广岛之恋

1957年夏的旅馆里，一对肤色完全不同的男女在床上紧紧拥抱着，在他们身上，特写的露珠时而像可怖的原子尘。　

这是一段发生在异国他乡短暂恋情。女人是来自法国的女演员，在她到日本广岛拍摄影片时，与一位日本建筑工程师邂逅相爱。然而此时两人一个是有夫之妇，一个是有妇之夫。

女人的拍摄工作已经结束了，她就要离开广岛，还有十六个小时，他们忘我的拥抱在一起，男人极力劝说女人留在这里，远处传来的音乐伴随着他们几乎令人窒息的激情。他们交替吟颂着这样两句话：　男：你在广岛什么也没有看见……　什么也没有看见。　女：我都看见了，都看见了。　广岛那曾经的重创，原子弹在此爆炸的恐怖景象，似乎又出现在他们面前。　恍惚中，女人不由自主的回忆起自己在二次世界大战结束前夕同一名德国士兵相恋的经历。她似乎分不清眼前的男人是日本青年还是德国恋人，她在潜意识中，将他们等同起来了。

　很快，天亮了，他们恋恋不舍的分手了。下午的和平广场上，法国女人在看台的阴影下睡着了。日本男人走来，他的凝视惊醒了她，他将她带回了家……男人问女人是否爱过别人，女人说是的，在战争年月，在内韦尔……他死了。夜幕降临，他们来到一家咖啡馆，女人给他讲起了她的故事。　

14年前，她所生活的小镇内韦尔被德国人占领。然而她却与一名德国士兵相恋了。他们的恋情不能被允许，只能在断壁残垣处相会。正当他们相约逃离法国，去巴伐利亚结婚时，他的德国恋人却被法国抵抗运动的战士冷枪打死。内韦尔解放了，恐怖的记忆令她发狂。人们把她当成德国的内奸关进地窖，还剃光她的头发游街。　“也许我们永远不会再见面了。”她决定与男人分手。　回到旅馆后，她焦躁不安地感到无比孤独，又来到了晚上刚分手的那家咖啡店。男人出现了，要求她留在广岛。在爱的折磨和煎熬下，她的内心激烈地冲突着。　他们在街巷间毫无目的的走着，不知不觉中又走到她住的那家旅馆。他们痛苦地面对面站着。“我要忘记你，我已经忘记你了！”她忧伤地说。他挽着女人的腰，两人彼此深情地注视着对方，发自内心地呼喊着：“广岛！”“内韦尔！”　在他们心中，“广岛！”“内韦尔！”各是两座城市。通过他俩，广岛爱上了内韦尔。——来自于搜狗百科

据费利克斯·纳达尔（Felix Nadar）记述，巴尔扎克对达盖尔摄影术怀有强烈的恐惧之情。巴尔扎克无法理解，摄影术何以能够将三维的人体转移到二维的照片上去。根据所谓的“物质守恒定律”，人类无法用非物质性的幻影制造出物质性的存在，亦即无法无中生有；但摄影术看起来却打破了这条铁律。于是乎，巴尔扎克提出了一套颇具迷信色彩的解释：一切物质性的身体都是由层层叠叠的幽灵影像（spectral image）所构成的，这些层体如同薄得近乎透明（但绝不是没有厚度）的叶片一般附着在人体的皮肤上。每当人们被拍摄的时候，其中一层就会脱离身体，转移到照片上去。由此观之，摄影术即是“摄魂术”：一次次的曝光必然导致幽灵影像的丧失，进而导致生命本质的丧失。

这番看似荒谬绝伦的言论很少有人当真。但谁都没有想到的是，有一天，巴尔扎克的理论竟然会以一种无比残酷的方式在现实中得到印证。那是1945年8月6日。那一天，广岛上空落下了一枚原子弹。（当然，还有长崎。）

爆炸平息之后，人们走上街头，放眼望去，遍地的断砖残瓦中间到处都是“影子”：烧焦的、化为灰烬的、甚至瞬间蒸发的有机物和非有机物，在墙壁和地面上留下了黑乎乎的影迹和污点。在邻近爆炸中心的区域，人们在银行门口的台阶上发现了一片“人影”。当时，他应该正坐着等待银行开门。极端的高温和辐射让他整个人瞬间灰飞烟灭，只在身后的台阶上留下了这片“幽灵影像”。

震悚惊惧之余，人们不禁好奇：原子弹的爆炸何以能够将影子固定下来。对此，利皮特（Akira Mizuta Lippit）指出：“原子弹的爆炸不可能容许原本意义上的摄影，因为它本身就是一种极致的摄影。”这绝不是在隐喻或类比的意义上谈论原子弹爆炸与摄影术之间的相似性。原子弹爆炸不是“就像”摄影术，而是“就是”摄影术，一种最原始也最暴力的摄影术。广岛是一间暗室，原子弹的爆炸和变黑的天空是一台巨型相机，那些影子则是物体在表面上直接曝光形成的图像，即黑影照片。摄影术的先驱塔尔博特（William Henry Fox Talbot），曾将摄影术称为“固定影子的艺术”（the art of fixing a shadow）。广岛的原子弹爆炸，的确做到了“固定影子”，但跟所谓的“艺术”毫无关系。

巴尔扎克所担心的是，相机每曝光一次，自己身上的幽灵影像就会少掉一层；但他自己的物理身体，其实仍然完好无损。那些影子的主人则相反：除了多出来的一层幽灵影像之外，他们的物理身体已经荡然无存。幽灵影像不再是被牺牲掉的部分，而是唯一幸存下来的部分；不再是缺失，而是唯一的剩余。它们起到了指示性（indexicality）的作用，证明了在爆炸的一瞬间，某人某物“曾在此”，而后随即“不复在此”。这是一种难以直视的指示性。广岛对指示性提出了一种新的要求，一种“后核时代”的指示性：“它拥抱不可想象之物：再现非物质（the immaterial）。”

在阿伦·雷乃的著名电影《广岛之恋》中，第一句台词是：Tu n'as rien vu à Hiroshima. “你在广岛一无所见。”女主角去广岛的纪念馆看了四次。她看（look）了很多照片：皮肤的灼伤、头发的脱落、躯体的疤痕。但她什么也没看见（see）。

1959年，时任《手册》主编埃里克·侯麦组织了一场就《广岛之恋》的讨论会，参加的包括：埃里克·侯麦、让-吕克·戈达尔、Jean Domarchi、 雅克·多尼奥-瓦克罗兹、皮埃尔·卡斯特、雅克·里维特。这个英文版发表于Jim Hillier编辑的《电影手册，1950年代》结集一书中，翻译为Liz Heron。

In Cahiers no. 71 some of our editorial board held the first round-table discussion on the then critical question of French cinema Today the release of Hiroshima mon amour is an event which seems important enough to warrant a new discussion.

Rohmer: I think everyone will agree with me if I start by saying that Hiroshima is a film about which you can say everything.

Godard: So let's start by saying that it's literature.

Rohmer: And a kind of literature that is a little dubious, in so far as it imitates the American school that was so fashionable in Paris after 1945.

Kast: The relationship between literature and cinema is neither good nor clear. I think all that one can say is that literary people have a kind of confused contempt for the cinema, and film people suffer from a confused feeling of inferiority. The uniqueness of Hiroshima is that the Marguerite Duras—Alain Resnais collaboration is an exception to the rule I have just stated.

Godard: Then we can say that the very first thing that strikes you about this film is that it is totally devoid of any cinematic references. You can describe Hiroshima as Faulkner plus Stravinsky, but you can't identify it as such and such a film-maker plus such and such another.

Rivette: Maybe Resnais's film doesn't have any specific cinematic references, but I think you can find references that are oblique and more profound, because its a film that recalls Eisenstein, in the sense that you can see some of Eisensteinis ideas put into practice and, moreover, in a very new way.

Godard: When I said there were no cinematic references, I meant that seeing Hiroshima gave one the impression of watching a film that would have been quite inconceivable in terms of what one was already familiar with in the cinema. For instance, when you see India you know that you'll be surprised, but you are more or less anticipating that surprise. Similarly, I know that Le Testament du dotter Cordeher will surprise me, just as Eljna et les hornmes did. However, with Hiroshima I fee] as if I am seeing something that I didn't expect at all.

Rohmer: Suppose we talk a bit about Toute la memoire du monde. As far as I'm concerned it is a film that is still rather unclear. Hiroshima has made certain aspects of it clearer for me, but not all.

Rivette: It's without doubt the most mysterious of all Resnais's short films. Through its subject, which is both very modern and very disturbing, it echoes what Renoir said in his interviews with us, that the most crucial thing that's happening to our civilization is that it is in the process of becoming a civilization of specialists. Each one of us is more and more locked into his own little domain, and incapable of leaving it. There is no one nowadays who has the capacity to decipher both an ancient inscription and a modern scientific formula. Culture and the common treasure of mankind have become the prey of the specialists. I think that was what Resnais had in mind when he made Toute la memoir e du monde. He wanted to show that the only task necessary for mankind in the search for that unity of culture was, through the work of every individual, to try to reassemble the scattered fragments of the universal culture that is being lost. And I think that is why Toute la memoir du monde ended with those higher and higher shots of the central hall, where you can see each reader, each researcher in his place, bent over his manuscript, yet all of them side by side, all in the process of trying to assemble the scattered pieces of the mosaic, to find the lost secret of humanity; a secret that is perhaps called happiness.

Domarchi: When all is said and done, it is a theme not so far from the theme of Hiroshima. You've been saying that on the level of form Resnais comes close to Eisenstein, but it's just as much on the level of content too, since both attempt to unify opposites, or in other words their art is dialectical.

Rivette: Resnais's great obsession, if I may use that word, is the sense of the splitting of primary unity - the world is broken up, fragmented into a series of tiny pieces, and it has to be put back together again like a jigsaw. I think that for Resnais this reconstitution of the pieces operates on two levels. First on the level of content, of dramatization. Then, I think even more importantly, on the level of the idea of cinema itself. I have the impression that for Alain Resnais the cinema consists in attempting to create a whole with fragments that are a priori dissimilar. For example, in one of Resnais's films two concrete phenomena which have no logical or dramatic connection are linked solely because they are both filmed in tracking shots at the same speed.

Godard: You can see all that is Eisensteinian about Hiroshima because it is in fact the very idea of montage, its definition even.

Rivette: Yes. Montage, for Eisenstein as for Resnais, consists in rediscovering unity from a basis of fragmentation, but without concealingthe fragmentation in doing so; on the contrary, emphasizing it by emphasizing the autonomy of the shot.

It's a double movement - emphasizing the autonomy of the shot and simultaneously seeking within that shot a strength that will enable it to enter into a relationship with another or several other shots, and in this way eventually form a unity. But don't forget, this unity is no longer that of classic continuity. It is a unity of contrasts, a dialectical unity as Hegel and Domarchi would say. (Laughter.)

Doniol-Valcroze: A reduction of the disparate.

Rohmer: To sum up. Alain Resnais is a cubist. I mean that he is the first modern film-maker of the sound film. There were many modern filmmakers in silent films: Fisenstein, the Expressionists, and Dreyer too. But I think that sound films have perhaps been more classical than silents. There has not yet been any profoundly modern cinema that attempts to do what cubism did in painting and the American novel in literature, in other words a kind of reconstitution of reality out of a kind of splintering which could have seemed quite arbitrary to the uninitiated. And on this basis one could explain Resnais's interest in Guernica, which is one of Picasso's cubist paintings for all that it isn't true cubism but more like a return to cubism - and also the fact that Faulkner or Dos Passos may have been the inspiration, even if it was by way of Marguerite Duras.

Kast: From what we can see, Resnais didn't ask Marguerite Duras for a piece of second-rate literary work meant to be 'turned into a film', and conversely she didn't suppose for a second that what she had to say, to write, might be beyond the scope of the cinema. You have to go very far back in the history of the cinema, to the era of great naïveté and great ambitions - relatively rarely put into practice - to someone like a Delluc, in order to find such a will to make no distinction between the literary purpose and the process of cinematic creation.

Rohmer: From that point of view the objection that I made to begin with would vanish - one could have reproached some film-makers with taking the American novel as their inspiration - on the grounds of its superficiality. But since here it's more a question of a profound equivalence, perhaps Hiroshima really is a totally new film. That calls into question a thesis which I confess was mine until now and which I can just as soon abandon without any difficulty (laughter), and that is the classicism of the cinema in relation to the other arts. There is no doubt that the cinema also could just as soon leave behind its classical period to enter a modern period. I think that in a few years, in ten, twenty or thirty years, we shall know whether Hiroshima was the most important film since the war, the first modern film of sound cinema, or whether it was possibly less important than we thought. In any case it is an extremely important film, but it could be that it will even gain stature with the years. It could be, too, that it will lose a little.

Godard: Like La Regle du feu on the one hand and films like Quai des brumes or Le Jour se !eve on the other. Both of Carne's films are very, very important, but nowadays they are a tiny bit less important than Renoir's film.

Rohmer: Yes. And on the grounds that I found some elements in Hiroshima less seductive than others, I reserve judgment. There was something in the first few frames that irritated me. Then the film very soon made me lose this feeling of irritation. But I can understand how one could like and admire Hiroshima and at the same time find it quite jarring in places.

Doniol-Valcroze: Morally or aesthetically?

Godard: Its the same thing. Tracking shots are a question of morality.'

Kass: It's indisputable that Hiroshima is a literary film. Now, the epithet 'literary' is the supreme insult in the everyday vocabulary of the cinema. What is so shattering about Hiroshima is its negation of this connotation of the word. It's as if Resnais had assumed that the greatest cinematic ambition had to coincide with the greatest literary ambition. By substituting pretension for ambition you can beautifully sum up the reviews that have appeared in several newspapers since the film came out. Resnais's initiative was intended to displease all those men of letters —whether they're that by profession or aspiration — who have no love for anything in the cinema that fails to justify the unforrnulated contempt in which they already hold it. The total fusion of the film with its script is so obvious that its enemies instantly understood that it was precisely at this point that the attack had to be made: granted, the film is beautiful, but the text is so literary, so uncinematic, etc., etc. In reality I can't see at all how one can even conceive of separating the two.

Godard: Sacha Guitry would be very pleased with all that.

Donioi-Vaicroze: No one sees the connection,

Godard: But it's there. The text, the famous false problem of the text and the image. Fortunately we have finally reached the point where even the literary people, who used to be of one accord with the provincial exhibitors, are no longer of the opinion that the important thing is the image. And that is what Sacha Guitry proved a long time ago. I say 'proved' advisedly. Because Pagnol, for example, wasn't able to prove it, Since Truffaut isn't with us I am very happy to take his place by incidentally making the point that Hiroshima is an indictment of all those who did not go and see the Sacra Guitry retrospective at the Cinematheque. 2

Doniol-Valcroze: If that's what Rohmer meant by the irritating side of the film, I acknowledge that Guitry's films have an irritating side. […] Essentially, more than the feeling of watching a really adult woman in a film for the first time, I think that the strength of the Emmanuelle Riva character is that she is a woman who isn't aiming at an adult's psychology, just as in Les 400 Coups little Jean-Pierre Laud wasn't aiming at a child's psychology, a style of behaviour prefabricated by professional scriptwriters, Emmanuelle Riva is a modern adult woman because she is not an adult woman, Quite the contrary, she is very childish, motivated solely by her impulses and not by her ideas. Antonioni was the first to show us this kind of woman.

Romer: Have there already been adult women in the cinema? Domarchi: Madame Bovary.

Godard: Renoir's or Minnelli's?

Domarchi: It goes without saying. (Laughter.) Let's say Elena, then.

Rivette: Elena is an adult woman in the sense that the female character played by Ingrid Bergman3 is not a classic character, but of a classic modernism, like Renoir's or Rossellini's. Elena is a woman to whom sensitivity matters, instinct and all the deep mechanisms matter, but they are contradicted by reason, the intellect. And that derives from classic psychology in terms of the interplay of the mind and the senses. While the Emmanuelle Riva character is that of a woman who is not irrational, but is not-rational. She doesn't understand herself. She doesn't analyse herself. Anyway, it is a bit like what Rossellini tried to do in Stromboli. But in Stromboli the Bergman character was clearly delineated, an exact curve. She was a 'moral' character. Instead of which the Emmanuelle Riva character remains voluntarily blurred and ambiguous. Moreover, that is the theme of Hiroshima: a woman who no longer knows where she stands, who no longer knows who she is, who tries desperately to redefine herself in relation to Hiroshima, in relation to this Japanese man, and in relation to the memories of Revers that come back to her. In the end she is a woman who is starting all over again, going right back to the beginning, trying to define herself in existential terms before the world and before her past, as if she were one more unformed matter in the process of being born.

Godard: So you could say that Hiroshima is Simone de Beauvoir that works. Domarchi: Yes. Resnais is illustrating an existentialist conception of psychology.

Doniol-Valcroze: As in Journey into Autumn or So Close to Life,4 but elaborated and done more systematically.

[…]

Domarchi: In fact, in a sense Hiroshima is a documentary on Emmanuelle Riva. I would be interested to know what she thinks of the film.

Rivette: Her acting takes the same direction as the film, It is a tremendous effort of composition. I think that we are again locating the schema I was trying to draw out just now: an endeavour to fit the pieces together again; within the consciousness of the heroine, an effort on her part to regroup the various elements of her persona and her consciousness in order to build a whole out of these fragments, or at least what have become interior fragments through the shock of that meeting at Hiroshima. One would be right in thinking that the film has a double beginning after the bomb; on the one hand, on the plastic level and the intellectual level, since the film's first image is the abstract image of the couple on whom the shower of ashes falls, and the entire beginning is simply a meditation on Hiroshima after the explosion of the bomb. But you can say too that, on another level, the film begins after the explosion for Emmanuelle Riva, since it begins after the shock which has resulted in her disintegration, dispersed her social and psychological personality, and which means that it is only later that we guess, through what is implied, that she is married, has children in France, and is an actress —in short, that she has a structured life. At Hiroshima she experiences a shock, she is hit by a 'bomb' which explodes her consciousness, and for her from that moment it becomes a question of finding herself again, re-composing herself. In the same way that Hiroshima had to be rebuilt after atomic destruction, Emmanuelle Riva in Hiroshima is going to try to reconstruct her reality. She can only achieve this through using the synthesis of the present and the past, what she herself has discovered at Hiroshima and what she has experienced in the past at levers.

Doniol-Valcroze: What is the meaning of the line that keeps being repeated by the Japanese man at the beginning of the film: 'No, you saw nothing at Hiroshima'?

Godard: It has to be taken in the simplest sense. She saw nothing because she wasn't there. for was he. However, he also tells her that she has seen nothing of Paris, yet she is a Parisian. The point of departure is the moment of awareness, or at the very least the desire to become aware, I think Resnais has filmed the novel that the young French novelists are all trying to write, people like Butor, Robbe-Grillet, Bastide and of course Marguerite Duras. I can remember a radio programme where Regis Bastide was talking about Wild Strawberries and he suddenly realized that the cinema had managed to express what he thought belonged exclusively in the domain of literature, and that the problems which he, as a novelist, was setting himself had already been solved by the cinema without its even needing to pose them for itself. I think it's a very significant point.

Kast: We've already seen a lot of films that parallel the novel's rules of construction. Hiroshima goes further. We are at the very core of a reflection on the narrative form itself. The passage from the present to the past, the persistence of the past in the present, are here no longer determined by the subject, the plot, but by pure lyrical movements. In reality, Hiroshima evokes the essential conflict between the plot and the novel. Nowadays there is a gradual tendency for the novel to get rid of the psychological plot. Alain Resnais's film is completely bound up with this modification of the structures of the novel. The reason for this is simple. There is no action, only a kind of double endeavour to understand what a love story can mean. First at the level of individuals, in a kind of long struggle between love and its own erosion through the passage of time. As if love, at the very instant it happens, were already threatened with being forgotten and destroyed. Then, also, at the level of the connections between an individual experience and an objective historical and social situation. The love of these anonymous characters is not located on the desert island usually reserved for games of passion. It takes place in a specific context, which only accentuates and underlines the horror of contemporary society. 'Enmeshing a love story in a context which takes into account knowledge of the unhappiness of others,' Resnais says somewhere. His film is not made up of a documentary on Hiroshima stuck on to a plot, as has been said by those who don't take the time to look at things properly. For Titus and Berenice in the ruins of Hiroshima are inescapably no longer Titus and Berenice.

Rohmer: To sum up, it is no longer a reproach to say that this film is literary, since it happens that Hiroshima moves not in the wake of literature but well in advance of it.5 "There are certainly specific influences: Proust, Joyce, the Americans, but they are assimilated as they would be by a young novelist writing his first novel, a first novel that would be an event, a date to be accorded significance, because it would mark a step forward.

Godard: The profoundly literary aspect perhaps also explains the fact that people who are usually irritated by the cinema within the cinema, while the theatre within the theatre or the novel within the novel don't affect them in the same way, are not irritated by the fact that in Hiroshima Emmanuelle Riva plays the part of a film actress who is in fact involved in making a film.

Doniol-Valcroze: I think it is a device of the script, and on Resnais's part there are deliberate devices in the handling of the subject. In my opinion Resnais was very much afraid that his film might be seen as nothing more than a propaganda film. He didn't want it to be potentially useful for any specific political ends. This may be marginally the reason why he neutralized a possible 'fighter for peace' element through the girl having her head shaved after the Liberation. In any case he thereby gave a political message its deep meaning instead of its superficial meaning.

Domarchi: It is for this same reason that the girl is a film actress. It allows Resnais to raise the question of the anti-atomic struggle at a secondary level, and, for example, instead of showing a real march with people carrying placards, he shows a filmed reconstruction of a march during which, at regular intervals, an image comes up to remind the viewers that it is a film they are watching.

Rivette: It is the same intellectual strategy as Pierre Klossowski used in his first novel, La Vocation suspenclue. He presented his story as the review of a book that had been published earlier, Both are a double movement of consciousness, and so we come back again to that key word, which is at the same time a vogue word: dialectic — a movement which consists in presenting the thing and at the same time an act of distancing in relation to that thing, in order to be critical — in other words, denying it and affirming it. To return to the same example, the march, instead of being a creation of the director, becomes an objective fact that is filmed twice over by the director. For Klossowski and for Resnais the problem is to give the readers or the viewers the sensation that what they are going to read or to see is not an author's creation but an element of the real world. Objectivity, rather than authenticity, is the right word to characterize this intellectual strategy, since the film-maker and the novelist look from the same vantage-point as the eventual reader or viewer. […] since we are in the realm of aesthetics, as well as the reference to Faulkner I think it just as pertinent to mention a name that in my opinion has an indisputable connection with the narrative technique of Hiroshima: Stravinsky. The problems which Resnais sets himself in film are parallel to those that Stravinsky sets himself in music. For example, the definition of music given by Stravinsky — an alternating succession of exaltation and repose — seems to me to fit Alain Resnais's film perfectly. What does it mean? The search for an equilibrium superior to all the individual elements of creativity. Stravinsky systematically uses contrasts and simultaneously, at the very point where they are used, he brings into relief what it is that unites them. The principle of Stravinsky's music is the perpetual rupture of the rhythm. The great novelty of The Rite of Spring was its being the first musical work where the rhythm was systematically varied. Within the field of rhythm, not tone, it was already almost serial music, made up of rhythmical oppositions, structures and series. And I get the impression that this is what Resnais is aiming at when he cuts together four tracking shots, then suddenly a static shot, two static shots and back to a tracking shot. Within the juxtaposition of static and tracking shots he tries to find what unites them. In other words he is seeking simultaneously an effect of opposition and an effect of profound unity.

Godard: It's what Rohmer was saying before. It's Picasso, but it isn't Matisse.

Domarchi: Matisse — that's Rossellini. (Laughter.)

Rivette: I find it is even more Braque than Picasso, in the sense that Braque's entire sure is devoted to that particular reflection, while Picasso's is tremendously diverse. Orson Welles would be more like Picasso, while Alain Resnais is close to Braque to the degree that the work of art is primarily a reflection in a particular direction.

Godard: When I said Picasso I was thinking mainly of the colours.

Rivette: Yes, but Braque too. He is a painter who wants both to soften strident colours and make soft colours violent. Braque wants bright yellow to be soft and Manet grey to be sharp. Well now, we've mentioned quite a few 'names', so you can see just how cultured we are, Cahiers du Cinema is true to form, as always. (Laughter.)

Godard: There is one film that must have given Alain Resnais something to think about, and what's more, he edited it: La Pointe courte.

Rivette: Obviously. But I don't think it's being false to Agnès Varda to say that by virtue of the fact that Resnais edited La Pointe courte his editing itself contained a reflection on what Agnes Varga had intended. To a certain degree Agnèsvarda becomes a fragment of Alain Resnais, and Chrismarker too.

Doniol-Valcroze: Now's the time to bring up Alain Resnais's 'terrible tenderness' which makes him devour his own friends by turning them into moments in his personal creativity. Resnais is Saturn. And that's why we all feel quite weak when we are confronted with him.

Rohmer: We have no wish to be devoured. It's lucky that he stays on the Left Bank of the Seine and we keep to the Right Banks.

Godard: When Resnais shouts 'Action', his sound engineer replies 'Saturn' riga tourne', i.e. 'it's rolling]. (Laughter.) Another thing — I'm thinking of an article by Roland Barthes on Les Cousins where he more or less said that these days talent had taken refuge in the right. Is Hiroshima a left-wing film or a right-wing film?

Rivette: Let's say that there has always been an aesthetic left, the one Cocteau talked about and which, furthermore, according to Radiguet, had to be contradicted, so that in its turn that contradiction could be contradicted, and so on As far as I'm concerned, if Hiroshima is a left-wing film it doesn't bother me in the slightest.

Rohmer: From the aesthetic point of view modern art has always been positioned to the left. But just the same, there's nothing to stop one thinking that it's possible to be modern without necessarily being left-wing. In other words, it is possible, for example, to reject a particular conception of modern art and regard it as out of date, not in the same but, if you like, in the opposite sense to dialectics. With regard to the cinema one shouldn't consider its evolution solely in terms of chronology. For example, the history of the sound film is very unclear in comparison with the history of the silent film, That's why even if Resnais has made a film that's ten years ahead of its time, it's wrong to assume that in ten years' time there will be a Resnais period that will follow on from the present one.

Rivette: Obviously, since if Resnais is ahead of his time he does it by remaining true to October, in the same way that Picasso's Las Meninas is true to Velazquez.

Rohmer: Yes. Hiroshima is a film that plunges at the same time into the past, the present and the future. It has a very strong sense of the future, particularly the anguish of the future.

Rivette: It's right to talk about the science-fiction element in Resnais. But it's also wrong, because he is the only film-maker to convey the feeling that he has already reached a world which in other people's eyes is still futuristic. In other words he is the only one to know that we are already in the age where science-fiction has become reality. In short, Alain Resnais is the only one of us who truly lives in 1959. With him the word 'science-fiction' loses all its pejorative and childish associations because Resnais is able to see the modern world as it is. Like the science-fiction writers he is able to show us all that is frightening in it, but also all that is human. Unlike the Fritz Lang of Metropolis or the Jules Verne of Ong cents millions de la Begum, unlike the classic notion of science-fiction as expressed by a Bradbury or a Lovecraft or even a Van Vogt all reactionaries in the end - it is very obvious that Resnais possesses the great originality of not reacting inside science-fiction. Not only does he opt for this modern and futuristic world, not only does he accept it, but he analyses it deeply, with lucidity and with love. Since this is the world in which we live and love, then for Resnais it is this world that is good, just and true.

Domarchi: That brings us back to this idea of terrible tenderness that is at the centre of Resnais's reflection. Essentially it is explained by the fact that for him society is characterized by a kind of anonymity. The wretchedness of the world derives from the fact of being struck down without knowing who is the aggressor. In Nuit et brouillard the commentary points out that some guy born in Carpentras or Brest has no idea that he is going to end up in a concentration camp, that already his fate is sealed, What impresses Resnais is that the world presents itself like an anonymous and abstract force that strikes where it likes„ anywhere, and whose will cannot be determined in advance. It is out of this conflict between individuals and a totally anonymous universe that is born a tragic vision of the world. That is the first stage of Resnais's thought. Then there comes a second stage which consists in channelling this first movement. Resnais has gone back to the romantic theme of the conflict between the individual and society, so dear to Goethe and his imitators, as it was to the nineteenth-century English novelists, But in their works it was the conflict between a man and palpable social forms that was clearly defined, while in Resnais there is none of that, The conflict is represented in a completely abstract way; it is between an and the universe. One can then react in an extremely tender way towards this state of affairs. I mean that it is no longer necessary to be indignant, to protest or even to explain. It is enough to show things without any emphasis, very subtly. And subtlety has always characterized Alain Resnais.

Rivette: Resnais is sensitive to the current abstract nature of the world. The first movement of his films is to state this abstraction. The second is to overcome this abstraction by reducing it through itself, if I may put it that way; by juxtaposing with each abstraction another abstraction in order to rediscover a concrete reality through the very act of setting them in relation to one another.

Godard: That's the exact opposite of Rossellini's procedure - he was outraged because abstract art had become official art.9 So Resnais's tenderness is metaphysical, it isn't Christian. There is no notion of charity in his films.

Rivette: Obviously not. Resnais is an agnostic. If there is a God he believes in, it's worse than St Thomas Aquinas's. His attitude is this: perhaps God exists, perhaps there is an explanation for everything, but there's nothing that allows us to be sure of it.

Godard: Like Dostoevsky's Stavrogin, who, if he believes, doesn't believe that he believes, and if he doesn't believe, doesn't believe that he doesn't believe. Besides, at the end of the film does Emmanuelle Riva leave, or does she stay? One can ask the same question about her as about Agnes in Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, when you ask yourself whether she lives or dies.

Rivette: That doesn't matter. It's fine if half the audience thinks that Emmanuelle Riva stays with the Japanese man and the other half thinks that she goes back to France.

Domarchi: Marguerite Duras and Resnais say that she leaves, and leaves for good.

Godard: believe them when they make another film that proves it to me.

Rivette: I don't think it really matters at all, for Hiroshima is a circular film. At the end of the last reel you can easily move back to the first, and so on. Hiroshima is a parenthesis in time. It is a film about reflection, on the past and on the present. Now, in reflection, the passage of time is effaced because it is a parenthesis within duration. And it is within this duration that Hiroshima is inserted. In this sense Resnais is dose to a writer like Borges, who has always tried to write stories in such a way that on reaching the last line the reader has to turn back and re-read the story right from the first line to understand what it is about — and so it goes on, relentlessly. With Resnais it is the same notion of the infinitesimal achieved by material means, mirrors face to face, series of labyrinths. It is an idea of the infinite but contained within a very short interval, since ultimately the 'time' of Hiroshima can just as well last twenty-four hours as one second.