Jacques Rivette’s review published on Letterboxd:
HIROSHIMA, OUR LOVE
by Jean Domarchi, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Jean-Luc Godard, Pierre Kast, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer.
(Cahiers du Cinéma No. 97, July 1959)
In our issue 71, some editors of CAHIERS DU CINÉMA had held a first roundtable on the then-critical situation of French cinema. Today, the release of Hiroshima, my love seems to them an event important enough to justify a new conversation.
ROHMER: Everyone, I think, will agree if I start by saying that Hiroshima is a film about which one can say everything.
GODARD: So let's start by saying that it is literature.
ROHMER: And literature that is somewhat suspect, insofar as it belongs to an epigone of the American school, the one that was so popular in France after 1945.
KAST: The relationship between cinema and literature is, at least, obscure and bad. All one can say, I believe, is that literati vaguely despise cinema. And cinema people, vaguely, suffer from a feeling of inferiority. The uniqueness of Hiroshima is that the Marguerite Duras-Alain Resnais meeting is an exception to the rule I have just stated.
GODARD: Let's say then what is striking, at first glance in this film, is that it has no cinematographic reference whatsoever. One can say of Hiroshima that it is Faulkner + Stravinsky, but one cannot say that it is such filmmaker + another.
RIVETTE: Resnais's film may not have specific cinematographic references, but I believe it can be found to have indirect and deeper references, for it is a film that strongly reminds one of Eisenstein insofar as it can be found to apply, albeit very freshly, some ideas from Eisenstein.
GODARD: When I said: no cinematographic references, I meant that watching Hiroshima, one has the impression of seeing a film that was impossible to anticipate based on what was already known about cinema. For example, when one sees India, one knows that one will be surprised, but more or less expects this surprise. Similarly, I know I will be surprised by Cordelier as I was by Elena. Whereas with Hiroshima, I have the impression of seeing something I absolutely did not expect.
A central motif in the tapestry.
DONIOL-VALCROZE: Regarding Resnais, didn't we already know a bit about what we were going to see? In relation to Night and Fog and All the Memory in the World, for example.
KAST: That's true. Behind the apparent diversity of subjects, from Guernica to The Song of Styrene, a kind of central motif in the tapestry emerges. It is customary to consider intelligence and sensitivity, intellectual passion and emotion, as contradictory. Resnais troubles those lovers of logic. From this work, which is a flawless whole, if one goes back up to the author, one is not at the end of one's surprises.
RIVETTE: Hiroshima explains Resnais's short films more than it is explained by them. It is by watching Hiroshima that one finally understands exactly what Resnais meant in Statues Also Die, the "National Library", or even Van Gogh, in which Resnais was already defining himself as a filmmaker who reflects. So indeed Hiroshima is the culmination of the short films that we admired somewhat blindly. But there is undoubtedly a part of Hiroshima that we admire blindly and that would be explained by Resnais's following films. In any case, I believe that with Hiroshima one can finally consider Resnais's short films as a work forming a whole. Until now, they were scattered, even in our admiration. It was normal to look at each one as a particular case. Just to take the last three, there were obviously similarities between Night and Fog, the "National", and Styrene, but precisely, we tended to think that it was, if not a trick that Resnais had found, at least a "style", with what that can entail both profound and mannered. In the "National", what I liked was more the content, the subject. I found the form very beautiful, but it gave me the feeling of perhaps being added on. After seeing Hiroshima, I no longer have this sensation.
GODARD: Besides, Hiroshima is much more similar to All the Memory in the World than to the other short films by Resnais. After all, it's almost the same subject: forgetting and memory.
DONIOL-VALCROZE: Basically, these short films were mostly parts of a great film that we will never see, but which Hiroshima shows us what it could have been.
KAST: No one has ever had the idea of labeling Resnais as a documentarist, in the pejorative sense of the term. But finally, conceding to the Aristotelians, it must be acknowledged that his films were not fiction films.
GODARD: In any case, they were science films.
KAST: So, let's say that it's Marguerite Duras who played the role of catalyst between documentary and romance, science and fiction. Resnais had been thinking about the romanticized film for a very long time. He was interested in certain novels by Queneau, as well as "The Bad Moves" by Roger Vailland.
Perhaps happiness.
ROHMER: If we talked a little about All the Memory in the World. For me, it's a film that remains quite obscure. Hiroshima has illuminated certain aspects for me, but not all.
RIVETTE: It's undoubtedly the most mysterious of all Resnais's short films. By its subject, both very modern and very distressing, it joins what Renoir told us in his interviews, that is to say, the great drama of our civilization is that it is becoming a civilization of specialists. Everyone is more and more locked in their own little domain, and incapable of leaving it. No one today is capable of deciphering both an ancient inscription and a modern scientific formula. Culture and the common treasure of humanity have become the prey of specialists. I believe that was Resnais's idea in shooting the "National". He wanted to show that the only necessary task for humanity, in trying to regain this unity of culture, was, through the work of each individual, to try to glue back together the scattered fragments of this universal culture that is getting lost. And that's why, I think, All the Memory in the World ended with those increasingly high views of the central hall, where one sees each reader, each researcher, in his corner, bent over his manuscript, but next to each other, all trying to assemble the scattered pieces of the mosaic, to rediscover the lost secret of humanity, a secret that might be called happiness.
DOMARCHI: Ultimately, it's a subject that is not so far removed, indeed, from that of Hiroshima. We said: in terms of form; but also in terms of content, Resnais approaches Eisenstein, since both of them try to unify the opposites, in other words, that their art is dialectical.
RIVETTE: Resnais's great obsession, if we can use that word, is the feeling of the fragmentation of the original unity: the world has broken, it has fragmented into a series of tiny pieces, and the challenge is to reassemble the puzzle. For Resnais, it seems to me that this reconstitution takes place on two levels. First on the level of the subject, of dramatization. Then, and above all, on the level, I believe, of the very idea of cinema. I have the impression that for Alain Resnais, cinema consists in trying to make a whole out of dissimilar fragments a priori. For example, in a Resnais film, two concrete phenomena, without logical or dramatic relation between them, are linked solely because they are filmed in a tracking shot at the same speed.
GODARD: We understand all that is Eisensteinian in Hiroshima, because in fact, it's the profound idea of editing, and even its definition.
RIVETTE: Yes. Editing, for Eisenstein as for Resnais, consists of finding unity from fragmentation, but without hiding the fragmentation, on the contrary, by accentuating it, by emphasizing the independence of the shot.
It's a double movement, which emphasizes the autonomy of the shot and at the same time seeks within this shot a force that makes it possible to relate it to one or more others, thus eventually forming a unity. But beware, this unity is no longer that of the classic sequence. It's a unity of contrasts, a dialectical unity, Hegel and Domarchi would say (laughter).
DONIOL-VALCROZE: A reduction of the disparate.
ROHMER: In short, Alain Resnais is a cubist. I mean, he is the first modern filmmaker of the talking cinema. There have been many modern filmmakers in silent cinema, including Eisenstein, the Expressionists, and Dreyer as well. But I believe that talking cinema was perhaps more classical than silent cinema. There has not yet been a deeply modern cinema that tries to do what Cubism did in painting and the American novel in literature, that is to say, a sort of reconstruction of reality from a certain fragmentation that may have seemed arbitrary to the layman. And, in this case, one could explain the interest that Resnais has on one side in "Guernica" — which is after all a cubist painting by Picasso, even if it is not true Cubism, but it is a kind of return to Cubism — and on the other hand the fact that he was inspired by Faulkner or Dos Passos, even if it's through Marguerite Duras.
The false problem of text and image.
KAST: Clearly, Resnais did not ask Marguerite Duras for second-rate literary work, intended to "make cinema", and reciprocally, she did not assume for a second that what she had to say, to write could be beyond the reach of cinema. One has to go far back in the History of Cinema, to the time of the great naiveties and ambitions, relatively little translated into action, of a Delluc, to find such a will to make no difference between the literary proposition and the cinematographic creation process.
ROHMER: From this point of view, the objection I made at the beginning would disappear — some filmmakers have been criticized for being inspired by the American novel — insofar as it was superficial. But since it is a profound equivalence, perhaps Hiroshima is an entirely new film. It then questions a postulate, which was until now mine, I admit, and which I can very well abandon (laughter), and which is the postulate of the classicism of cinema compared to other arts. It is certain that cinema can quite well also leave its classical period to enter a modern period. I believe that in a few years, in ten, twenty or thirty years, we will know if Hiroshima is the most important film since the war, the first modern film of talking cinema, or if it is perhaps less important than we think. It is in any case an extremely important film, but it may gain even more with age. It may also lose a little.
GODARD: As on the one hand, The Rules of the Game, and on the other films like Port of Shadows or Daybreak. The two films by Carné are very, very important. But today, they are a little less so than that of Renoir.
ROHMER: Yes. And I reserve my judgment insofar as certain elements of Hiroshima did not seduce me as much as the others. In the first images, there was something that bothered me. Then, very quickly, the film managed to make this feeling of discomfort disappear in me. But I understand that one can love and admire Hiroshima and at the same time find it quite annoying at certain moments.
DONIOL-VALCROZE: Morally or aesthetically?
GODARD: It's the same thing. Travellings are a matter of morality.
KAST: It is undeniable that Hiroshima is a literary film. However, the adjective "literary" is the pinnacle of insult in the everyday vocabulary of cinema. What strikes in a striking way in Hiroshima, is the negation of this language tic. As if, to the greatest cinematographic ambition, Resnais supposed that the greatest literary ambition must correspond. By replacing ambition with pretension, we will also have a neat summary of the criticisms that appeared in several newspapers after the release of the film. Resnais's approach is made to displease all those who, literati by profession or regret, like in cinema only what justifies the unformulated contempt in which they hold it. This total alliance of the film and its script is so obvious that the enemies of the film immediately saw that it was precisely there that they had to attack: yes, the film is beautiful, but there is this text so literary, so uncinematic, etc. In fact, I don't see at all how it's even imaginable to separate them.
GODARD: All this would make Sacha Guitry very happy.
DONIOL-VALCROZE: No one sees the connection.
GODARD: Yes, the text, the famous false problem of text and image. Fortunately, we have finally reached the point where even the literati, formerly in agreement with provincial exhibitors, no longer believe that what is important is the image. And that, Sacha Guitry proved it a long time ago. I say proved. Because, for example, Pagnol had not managed to prove it. Since Truffaut is not here, I am very happy to open a parenthesis on his behalf to say that Hiroshima proves wrong all those who did not go to see the Guitry retrospective at the Cinematheque.
DONIOL-VALCROZE: If it's the annoying side that Rohmer was talking about, I recognize that Guitry's films have an annoying side.
An adult woman.
ROHMER: One remarkable thing, in Hiroshima, is that I find, indeed, often the characters annoying, and yet, instead of becoming disinterested, on the contrary, they fascinate me even more.
GODARD: It's true. Take the character played by Emmanuelle Riva. One would cross her in the street, one would see her every day, she would interest only a very limited number of people, I believe. Yet, in the film, she interests everyone.
ROHMER: Because she is not a classic heroine, at least not the one that a certain classic cinema had accustomed us to gaze at, from Griffith to Nicholas Ray.
DONIOL-VALCROZE: She is unique. It is the first time that we see on screen an adult woman with such an interiority and reasoning taken to this point. I don't know if she is classic or not, modern or not.
DOMARCHI: She is modern in her classic behavior.
GODARD: For me, she's the kind of girl who works at "Editions du Seuil" or "l'Express", a sort of George Sand 1959. A priori, she doesn't interest me because I prefer the kind of girls seen in Castellani's films. That said, Resnais directed Emmanuelle Riva in such a prodigious way that it makes me want to read the books from "Seuil" or "l'Express".
DONIOL-VALCROZE: Basically, rather than the feeling of seeing for the first time a truly adult woman in cinema, I believe that the strength of Emmanuelle Riva's character is that she does not try to have an adult's psychology, just as in The 400 Blows, the young Jean-Pierre Léaud did not try to have a child's psychology, a behavior pre-manufactured by professional screenwriters. Emmanuelle Riva is a modern adult woman because she is not an adult woman. She is, on the contrary, very childish, solely guided by her impulses and not by her ideas. It is Antonioni who first showed this kind of woman.
ROHMER: Has there ever been adult women in cinema?
DOMARCHI: Madame Bovary.
GODARD: By Renoir or by Minnelli?
DOMARCHI: The answer is obvious (laughter). Let's say then Elena.
RIVETTE: Elena is an adult woman insofar as the character of woman played by Ingrid Bergman is a character, not classic, but of a classic modernism which is that of Renoir or Rossellini. Elena is a woman in whom sensitivity counts, instinct counts, all the deep movements count. But they are contradicted by the spirit, reason. And that comes from classical psychology insofar as there is intervention of spirit and sensitivity. Whereas the character of Emmanuelle Riva is that of a woman not unreasonable, but non-reasonable. She does not understand herself. She does not analyze herself. That's a bit what Rossellini had tried to do in Stromboli. But in Stromboli, Bergman's character had clear lines, a precise curve. It was a "moral" character. Instead, the character of Emmanuelle Riva remains, voluntarily, vague and ambiguous. And that's also the subject of Hiroshima: a woman who no longer knows where she stands, who no longer knows who she is, who desperately tries to redefine herself in relation to Hiroshima, in relation to this Japanese man, and in relation to the memories that come back to her from Nevers. Ultimately, she is a woman who goes back to the origin, to the beginning, who tries to define herself in existential terms in front of the world and her past, as if she were again soft matter being born.
GODARD: So one could say of Hiroshima that it is successful Simone de Beauvoir.
DOMARCHI: Yes. Resnais illustrates an existentialist conception of psychology.
DONIOL-VALCROZE: As in Dreams of Women or At the Threshold of Life, but more pushed and systematic.
Film mountains.
KAST: Could it come from the fact that Resnais was directing actors for the first time, openly, in the eyes of the world, since we know that he made films in secret (1).
(1) Among others, a feature film in 16 mm. with Danièle Delorme and Daniel Gélin.
DONIOL-VALCROZE: Indeed, there, he was making the leap, and it was his stumbling block.
GODARD: Given Resnais's terrible demand on himself, it explains that he pushed the direction of actors to a point perhaps never reached, even by a Renoir, a Bergman, or a Cukor. Resnais knew that cinema people were wondering: does he know how to direct actors?
DONIOL-VALCROZE: Frankly, it's a question I asked myself, especially thinking about the fact that Resnais, formerly, wanted to become an actor. This question of directing actors is always asked when a documentarist moves to fiction feature films.
DOMARCHI: It was asked about Franju.
GODARD: I believe it's a question that one is wrong to ask. Cinema is cinema. There is a word from Lubitsch that I find admirable. Once, a young guy came to see him asking what he should start with to make comedies as perfect as Design for Living. Do you know what Lubitsch replied? Film mountains, my dear friend, when you have learned to film nature, you will know how to film men.
DOMARCHI: Hiroshima is, indeed, in a certain way, a documentary about Emmanuelle Riva. I would be curious to know what she thinks of the film.
RIVETTE: Her acting goes in the direction of the film. It's a huge effort of composition. I believe we find the schema I was trying to outline earlier: an attempt to piece together the pieces; within the heroine's consciousness, an attempt by her to regroup the various elements of her person and her consciousness in order to make a whole of these fragments, or at least of what has become fragments in her by the shock of this meeting in Hiroshima. One is entitled to think that the film begins doubly after the bomb; on the one hand, on the plastic level and on the level of thought, since the first image of the film is the abstract image of the couple on which the ash rain falls, and that all the beginning is only a meditation on Hiroshima after the explosion of the bomb. But one can also say, on the other hand, that the film begins after the explosion for Emmanuelle Riva, since it begins after this shock that disintegrated her, that scattered her social and psychological personality, and that only afterwards, by allusions, we guess that she is married, that she has children in France, that she is an actress, in short, that she has an organized life. In Hiroshima, she undergoes a shock, she receives a "bomb" that explodes her consciousness, and it is a question for her, at that moment, to find herself, to recompose herself. Just as Hiroshima had to be rebuilt after the atomic destruction, so Emmanuelle Riva, in Hiroshima, will try to recompose her reality. She will only succeed by operating this synthesis of the present and the past, of what she herself discovered in Hiroshima, and of what she had previously suffered in Nevers.
Bérénice in Hiroshima.
DONIOL-VALCROZE: What is the meaning of the line that always comes back at the beginning of the film in the mouth of the Japanese: "No, you saw nothing, in Hiroshima?"
GODARD: It must be taken in the simplest sense. She saw nothing because she wasn't there. Neither was he. Besides, from Paris, he also tells her that she saw nothing, even though she is Parisian. The starting point is the realization, or at least the desire to realize. Resnais, I believe, filmed the novel that all the young French novelists, people like Butor, Robbe-Grillet, Bastide, and of course Marguerite Duras, try to write. I remember a radio show where Régis Bastide, talking about Wild Strawberries, suddenly discovered that cinema had managed to express what he believed to be the exclusive domain of literature, and that the problems he, as a novelist, was facing, cinema had already solved without even needing to pose them. I think it's a very significant fact.
KAST: We have already seen many films finding the laws of the composition of the novel. Hiroshima goes further. We are at the very heart of a reflection on the novelistic narrative itself. The transition from the present to the past, the persistence of the past in the present are no longer commanded by the subject, by the plot, but by pure lyrical movements. In reality, in Hiroshima, it is the very conflict between plot and novel that is evoked. The novel today is slowly trying to get rid of the psychological plot. Alain Resnais's film is entirely linked to this modification of novelistic structures. The reason is simple. There is no action, but a kind of double attempt to understand what a love story means. First on the level of individuals, in a kind of long struggle between love and its own degradation engendered by the passage of time. As if love, at the very moment it manifests itself, was already threatened by oblivion and destruction. Then, on the level of the relations between an individual adventure and a given historical and social situation. The love of these anonymous characters does not take place on the desert island usually reserved for the games of passion. It takes place in a precise setting, which only emphasizes, only underlines the horror of contemporary society. "To glue a love story into a context that takes into account the knowledge of the misfortune of others," says Resnais somewhere. His film does not include a documentary on Hiroshima that would be grafted onto a plot, as those who regret things a little too quickly have said. Because Titus and Berenice in the ruins of Hiroshima, inevitably, are no longer Titus and Berenice.
ROHMER: In summary, to say that this film is literary is no longer a reproach since it turns out that Hiroshima is not trailing behind literature, but well ahead of it. There are, of course, precise influences, Proust, Joyce, the Americans, but they are as assimilated as by a young novelist writing his first novel, a first novel that would be an event, a major date, because it would mark a step forward.
Cinema and cinema.
GODARD: This deeply literary aspect also perhaps explains the fact that people who are usually bothered by cinema within cinema, while they are not bothered by theater within theater, or the novel within the novel, in Hiroshima, are not bothered by the fact that Emmanuelle Riva plays the role of a cinema actress precisely filming a film.
DONIOL-VALCROZE: I think it's a cleverness of the script and that from Resnais's part, there is in the treatment of the subject voluntary cleverness. In my opinion, Resnais was very afraid that his film might look like a simple propaganda film. He did not want it to be used for specific political purposes. It's perhaps a little bit for this reason that he neutralized a possible "peace activist" aspect with the girl shaved after the Liberation. In any case, he thus gave the political message its profound sense instead of its superficial sense.
DOMARCHI: It's for the same reason that the girl is a cinema actress. It allows Resnais not to evoke the problem of the anti-nuclear fight at the first degree and, for example, not to show a real parade of people with signs, but a cinema parade reconstituted during which, at regular intervals, an image reminds the spectator that it is cinema.
RIVETTE: It's the same spirit approach as that of Pierre Klossowski in his first novel, "The Suspended Vocation". He presented his story as a critique of an already published book. It's always the double movement of consciousness, and we come back once more to this key word, which is at the same time a "boat" word: that of dialectic, movement which consists at the same time in presenting the thing and taking distance vis-à-vis this thing to criticize it, that is to say to deny and to affirm it. Instead of being an invention of a director, the parade, to take the same example, becomes an objective fact that a director films a second time. For Klossowski and for Resnais, the problem is to give their readers or spectators the feeling that what they are reading or seeing is not an author's invention but an element of the real world. Rather than the word authenticity, it is that of objectivity that should be used to characterize this intellectual approach, because the filmmaker or the novelist have the same gaze as their future reader or spectator.
DONIOL-VALCROZE: That's probably why Resnais started by making a film about Van Gogh, then about Guernica. His starting point is a reflection on documents.
DOMARCHI: And the "National" is a reflection on the whole of Culture.
ROHMER: And The Styrene would be a reflection on the process of creation.
Love or horror.
GODARD: There is something that bothers me a bit in Hiroshima, and that had also bothered me in Night and Fog, it's that there is a certain ease in showing scenes of horror, because one is quickly beyond aesthetics. I mean that whether well or poorly filmed, it doesn't matter, such scenes anyway make a terrible impression on the spectator. If a film about concentration camps, or about torture, is signed Couzinet, or signed Visconti, for me, I find that it's almost the same thing. Before At the Threshold of Life, there was a documentary produced by UNESCO which showed in a montage to music all the people who were suffering on earth, the crippled, the blind, the disabled, those who were hungry, the old, the young, etc. I forgot the title. It must have been Man, or something like that. Well, this film was hideous. No compassion with Night and Fog, but it was still a film that made an impression on people, just like recently The Nuremberg Trials. The problem, therefore, in showing scenes of horror, is that one is automatically surpassed by one's subject, and that one is shocked by these images a bit like by pornographic images. In the end, what shocks me in Hiroshima, is that, reciprocally, the images of the couple making love in the first shots scare me in the same way as those of the wounds, also in close-ups, caused by the atomic bomb. There is something not immoral, but amoral, in showing thus love or horror with the same close-ups. It's perhaps by there that Resnais is truly modern compared to, let's say, Rossellini. But I then find that it's a regression, because in Voyage to Italy, when George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman look at the calcined couple of Pompeii, one had the same feeling of anguish and beauty, but with something more.
RIVETTE: What allows Resnais to allow himself certain things, and not other filmmakers, is that he knows in advance all the objections of principle that can be made to him. More, these questions of moral or aesthetic justification, Resnais not only asks them, but he includes them in the very movement of the film. In Hiroshima, the commentary and the reactions of Emmanuelle Riva play this role of reflection on the document. And that's why Resnais succeeds in going beyond this first stage of the ease there is in using documents. The very subject of Resnais's films is the effort he must make to resolve this contradiction.
DONIOL-VALCROZE: Resnais has often pronounced the word terrible sweetness. For him, it's characteristic of this effort.
RIVETTE: Ultimately, Resnais's films all draw their strength from an initial contradiction. We always come back to it: an attempt (or a temptation) to resolve the fundamental contradiction that is everywhere in the world and that makes the universe itself become an accumulation of contradictions. It is first necessary to resolve or overcome these local contradictions by becoming aware of them and, at the same time, show that there is no accumulation, but series, organization, construction.
GODARD: We find this idea on the level of staging, since what Resnais wants, for example, is to manage to make a tracking shot with two fixed shots.
DONIOL-VALCROZE: Yes. Resnais's long forward travellings ultimately give a great feeling of permanence and immobility. Whereas on the contrary, his shot-reverse shots, in fixed shots, give a sensation of insecurity, therefore of movement. His trick of editing travellings made at the same speed side-by-side is a certain way of seeking immobility.
DOMARCHI: It's Zeno of Elea.
GODARD: Or Cocteau who said: "what's the use of a tracking shot to film a galloping horse?"
Music above all else.
RIVETTE: Since we are in the field of aesthetics, in addition to the reference to Faulkner, I believe we could also mention a name that seems indubitably linked to the narrative technique of Hiroshima, it's that of Stravinsky. The problems that Resnais poses within cinema are parallel to those posed by Stravinsky in music. For example, the definition that Stravinsky gives of music — "a succession of impulses and rests" — seems to me to fit perfectly the film by Alain Resnais. What does it mean? The search for a superior balance of all the elements of creation. Stravinsky systematically uses contrasts and, at the same time, at the very moment he uses them, highlights what unites them. The principle of Stravinsky's music is the perpetual rupture of measure. The great novelty of "The Rite of Spring" was to be the first musical work where the rhythm varied systematically. Within the rhythmic domain, not the tonal domain, it was already almost serial music, made of the opposition of rhythms, of structures and of series of rhythms. And I have the impression that it's what Resnais is looking for when he edits one after the other four travellings, and suddenly a fixed shot, two fixed shots, and again a tracking shot. Within the contrast of fixed shots and travellings, he tries to find what unites them. That is to say, he seeks both an effect of opposition and an effect of deep unity.
GODARD: That's what Rohmer was saying earlier. It's Picasso, but it's not Matisse.
DOMARCHI: Matisse, it's Rossellini (laughter).
RIVETTE: I find that it's even more Braque than Picasso, insofar as all the work of Braque is devoted to this reflection there, whereas that of Picasso is terribly multifaceted. Picasso, it would be rather Orson Welles, while Alain Resnais is closer to Braque insofar as the work of art is first a reflection within a certain direction.
GODARD: In saying Picasso, I was thinking especially of the colors.
RIVETTE: Yes, but Braque too. He is a painter who wants at the same time to make soft colors violent, and very soft the strident colors. Braque wants the lemon yellow to be soft and the Manet gray sharp. — Well, we have cited quite a few names and shown great culture. LES CAHIERS DU CINÉMA are true to themselves (laughter).
GODARD: There is a film that must have made Alain Resnais think a lot, and which he also edited: La Pointe courte.
RIVETTE: It's obvious. But I think it's not being perfidious towards Agnès Varda to say that, by the very fact that Resnais was editing La Pointe courte, there was already in this editing a reflection on what Varda had wanted to do. In a certain measure AgnèsVarda becomes a fragment of Alain Resnais, and Chrismarker too.
DONIOL-VALCROZE: It's at this moment that we can talk about the terrible sweetness of Alain Resnais, which makes him devour his own friends by making them moments of his personal work. Resnais is Saturn. And that's why we all feel quite weak in front of him.
ROHMER: We don't want to be devoured. Fortunately, he stays on the left bank of the Seine and we on the right.
GODARD: When Resnais shouts: "Motor", his sound engineer replies: "Saturn" (laughter). Another thing, I think of an article by Roland Barthes, about The Cousins, where he said more or less that talent, today, had taken refuge on the right. Is Hiroshima a left-wing or right-wing film?
Science fiction has become reality.
RIVETTE: Let's say that there has always been a left aesthetic, the one that Cocteau talked about and that, according to Radiguet, it was also a matter of contradicting, then to contradict in turn this contradiction, and so on. Personally, if Hiroshima is a left-wing film, it doesn't bother me at all.
ROHMER: From the aesthetic point of view, modern art has always been on the left. But one is also entitled to think that it is possible to be modern without necessarily being on the left, that is to say, that one can, for example, refuse a certain conception of modern art and think that it is outdated, not in the same direction, but in the opposite direction, if you want, of dialectic. In terms of cinema, one must not consider its evolution only from a chronological angle. The history of talking cinema, for example, is very disordered compared to that of silent cinema. That's why even if Resnais has made a film that is ten years ahead, one must not consider that in ten years there will be a Resnais period that will succeed the current period.
RIVETTE: Obviously, because if Resnais is ahead, he is remaining faithful to October, just as Picasso's "Las Meninas" remain faithful to Velasquez.
ROHMER: Yes, Hiroshima is a film that plunges at the same time into the past, the present and also into the future. One finds in it a very strong feeling of the future, and especially of the anxiety of the future.
RIVETTE: We are right to talk about the science fiction side of Resnais. But we are also wrong, because he is the only filmmaker to give the feeling that he has already joined a world that still remains futuristic in the eyes of others. In other words, who knows that we are already in the era where science fiction has become reality. In short, Alain Resnais is the only one among us who truly lives in 1959. With him, the word science fiction loses all that it can have pejorative and childish insofar as Resnais knows how to see the modern world as it is. He knows how to show us, like the authors of science fiction, all that it has frightening, but also all that it has human. Unlike Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Jules Verne's "The 500 Million of the Begum", unlike this classic idea of science fiction as expressed by a Bradbury, a Lovecraft, or even a Van Vogt — who are all in the end reactionaries — it is obvious that Resnais, he, has the great originality of not reacting within science fiction. Not only does he take his side of this modern and futuristic world, not only does he accept it, but he analyzes it deeply with lucidity and love. For Resnais, since it's the world in which we live, we love, so it's this world that is good, just and true.
DOMARCHI: We come back to this idea of terrible sweetness which is at the center of Resnais's reflection. Ultimately, it is explained by the fact that, for him, society is characterized by a sort of anonymity. The misfortune of the world comes from the fact that if someone is struck, he does not know by whom he is struck. In Night and Fog, the commentary indicates that a guy born in Carpentras or in Brast does not know that he will end up in a concentration camp, that his fate is already marked. What strikes Resnais is that the universe presents itself as an anonymous and abstract force that strikes where it wants, anywhere, and whose will cannot be determined in advance. It is from this conflict of individuals with this absolutely anonymous universe that a tragic vision of the world is born. This is the first stage of Resnais's thought. Then comes a second stage which consists of channeling this first movement. Resnais has taken up the romantic theme of the conflict of the individual and society, dear to Goethe, to his epigones, as well as to the English novelists of the 19th century. But with them, the conflict opposed a man to social forms clearly defined, palpable, while with Resnais, there is nothing like that. The conflict is presented in a totally abstract way, it's that of man and the universe. One can then react in an extremely soft way towards this state of affairs. I mean that it is no longer necessary to be indignant, to protest, or even to explain. It is enough to show things without emphasis, with a lot of discretion. And discretion has always characterized Alain Resnais.
RIVETTE: Resnais is sensitive to the abstract character that the world currently takes. The first movement of his films is to note this abstraction. The second, to overcome this abstraction by reducing it by itself, if I may say; by juxtaposing to each abstraction another abstraction in order to find a concrete reality through the very movement of abstractions put in relation.
To leave or to stay.
GODARD: It's exactly the opposite of Rossellini's approach who was indignant, himself, that abstract art had become the official art. The sweetness of Resnais is therefore metaphysical, it is not Christian. There is no idea of charity in his films.
RIVETTE: Obviously not. Resnais is an agnostic. If he believes in God, it's at worst the one of Saint Thomas Aquinas. His attitude is to say: maybe God exists, maybe everything can be explained, but nothing allows us to affirm it.
GODARD: Like Stavroguine from Dostoevsky who, if he believes, does not believe that he believes, and if he does not believe, does not believe that he does not believe. Besides, at the end of the film, does Emmanuelle Riva go away? or does she stay? One can ask the same question about her as about the Agnès of The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne, about whom one wonders if she dies or not.
RIVETTE: It doesn't matter. It's very good that half of the spectators believe that Emmanuelle Riva stays with the Japanese, and that the other half thinks that she returns to France.
DOMARCHI: Marguerite Duras and Resnais say that she leaves, and that she leaves for good.
GODARD: I will believe them when they make another film that proves it to me.
RIVETTE: I think it really doesn't matter, because Hiroshima is a loop film. After the last reel, one can very well link to the first, and so on. Hiroshima is a parenthesis in time. It's the film of reflection, on the past and the present. Now, in reflection, the flow of time is abolished because it is a parenthesis within the duration. And it's within this duration that Hiroshima fits. In this sense, Resnais approaches a writer like Borges who has always tried to write stories such that at the last line the reader is forced to reread the story from the first line to understand what it is about. And so on, without stopping. With Resnais, it's the same idea of the infinitesimal obtained by material means, mirrors facing each other, labyrinths in series. It's an idea of infinity, but within a very brief interval, since finally the "time" of Hiroshima can just as well last twenty-four hours as one second.
Two words.
ROHMER: But in the end, does the film signify anything other than itself? Can one extract a truth from it?
RIVETTE: Yes and no. Hiroshima means that reflection makes a circle, but that there is nevertheless progress at each turn. We fall back on the old father Hegel who redid the same path in his "Phenomenology", but each time at a higher stage of consciousness.
GODARD: Until now, we have always considered Hiroshima from the point of view of Emmanuelle Riva. The first time I saw the film, on the contrary, I considered it from the point of view of the Japanese. Here: it's a guy who sleeps with a girl. There is no reason for it to continue all life. But he says to himself: "yes, there is a reason". And he tries to persuade the girl to continue sleeping with him. It's then that a film begins whose subject was: Can we start love again?
RIVETTE: It's also true. The whole film is a desperate search for dialogue; it's a double monologue that would like to transform into dialogue. And at the end of the film, Emmanuelle Riva and the Japanese have finally found this dialogue since they exchange two words, that of Hiroshima against that of Nevers. For him, she will be called Nevers, and for her, he will be called Hiroshima.
DOMARCHI: Why Resnais, who is so demonstrative about Hiroshima, remains so discreet about Nevers? For him, I imagine that the tonsure of Emmanuelle Riva is at least as terrible as everything that happened after the explosion of the atomic bomb.
RIVETTE: There are several reasons that argue in favor of the relative discretion with which Resnais approaches the episode of Nevers. First, it is presented as part of Emmanuelle Riva's consciousness. Now, it is obvious that censorship, in the Freudian sense, continues to play, and that therefore Nevers can only be presented by brief flashes, by gusts, but never as real scenes, because we remain on the level of subjectivity. Then, by the mere fact that Nevers appears only by flashes, we feel it as a plunge into a reality so horrible that it is impossible to confront it other than by short fragments. For example, the few shots of the cellar have a terrible effect, while in the end we see very little on the screen. For example still, the close-up of the cat. It's the most frightening thing I've seen in the cinema, while after all it's just a close-up of a cat. Why is it frightening? Because the movement in which Resnais shows it to us is the very movement of terror, that is to say, a movement of sudden capture and sudden retreat at the same time: the immobility of fascination in front of the thing.
GODARD: Yes. It's the Marquis de Sade side of Resnais. The girl imprisoned at the Liberation, it's a bit "The Misfortunes of Virtue".
DOMARCHI: As a conclusion, we could talk a little about the acting.
RIVETTE: No, since we all agree. Besides, our debate has led us too high, and to close it worthily, let's simply say, as we are no longer at a formula's distance, that once again, everything is in everything, and reciprocally.
DISCLAIMER: This is an AI-based translation using ChatGPT-4. Thus, this is bound to be dodgy in more ways than one; for transparency, I have posted the original French text as well, which you can view here.