Remembering Hiroshima Mon Amour

Hiroshima Mon Amour has many issues that it tries to express. A main one is memory it’s role in a person’s life. Memory is shown in two different views through the movie and both have a different effect on the audience. One view starts with Hiroshima and the effect the atomic bomb had on the land and people. Here, the city is rebuilt and remade after the horrible event that took place. However, while it takes pains to remind the tourists what happened with museums, the city seems to take pride in what happened with rides and flashing towers designed to look like rockets/bombs. The city attempts to glaze over the horrors of that day and forget what it did much like the audience does by the end of this movie.
The viewer is assailed with terrible images of the damage that the bomb did and the effect on the population but by the end of the movie we barely remember it. While images of the effects of the bomb show up once more in the movie, during the march/parade, the remainder of the movie moves on to another topic of tragedy and another view of memory that share similarities with Hiroshima.
Elle, the woman, had an appalling experience in Nevers that she forced herself to forget. She moved on with her life and tries to glaze over the horrors of that part of her life by becoming an actress. However, much like the burnt out building that remains in Hiroshima, Elle is reminded of what happened to her in Nevers because of Lui, her new lover. She is forced to confront her memory and relate it to Lui because of her feelings for him. The feelings are similar or the same to what she felt for her first love and this reminds her of the pain she dealt with. She relates her account of what happened that show flashbacks of the actual events of her life. This provides the audience a deeper emotional investment with her story/tragedy.
But after she tells her story the viewer is given long montages of her walking the streets and cylindrical conversations with Lui that result in the audience's memory loss of her tragedy. By the end of the movie the audience has forgotten Hiroshima and vaguely remember Elle’s story but are quickly brought back to this with their closing lines in which they embody the horrible event that took place.
The two types of memory, a city’s way of remembering and a single person’s memory, are different but hold similarities to each other. Each have their landmarks and each attempt to cover over their feelings and lessen the tragedy but each does it in their own way.


--Nicole Hoover