The Resnaisian Revolution- HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR

In viewing Alain Resnais' celebrated 1959 first feature, HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR, after many, many years I have a chance now to give it a certain scrutiny that allows me to see why this film is a masterpiece- a revolutionary masterpiece. I believe that the non-linear cinematic narrative began with this film. It is rare that we can find a film that is an inaugural point for a 'cine-genre' (i.e. a genre specific to the cinematic art form), but I believe that Resnais' HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR is just such a film. It is a film that reveals that dramatic 'temporality' or the actual historical time represented in a story is arbitrary to the shyzhet or the organization of the shots that tell a story. In classical Hollywood cinema the switching to the represented 'past tense' which in turn highlights and defines the represented 'present tense' was heavily coded by the use of the 'blurry lap dissolve shot' and music (usually harp glissandos) that noted the transition. A character could narrate the events of the past while the spectator is shown these past events without getting lost in the transition to and from past and present tense. Parallel editing was a precursor to the coding of past and present tense in that the filmmakers (Porter, Griffith, Eisenstein and others) could suspend one narrative thread while showing another narrative thread that would eventually be reconciled in the finale of the story. For instance, the house fire and the firemen racing from the firehouse to the house on fire. These cuts needed no musical transition or blurry lap dissolves for the story context allowed the viewer to reasonably assume that the two narrative threads were somehow interrelated. Yet, Resnais in HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR dismisses the use of lap dissolves and music to signify the transition from past to present. Moreover, Resnais uses several different tools of conventional cinematic grammar to construct a non-linear narrative where dramatic time is arbitrary to narrative time. These tools of cinematic grammar can be catalogued as such: the graphic match cut, the point of view shot, the voice over and finally the intertexual use of documentary and re-staged historical footage. As this item I am writing here is too brief to consider all of these tools I will concentrate on Resnais' use of two of the most recognizable: the graphic match cut and the point of view shot. A match cut was most often used in classical Hollywood cinema to make the actions in two different shots appear continuous. The match cut was a cut that was made on the action and was a standard tool of continuity editing and basic cinematographic grammar. Resnais takes this idea of a match cut and uses it to establish a compositional similarity between shots of two different time periods as well as a similarity between two similar actions in two different time periods. Because Resnais used this type of cutting to match actions or compositions that are similar in the narrative material that represented the past and the material that represented the present the non-linear narrative could now be free to develop without the restrictions of having to signify through music, dissolve or intertitle what is now the past and what is now the present. The first significant graphic match of temporal discontinuity occurs when the French woman looks at her Japanese lover on the bed where they have just made love. He is lying on his stomach with his right arm extended outward from his body. The next shot is of a man whom she loved (a German solider who died 14 years ago) lying fully clothed in the same position on the ground after having been shot. Although it is impossible at this point in the narrative to know who this man is, the sudden cut to a shot of another man in a different time period laying in the same position is the beginning of non-linearity in narrative cinematic discourse. For the representation of past and present are no longer dependent upon theatrical or musical cues, but instead can be represented cinematically via montage at the filmmaker's thematic discretion. The second tool of non-linearity is found in Resnais use of the point-of-view shot which is yet another standard device of classical Hollywood representation. Here, the shot of a character looking is juxtaposed with another shot of an object and then a return shot of the character. This system of suture as it was described by Dayan many years ago, is disrupted by Resnais for he uses the point of view shot to intertwine the past within the present. During the French woman's recounting of her love affair with a German soldier during WWII Resnais cuts to shots of the woman riding her bike and the various meetings of the two lovers. Suddenly he cuts back to the French woman and her Japanese lover and the two of them are looking off-screen as if they were spectators to the events that had just transpired. As if just as we, the audience, were watching the images of the past, so were they the characters themselves. The use of off-screen glances and a shot of an object is standard cinematic grammar that establishes a character's point-of-view, but in HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR the object being looked at is a fictional representation of the past. The object being looked at by the two characters in the present are the two characters in the past. By use of the graphic match and the point-of-view system Resnais was able to find a new way to represent the past in the present tense of a narrative without recourse to the conventional codes of cinematic grammar that defined past from present. More than this, by using the conventional tools unconventionally Resnais was able to go from past to present with an astonishing fluidity that had never been seen before and was advanced upon in his next film, L'ANNEE DERNIERE A MARIENBAD. I believe that HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR was revolutionary because of these advances in cinematic grammar that propelled the cinema into a new non-linear mode of temporal representation.