Hiroshima mon amour

A 1959 film directed by Alain Resnais, written by Marguerite Duras, and set in Hiroshima. Its brief affair between a French actress and a Japanese architect entwines personal memory with the atomic bombing and wartime trauma.

Nonlinear narrative: A storytelling structure that presents events out of chronological order. The film moves between the lovers’ present encounter and remembered pasts.
Alain Resnais: A French film director known for formally innovative works about memory and time. Resnais directed the film after making documentaries about war and remembrance.
Emmanuelle Riva: A French actor whose film and stage career began in the 1950s. Riva plays the French actress whose memories of Nevers surface in Hiroshima.
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum: A museum in Hiroshima documenting the atomic bombing and its consequences. The lovers’ visit to the museum frames their disagreement about seeing and knowing.
Cinema verite: A documentary movement that uses mobile cameras and direct sound to observe lived reality. The film’s staged encounter and documentary fragments unsettle straightforward documentary authority.
Voice-over: A voice heard over a film image, often belonging to a character or narrator. The opening voices dispute what images of Hiroshima can establish about memory.
Marguerite Duras: A French novelist, playwright, and filmmaker whose works often explore desire and memory. Duras wrote the screenplay and shaped its spare, recursive dialogue.
Eiji Okada: A Japanese film and stage actor known internationally for roles in postwar cinema. Okada plays the Hiroshima architect who becomes the actress’s lover.
Nevers: A city in central France, the setting of the heroine’s wartime memories. The film’s Hiroshima story repeatedly opens onto the woman’s earlier life in Nevers.
Holocaust film: A film concerned with the Nazi persecution and murder of European Jews. Resnais’s treatment of atrocity invites comparison with his earlier work on the camps.

Linked from 5 pages

Cléo from 5 to 7Compared with: Both films experiment with time and subjectivity, but Varda keeps Cléo’s story within one afternoon.