FILM REVIEW: HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR (RESTORED RELEASE)



Man (Eiji Okada) and Woman (Emmanuelle Riva) in Hiroshima Mon Amour.


Somehow we drifted off too far...

By Ed Rampell

The late 1950s and early 1960s was a pivotal, heady, historic time for French cinema, as Nouvelle Vague or New Wave classics flowed onto the screen. Whereas Cahiers du Cinema critic and enfant terrible Francois Truffaut’s reviews excoriating the state of France’s motion picture industry had previously literally resulted in his being banned from the Cannes Film Festival, in 1959 filmmaker Truffaut triumphantly returned, winning Cannes’ Best Director and OCIC Awards (as well as an Oscar nom) for his masterpiece, The 400 Blows. In 1960 Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless was released.  Then there was Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour.

Resnais’ film -- which won the FIPRESCI Award at Cannes bestowed by international film critics -- long unavailable for theatrical screenings, has been restored and is being theatrically re-released in glorious black and white. Hiroshima Mon Amour is a groundbreaking work written with a novelist’s sensibility by Marguerite Duras (who, along with Resnais, scored Cannes’ Film Writers Award). Having been born and raised in Vietnam and Cambodia Duras also enhances this story about what Noel Coward would call a “brief encounter” between a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva as Elle) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada plays Lui). Elle is making a pro-peace film on location in postwar Hiroshima and the A-bombed city forms a backdrop to their love affair.

(Riva appeared in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1960 concentration camp uprising drama, Kapo and, at age 85 co-starred with Jean-Louis Trintignant and Isabelle Huppert in Michael Haneke’s 2012, Amour.  Interestingly, Okada starred in a Japanese film called Hiroshima in 1953 and went on to act opposite Marlon Brando in his 1963 meditation on U.S. imperialism, The Ugly American, and in 1964’s Woman in the Dunes.)

As for Hiroshima Mon Amour’s politics, it was quite daring to make an anti-nuclear film at that time, especially vis-à-vis U.S. audiences. To this day many Americans have an unexamined assumption that nuking Hiroshima, and then Nagasaki, was a vital -- hence justifiable -- factor in ending WWII, a rationale Elle gives voice to. But Resnais and Duras audaciously critique this rationalization (which Olive Stone blew to smithereens in his recent Untold History of the United States documentary series for Showtime) and present the human face of atomic disaster. Viewers should be aware that there are a few gruesome shots that caused this cineaste to avert his eyes from the screen -- but then again, nuclear war is no cotillion ball.

The nuclear nightmare has left its mark on Lui -- although he was away from Hiroshima, serving overseas as an Imperial soldier, when the Enola Gay dropped its fatal, fateful payload on its civilian target, which included Lui’s family. Just as Elle’s experiences in occupied France during WWII made an enduring, indelible impression upon her. As a teenager she had a doomed romance with a German soldier at Nevers.

The Frenchwoman therefore has sex with men who were both on the opposing side during WWII (as Duras well knew, Japan and France vied over Indochina).  Although not explicit by 2014 standards, the sexuality onscreen was bold in terms of 1959’s aesthetics -- at a time when professional virgin Doris Day held sway in Hollywood, it is clear that this interracial couple is engaging in and enjoying sexual intercourse in an artfully shot sensuous sequence.

In the existential mode, Hiroshima Mon Amour asks profound questions: Can love overcome the horrors of war? Sigmund Freud asked which is stronger: Eros (the life force) or Thanatos (the death instinct)? Or, as “Dr.” George Carlin, that consummate master of wordplay, put it: “The person who thought up the slogan, ‘Make Love, Not War’… his job was over that day. He could’ve retired at that moment. If it would’ve been me, I would’ve walked away. So long, I’m goin’ to the beach. You guys work it out.”

Speaking of Freud, Hiroshima Mon Amour is also about the persistence of memory, and how it can rule and even terrorize our lives, long after those traumatizing event s have taken place. Indeed, one could make the point that both characters, especially Elle, suffer from PTSD. The work’s film form, which deploys flashbacks and even flash forwards to a flashback, helps express these notions. Resnais continued to experiment with cinematic structure as late as his 2012 You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet, made two years before his death in 2014 at the age of 91.

In 1959, the N.Y. Herald Tribune predicted Hiroshima Mon Amour “will still be important 50 years hence.” Well, today, as in 1959, this black and white, subtitled movie is not for everyone -- popcorn munchers thirsting for mindless entertainment might want to move on to the next theater in the multiplex. Some 2014 viewers may even find the acting, storyline, etc., to be pretentious, too arty, too intellectual, perhaps even laughable.

But 55 years hence, for serious cinema viewers interested in fine films and movie history, Alain Resnais’ masterpiece remains essential viewing. In 1961 Truffaut and Godard co-directed the whimsical short A Story of Water, a romance about the flooding of a French village, which in retrospect could be viewed as metaphorical foreshadowing for how the New Wave inundated world cinema. And Hiroshima Mon Amour remains an essential ripple in this marvelous movie movement. So as far as this cinefile and Resnais fan is concerned, he’s impatiently waiting for the restoration (assuming it needs it) and re-release (which it surely needs) of Resnais’ other early Nouvelle Vague Classic, 1961’s Last Year at Marienbad.

Editor's note: I would highly recommend people explore Ultravox's "Hiroshima Mon Amour" as well. It it is also a bonafide masterpiece.

 

DVD REVIEW: BRIAN ENO 1971-1977

The cover for Brian Eno 1971-1977: The Man Who Fell to Earth.

Brain One

By Don Simpson

Brian Eno 1971-1977: The Man Who Fell To Earth is, surprisingly enough, the first documentary film produced about, but not authorized or sanctioned by, Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno, otherwise known as Brian Eno, or simply just Eno. The documentary captures what are arguably the most important years of Eno’s fruitful career in 154 minutes. This would be 60 minutes too long for most music documentaries, but considering Eno’s countless seminal contributions to music as a musician, arranger, producer, innovator and theorist during those eight years, even 154 minutes seems all too brief of an overview. For better or worse, Eno is probably best known today for his production duties for U2 and Coldplay. The purpose of Brian Eno 1971-1977: The Man Who Fell To Earth is to school the uniformed on Eno’s golden years.

Eno studied at art school and considered himself to be a non-musician when he joined Roxy Music as their keyboards and synthesizers player in the early 1970s. As with everything else he touched from here on out, Eno’s unique influence, otherwise known as “treatments” or "Enossification," on Roxy Music’s first two albums -- Roxy Music (1972) and For Your Pleasure (1973) -- is undeniable.

After one too many clashes with Roxy Music frontman Brian Ferry, Eno began a solo career releasing four groundbreaking “vocal” albums (all of which would be “desert island” picks for me): Here Come the Warm Jets (1974), Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) (1974), Another Green World (1975) and Before and After Science (1977). Eno also began releasing instrumental albums, which eventually became his forte as a solo artist, such as Discreet Music (1975) and Ambient 1/Music for Airports (1978), thus laying the groundwork for ambient music.

Eno simultaneously began involving himself in many collaborative projects such as No Pussyfooting (1973) and Evening Star (1975) with Robert Fripp (King Crimson); The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974) with Genesis; End (1974) with Nico (Velvet Underground); Lady June's Linguistic Leprosy (1974) with Kevin Ayers (Soft Machine) and poet June Campbell Cramer; Diamond Head (1975) and Listen Now (1977) with Phil Manzanera (Roxy Music); Fear (1974), Slow Dazzle (1975) and Helen of Troy (1975) with John Cale (Velvet Underground); Cluster & Eno (1977) with Cluster; and Low (1977) and "Heroes" (1977) with David Bowie. Also by the close of 1977, Eno had produced Ultravox’s Ultravox!, Talking Heads’ More Songs About Buildings and Food and Devo’s debut Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!.

And that is -- literally -- only about half of what Eno did between 1971 and 1977. Brian Eno 1971-1977: The Man Who Fell To Earth touches upon even more Eno-related projects than I just did, dedicating a few minutes to each release and spending a bit more time on the major milestones in Eno’s career. Archive footage of live performances and studio recording sessions is interspersed amongst interviews with music journalists, colleagues, collaborators and friends; and of course there is a healthy dose of Eno’s music (most of which is matched with visual accompaniment).

Eno is debatably one of the most influential individuals to have ever worked in the music industry. As one of the more innovative musicians and producers in the history of rock music, no matter what role Eno plays during the recording of a song, he approaches the studio as a painter approaches a blank canvas. His specialty is adding more dimensions to the music, highlighting aspects of the song structure to make it stand out more, while morphing other aspects in order to blur them into the background. Everything Eno has touched during his 40+ year career has been gold to my ears.  

Now available on DVD, Brian Eno 1971-1977: The Man Who Fell To Earth suitably represents Eno’s genius, though I would argue that his golden years continued through the 1981 release of his collaboration with David Byrne, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.