observing real life ina fictional drama

Hiroshima Mon Amour shares a lot of characteristics with direct cinema. The hand-held cameras, shooting on location, and cinematic devices like extended takes and dead time contributed to a feeling of reality. Just like direct cinema, the director pushed a ideological message with depictions of an ordinary life. The audience was only observing two days, presented in seemingly real time. We watched the characters chat, connect and reminisce with each other. There was no firestorm–no cataclysmic event. It was a everyday event: two adults meeting, embracing, and moving on with their lives. But like the time this was shooting, everyday events took on additional meaning. All the gray and shots of rain were mean to evoke the atomic blast. The hotel was even named “New Hiroshima”. Symbolic of the world’s efforts to move this city on, teaching them to forget and erase the past.
The realness was assisted by consistent contradictions. There was a sense of the hidden reality as shown by the keyholes the audience had into the subconscious of the French woman. Close-ups dragged the spectator into her pain and loneliness. The director purposefully kept the same artistic style when shooting her memories and the present so they would blend into one stream of consciousness for the viewer–as they had for her. Even the two slaps on the face woke us up like they woke her up.
Referencing direct cinema, the director took his time to show us what it would really feel like and look like. The audience was able to identify with the main characters at a much higher level than in the typical fictional piece. We were able to experience the small changes and details that make things real. Two excellent examples include her running through he field to meet the German soldier. The music communicates her joy, and contrasts with the gray, wintery bleakness of this provincial French town during war time. The camera shows us the soldier signaling to her, and then sneaking out, bounding across the field, –we see time passing her by.
Her going up and down the stairs in the hotel are a great exhibition for Resnais’ use of contrast, elongated takes the first time she calmly walks to her room. We see the full extent of her journey. The second part, we see her slowly unraveling. Her gait has changed. By the end, she is rushing down the stairs, hurrying to get away from her own demons, choices, and the necessity of acting right then. Each run up and down the stairs had that much more meaning because the audience had something to compare it to.
Lastly, some of the most important scenes to thematically unravel the move were cleverly shrouded by distracting these everyday occurrences. The parade depicted the grotesque superficiality of the anti-war parades when contrasted with the effects of the war. Maimed, disfigured faces were walking around like ghosts in a gray, shell-shocked city. Meanwhile outsiders were so quick to move them forward, past their reality— as if forgetting would make it all disappear. This scene is key to understanding the director’s antiwar message, but he audience is too busy watching the back-and forth between the man and the woman. Like real life, we were distracted.