno 1973: 141) through,
for example, the kind of self-critical irony that the two protagonists express at
the end (and also at several earlier moments) of the film, and that Resnais and
Duras carry throughout Hiroshima mon amour. Cathy Caruth argues against
any resolution in Hiroshima mon amour, and take[s] issue with the dialectical
readings of the film, which according to her are quite common in the critical
literature (Caruth 1996: 124, n14). She notes that Resnais himself commented
on the tendency toward a dialectic in the film, which he suggests nonethe-
less resists any form of resolution (Caruth 1996: 125, n14). He asserts in an
interview with Michle Firk that in every sense, it is a film that wishes to be
dialectical, and where there remains a perpetual contradiction (Caruth 1996:
125, n14). I think that Resnais and Duras hold the dialectical and its decon-
struction in sustained tension, achieving (to some extent at least) closure, or
synthesis, while at the same time engaging in ironic play that calls into ques-
tion synthetic narrative and logic.

I would argue that an apprehension of particular particularities cannot be
realized from a sustainable or even bearable subjectivity, and that perhaps
this is the reality that the two protagonists accept when they ultimately
acquiesce to naming, which at least on some level offers comfort and concili-
ation, and perhaps the possibility of going on. When I visited Hiroshima in
2006, the city that I witnessed the immaculate streets and pristine buildings,
the children singing in the park was irreconcilable with nuclear devasta-
tion. Even six decades could not account for the disjunction between the two
images I held of Hiroshima: one of annihilated wasteland, the other of shin-
ing metropolis. My fellow traveller praised the city for its clean newness in
comparison to other Japanese cities. I had to remind him why. When you are
there, you forget; you forget even though to the rest of the world Hiroshima
signifies an event more than a city, and even if the very reason you are there
is because of an interest in Hiroshima as atomic bomb site. To a memory-
tourist, the sites of remembering are disconcertingly isolated; they do not
pervade the city. But what would it mean if they did? Hiroshimas present-
day success as a city depended upon its rapid reconstruction following
nuclear annihilation. Through this reconstruction, Hiroshima has established
a position as a thriving centre of industry, technology, and higher learning.
While the city exceeds its station as atomic bomb victim and its circulation as
metonymy for devastation, Hiroshima nonetheless continues to address its
history, maintaining an impassioned and internationally recognized commit-
ment to peace.
6
REFERENCES
Adorno, T. (1973), Negative Dialectics (trans. E. B. Ashton), New York: Seabury
Press.
(2008), Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/1966
(ed. R. Tiedemann and trans. R. Livingstone), Cambridge: Polity.
Caruth, C. (1996), Literature and the Enactment of Memory, Unclaimed
Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History, Baltimore: John Hopkins University
Press, pp. 2556.
SFC_11.2_Versava_111-123.indd 122 4/7/11 6:38:05 PM
Processions of trauma in Hiroshima mon amour
123
College Happenings (2007),28 Most Cliche Dorm Room Posters, College
Happenings, www.collegehappenings.com/college/28-most-cliche-dorm-
room-posters/. Accessed 2 December 2009.
Cornell, D. (1992), The Philosophy of the Limit, New York: Routledge.____
Derrida, J. (1996), Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (trans. E. Prenowitz),
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
(1981), Platos Pharmacy, Dissemination (ed. and trans. B. Johnson), Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, pp. 63156.
Duras, M. (1961), Synopsis, Hiroshima mon amour (trans. R. Seaver), New
York: Grove, pp. 813.
Gronhovd, A.-M. and VanderWolk, W. C. (1992), Memory as Ontological
Disruption: Hiroshima Mon Amour as Postmodern Work, in M. Cranston
(ed.), In Language and in Love: Marguerite Duras: The Unspeakable, Potomac,
MD: Scripta Humanistica, pp. 11938.
Hutcheon, L. (2002), The Politics of Postmodernism, New York: Routledge.
Kristeva, J. (1989), Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (trans. L. S. Roudiez),
NewYork: Columbia University Press.
Maclear, K. (1999), Beclouded Visions: Hiroshima-Nagasaki and the Art of
Witness, New York: SUNY Press.
Moses, J. W. (1987), Vision Denied in Night and Fog and Hiroshima Mon
Amour, Literature/Film Quarterly, 15: 3, pp. 15963.
Sontag, S. (1977), On Photography, New York: Dell.
Sweet, F. (1981), The Film Narratives of Alain Resnais, Ann Arbor: UMI
Research.
SUGGESTED CITATION
Varsava, N. (2011), Processions of trauma in Hiroshima mon amour: Towards
an ethics of representation, Studies in French Cinema 11: 2, pp. 111123,
doi: 10.1386/sfc.11.2.111_1
CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Nina Varsava is a graduate student in the Department of English at the
University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and currently a visiting researcher
at Stanford. Her interests revolve around ethics and contemporary litera-
ture, in particular bio- and eco-ethics, and the ethics of representation. Her
research has appeared in scholarly journals in the United States and Europe,
and her creative writing and journalism have appeared in various Canadian
publications.
Contact: Department of English, University of British Columbia, 397 1873
East Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1.
E-mail: nvarsava@ualberta.ca
SFC_11.2_Versava_111-123.indd 123 4/7/11 6:38:05 PM
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