Review of Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) by Kristen D — 30 Apr 2009

Breathtaking, brutal, and and intensely philosophical, Alain Resnais weaves nauseating footage of victims of nuclear fallout together with a passionately brief affair between a French actress and a former Japanese soldier to create a film that not only speculates on the fundamental nature of the temporal categories of past, present, and future but also uses the love affair as a metaphor for the confused feelings that Hiroshima evokes in those who are living within fifteen years after its nuclear annihilation.

In many ways, Resnais's film fully evokes the feeling of postmodernism (a term that would not be coined for several more decades) in its positing that we have lost a fundamental connection with our past and look with dread towards the future.