Hiroshima Mon Amour Read online

  HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR

  Other Works by Marguerite Duras

  Published by Grove Press

  Four Novels

  (The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas; 10:30 on a Summer Night;

  Moderato Cantabile; The Square)

  India Song

  The Malady of Death

  Destroy, She Said

  Practicalities

  HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR

  Text by

  MARGUERITE DURAS

  for the film by

  ALAIN RESNAIS

  Translated from the French

  by Richard Seaver

  Picture Editor: Robert Hughes

  Grove Press

  New York

  Copyright © 1961 by Grove Press, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011.

  Originally published in 1960 by Librairie Gallimard, Paris, France

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 61-8011

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-3104-1

  eISBN: 978-0-8021-9061-1

  Cover design by Charles Rue Woods

  Cover photograph courtesy of Photofest

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  09 10 11 12 37 36 35 34 33

  HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR

  Produced by: Argos-Daiei-Como-Pathe Productions

  Directed by: Alain Resnais

  Scenario and dialogue by: Marguerite Duras

  Directors of Photography: Sacha Vierny and Takahashi Michio

  Music by: Georges Delerue and Giovanni Fusco

  Settings by: Esaka, Mayo, Petri

  Literary Adviser: Gérard Jarlot

  The principal roles were played by Emmanuelle Riva as the French actress, and Eiji Okada as the Japanese architect.

  The publishers would like to express their appreciation for the help and cooperation given by the American film distributors of Hiroshima Mon Amour, Zenith International Film Corporation, and its director, Mr. Dan Frankel.

  PREFACE

  I have tried to give as faithful an account as possible of the work I did for Alain Resnais on Hiroshima Mon Amour.

  Readers should not be surprised that Resnais’ “pictorial” contribution is practically never described in this work. My role is limited to describing those elements from which Resnais made his film.

  The passages on Nevers, which were not included in the original scenario (July, 1958) were annotated before the shooting in France (December, 1958). ("Pretend you were annotating not a future film, but a finished film,” Resnais told me.) They therefore represent a work apart from the script (see the Appendix: Nocturnal Notations). In the script itself only passing reference is made to them.

  As I hand the book over for publication, I greatly regret that it does not include the account of the almost daily conversations between Resnais and myself, G. Jarlot and myself, and all three of us together. Their advice was always precious, and I was never able to begin work on any episode without submitting the preceding one to them and listening to their comments, which were always lucid, demanding, and productive.

  Marguerite Duras

  SYNOPSIS

  The time is summer, 1957—August—at Hiroshima.

  A French woman, about thirty years old, has come to Hiroshima to play in a film on Peace.

  The story begins the day before her return to France. The film in which she's playing is practically finished. There's only one more scene to shoot.

  The day before her return to France, this French woman, whose name will never be given in the film—this anonymous woman—meets a Japanese (engineer or architect) and has a very brief love affair with him.

  How they met will not be revealed in the picture. For that is not what really matters. Chance meetings occur everywhere in the world. What is important is what these ordinary meetings lead to.

  In the beginning of the film we don't see this chance couple. Neither her nor him. Instead we see mutilated bodies—the heads, the hips—moving—in the throes of love or death—and covered successively with the ashes, the dew, of atomic death—and the sweat of love fulfilled.

  It is only by slow degrees that from these formless, anonymous bodies their own bodies emerge.

  They are lying in a hotel room. Naked. Smooth bodies. Intact.

  What are they talking about? About Hiroshima.

  She tells him that she has seen everything in Hiroshima. We see what she has seen. It's horrible. And meanwhile his voice, a negative voice, denies the deceitful pictures, and in an impersonal, unbearable way, he repeats that she has seen nothing at Hiroshima.

  Thus their initial exchange is allegorical. In short, an operatic exchange. Impossible to talk about Hiroshima. All one can do is talk about the impossibility of talking about Hiroshima. The knowledge of Hiroshima being stated a priori by an exemplary delusion of the mind.

  This beginning, this official parade of already well-known horrors from Hiroshima, recalled in a hotel bed, this sacrilegious recollection, is voluntary. One can talk about Hiroshima anywhere, even in a hotel bed, during a chance, an adulterous love affair. The bodies of both protagonists, who are really in love with each other, will remind us of this. What is really sacrilegious, if anything is, is Hiroshima itself. There's no point in being hypocritical and avoiding the issue.

  However little he has been shown of the Hiroshima Monument, these miserable remains of a Monument of Emptiness, the spectator should come away purged of practically all prejudice, and ready to accept anything he may be told about the two protagonists.

  And at this point the film comes back to their own story.

  A banal tale, one that happens thousands of times every day. The Japanese is married, has children. So is the French woman, who also has two children. Theirs is a one-night affair.

  But where? At Hiroshima.

  Their embrace—so banal, so commonplace—takes place in the one city of the world where it is hardest to imagine it: Hiroshima. Nothing is “given” at Hiroshima. Every gesture, every word, takes on an aura of meaning that transcends its literal meaning. And this is one of the principal goals of the film: to have done with the description of horror by horror, for that has been done by the Japanese themselves, but make this horror rise again from its ashes by incorporating it in a love that will necessarily be special and “wonderful,” one that will be more credible than if it had occurred anywhere else in the world, a place that death had not preserved.

  Between two people as dissimilar geographically, philosophically, historically, economically, racially, etc. as it is possible to be, Hiroshima will be the common ground (perhaps the only one in the world?) where the universal factors of eroticism, love, and unhappiness will appear in an implacable light. Everywhere except at Hiroshima guile is an accepted convention. At Hiroshima it cannot exist, or else it will be denounced.

  Before falling asleep they talk again of Hiroshima. In a different way. With desire and, perhaps without their being aware of it, with nascent love.

>   Their conversation concerns both themselves and Hiroshima. And their remarks are mixed in such a way from this point on—following the opera of Hiroshima—that it will be impossible to distinguish one from the other.

  Their personal story, however brief it may be, always dominates Hiroshima.

  If this premise were not adhered to, this would be just one more made-to-order picture, of no more interest than any fictionalized documentary. If it is adhered to, we'll end up with a sort of false documentary that will probe the lesson of Hiroshima more deeply than any made-to-order documentary.

  They awake. And talk again while she is getting dressed. Of ordinary things, and also of Hiroshima. Why not? It's quite natural. This is Hiroshima.

  And suddenly she appears completely dressed, as a Red Cross nurse.

  (This uniform, which is actually the uniform of official virtue, reawakens his desire. He wants to see her again. He's like everyone else, like all men, exactly, and in travesty there is an erotic factor that intrigues all men. The eternal nurse of an eternal war. . .)

  Why, since she also desires him, doesn't she want to see him again? She doesn't give any clear reason.

  When they awake they also talk of her past.

  What happened in Nevers, her native city, in that region called Nièvre where she was brought up? What happened to make her the way she is, so free and yet so haunted, so honest and yet so dishonest, so equivocal and so clear? So predisposed to chance love affairs? So cowardly when faced with love?

  One day, she tells him, one day at Nevers she was mad. Mad with spite. She says it the same way she might say that once at Nevers she saw things with perfect lucidity. The same way,

  If that Nevers “incident” explains her present conduct at Hiroshima, she says nothing about it. She talks about the Nevers incident as she might talk about anything else. Without revealing its cause.

  She leaves. She has decided not to see him again.

  But they will see each other again.

  Four o'clock that afternoon. Peace Square at Hiroshima (or in front of the hospital).

  The cameramen are moving off (whenever we see them in the film they're moving off with their equipment). The grandstands are being dismantled. The bunting is being removed.

  The French woman is asleep in the shadow (perhaps) of one of the grandstands which is being taken down.

  An enlightening film about Peace has just been completed. Not at all a ridiculous film, but just another film.

  A Japanese man makes his way through the crowd which, once again, presses in around the settings for the film that has just been completed. The same man we saw this morning in the hotel room. He sees the French woman, stops, goes toward her, watches her sleeping. His gaze awakens her. They exchange looks, both filled with desire. He has not come by chance. He has come to see her again.

  Almost immediately after they meet, there is a parade. It's the final scene of the film. Children parading, students parading. Dogs. Cats. Idlers. All Hiroshima is there, as it always is when the cause of world peace is at stake. A baroque parade.

  It is terribly hot. The sky is threatening. They wait for the parade to pass. As it does he tells her he thinks he loves her.

  He takes her to his house. They talk briefly about their respective lives.

  They're both happily married, not looking for a substitute for an unhappy marriage.

  It's there, during the act of love, that she begins to tell him about Nevers.

  She runs away from the house, and they go to a café overlooking the river “to kill time before her departure.” Night now.

  They remain there for several hours. Their love grows in inverse proportion to the time left before the plane's departure the following morning.

  It's here, in this café, that she tells him why she was mad in Nevers.

  Her head was shaved at Nevers in 1944, when she was twenty years old. Her first lover was a German. Killed at the Liberation.

  She remained in a cellar in Nevers, with her head shaved. It was only when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima that she was presentable enough to leave the cellar and join the delirious crowd in the streets.

  Why did she choose this personal sorrow? No doubt because he too is a person of extremes. To shave a girl's head because she has loved—really loved—an official enemy of her country, is the ultimate of horror and stupidity.

  We see Nevers, as we've already seen it before in the hotel room. And again they talk of themselves. And once again an overlapping of Nevers and love, of Hiroshima and love. It will all be mixed, without any preconceived principle, the way such things happen everywhere, every day, whenever couples newly in love talk.

  Again she leaves. Again she runs away from him.

  She tries to go back to her hotel to collect herself, doesn't succeed, emerges again from the hotel and returns to the café, which by then is closed. And she stays there. Remembering Never (interior monologue), therefore love itself.

  The man has followed her. She notices it. She looks at him. They look at each other, completely in love. A hopeless love, killed like the Nevers love. Therefore already relegated to oblivion. Therefore eternal.

  And yet she doesn't join him.

  She wanders through the city. And he follows her as he would an unknown woman. At a certain moment he accosts her and asks her to stay in Hiroshima, as if in an aside. She says no. Everyone's refusal. Common cowardice.*

  For them, the die is really cast.

  He doesn't insist.

  She wanders to the railroad station. He joins her there. They look at each other like shadows.

  From now on, nothing further to say to each other. The imminence of the departure freezes them in a funereal silence.

  It's really love. All they can do now is remain silent. An ultimate scene takes place in a café. We see her there in the company of another Japanese.

  And at another table the man she loves, completely motionless, his only reaction that of despair, to which he is wholly resigned but which transcends him physically. It is already as if she belonged to “the others.” And he can only fully understand it.

  At dawn she returns to her room. A few minutes later he knocks at the door. He can't help it. “Impossible not to come,” he apologizes.

  And in the room nothing happens. Both are reduced to a terrifying, mutual impotence. The room, "the way of the world,” remains around them, and they will disturb it no more.

  No vows exchanged. No further gesture.

  They simply call each other once again. What? Nevers, Hiroshima. For in fact, in each other's eyes, they are no one. They are names of places, names that are not names. It is as though, through them, all of Hiroshima was in love with all of Nevers.

  She says to him: “Hiroshima, that's your name.”

  *Note: Certain spectators of the film thought she “ended up” by staying at Hiroshima. It's possible. I have no opinion. Having taken her to the limit of her refusal to stay at Hiroshima, we haven't been concerned to know whether—once the film was finished—she succeeded in reversing her refusal.

  SCENARIO

  Part I

  (As the film opens, two pair of bare shoulders appear, little by little. All we see are these shoulders—cut off from the body at the height of the head and hips—in an embrace, and as if drenched with ashes, rain, dew, or sweat, whichever is preferred. The main thing is that we get the feeling that this dew, this perspiration, has been deposited by the atomic “mushroom” as it moves away and evaporates. It should produce a violent, conflicting feeling of freshness and desire. The shoulders are of different colors, one dark, one light. Fusco's music accompanies this almost shocking embrace. The difference between the hands is also very marked. The woman's hand lies on the darker shoulder: “lies” is perhaps not the word; “grips” would be closer to it. A man's voice, flat and calm, as if reciting, says:)

  HE: You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.

  (To be used as often as desired. A woman's voice, also flat, muffl
ed, monotonous, the voice of someone reciting, replies:)

  SHE: I saw everything. Everything.

  (Fusco's music, which has faded before this initial exchange, resumes just long enough to accompany the woman's hand tightening on the shoulder again, then letting go, then caressing it. The mark of fingernails on the darker flesh. As if this scratch could give the illusion of being a punishment for: "No. You saw nothing in Hiroshima.” Then the woman's voice begins again, still calm, colorless, incantatory:)

  SHE: The hospital, for instance, I saw it. I'm sure I did. There is a hospital in Hiroshima. How could I help seeing it?

  (The hospital, hallways, stairs, patients, the camera coldly objective.* [We never see her seeing.] Then we come back to the hand gripping—and not letting go of—the darker shoulder.)

  HE: You did not see the hospital in Hiroshima. You saw nothing in Hiroshima.

  (Then the woman's voice becomes more . . . more impersonal. Shots of the museum.† The same blinding light, the same ugly light here as at the hospital. Explanatory signs, pieces of evidence from the bombardment, scale models, mutilated iron, skin, burned hair, wax models, etc.)

  SHE: Four times at the museum. . . .

  HE: What museum in Hiroshima?

  SHE: Four times at the museum in Hiroshima. I saw the people walking around. The people walk around, lost in thought, among the photographs, the reconstructions, for want of something else, among the photographs, the photographs, the reconstructions, for want of something else, the explanations, for want of something else.

  Four times at the museum in Hiroshima.

  I looked at the people. I myself looked thoughtfully at the iron. The burned iron. The broken iron, the iron made vulnerable as flesh. I saw the bouquet of bottle caps: who would have suspected that? Human skin floating, surviving, still in the bloom of its agony. Stones. Burned stones. Shattered stones. Anonymous heads of hair that the women of Hiroshima, when they awoke in the morning, discovered had fallen out.