University of Iowa
Iowa Research Online
Theses and Dissertations
Summer 2011
The woman condition: love and technology in
Hiroshima mon amour
Alessandra Madella
University of Iowa
Copyright 2011 Alessandra Madella
This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1245
Recommended Citation
Madella, Alessandra. "The woman condition: love and technology in Hiroshima mon amour." PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) thesis,
University of Iowa, 2011.
http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1245.
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Part of the Communication Commons
THE WOMAN CONDITION:
LOVE AND TECHNOLOGY IN HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR
by
Alessandra Madella
An Abstract
Of a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in Communication Studies
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
July 2011
Thesis Supervisors: Professor Emeritus Bruce E. Gronbeck
Professor Russell Valentino
1
ABSTRACT
This dissertation is a rhetorical study of the critical reception of the French film
Hiroshima mon amour (1959; dir.: Alain Resnais; screenplay: Marguerite Duras). My main
argument is that the themes of love and technology followed a dialectical progression in the
critical reception of Hiroshima mon amour. They were important and politically charged in the
first essays on the film at the turn of the Sixties. But they lost momentum and became more
neutral due to the academization of Film Studies and to the rise of semiology that privileged
linguistic abstractions. The return of the themes of love and technology in the Eighties signals
the search for renewed forms of commitment. However, this commitment “through abstraction”
is also predicated on forgetting. In fact, a different understanding of commitment does not allow
remembering that Hiroshima mon amour was also a protest against the first French atomic test in
Algeria and its colonial implications. My dissertation examines the limits of what can be said
through different paradigms of criticism and commitment through the careful study of the
rhetorical situation of each critical act.
Jacques Derrida’s twin concepts of aimance and of the peut-être guide my research. I
examine how we can think Hiroshima mon amour on the background of the paradoxical
communities that invented new forms of political participation in postwar France. The early
debate on the representation of “mad love” in Resnais’ film signaled a concern for the way in
which modern technology undermined the binary oppositions between war/peace,
civilian/military, and friend/enemy. The paradoxical communities that originated from this
realization opened to rhetorical articulations that united people with no communal party
membership. Derrida’s politics of aimance carries on this reflection on the peut-être by targeting
the traditional view that envisions the political as limited to the public sphere and tend to exclude
women. By contrast, Hiroshima mon amour empowered women because it tapped into the dark
territories of the private in order to show that modern technology had colonized the intimate and
2
daily life. Hence, women critics could acquire a strong political voice from the oppression of the
private.
Abstract Approved: ___________________________________
Thesis Supervisor
___________________________________
Title and Department
____________________________________
Date
___________________________________
Thesis Supervisor
___________________________________
Title and Department
____________________________________
Date
THE WOMAN CONDITION:
LOVE AND TECHNOLOGY IN HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR
by
Alessandra Madella
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in Communication Studies
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
July 2011
Thesis Supervisors: Professor Emeritus Bruce E. Gronbeck
Professor Russell Valentino
Copyright by
ALESSANDRA MADELLA
2011
All Rights Reserved
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
_________________________
PH.D. THESIS
______________
This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of
Alessandra Madella
has been approved by the Examining Committee
for the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy
degree in Communication Studies at the July 2011 graduation.
Thesis Committee: __________________________________
Bruce E. Gronbeck, Thesis Supervisor
__________________________________
Russell Valentino, Thesis Supervisor
__________________________________
David J. Depew
___________________________________
David Hingstman
___________________________________
John Durham Peters
To My Parents and Xin
ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This dissertation could not have seen the light without the help of my mentors. I
am grateful to Bruce E. Gronbeck and David J. Depew for having believed in this project.
Their constant support and patience have been invaluable. Dr. Gronbeck encouraged me
to think in rhetorical terms and carefully corrected my manuscript. Dr. Depew’s
philosophical breadth and boundless knowledge helped me to glimpse the big picture
where only fragments existed. I also thank Russell Valentino (my co-Chair) and my other
committee members Natasa Durovicova, David Hingstman, and John Durham Peters for
their insightful criticism and help. I also wish to remember two teachers who left us in the
blossom of age: My undergraduate supervisor Paola Cagnoni who introduced me to
Duras and Abe’s works and Joanna Ploeger who encouraged me to write on Hiroshima
mon amour.
The Crossing Borders Program and the Graduate College at The University of
Iowa provided me with the economic assistance to begin this research.
I am also grateful to my friends and colleagues for their help and support. Youngcheon Cho’s love for Arendt’s judgment and Amit Baishya’s committed postcolonial
thought influenced my work. Linda Mokdad introduced me to Positif and Fujiko MartinAoba directed me to Philippe Forest’s writings. Swarnavel Eswaranpillai illuminated for
me Resnais’ technique and Sonia Kpota honed my understanding of French. I could not
have completed this dissertation without the friendly care of Benjamin Basan, Anna
Stranieri, Minkyu Sung, Hsin-Yen Yang, and Jia Zhu.
Last but not least, I thank my parents, Luisa and Vittorio Madella, and Du Xin for
having always been there for me. This dissertation is dedicated to them.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
ON PEARLS OF “MAD LOVE”
AND “TECHNOLOGICAL OBJECTS” .…………………....... 1
The Problem …………………………………………………….. 1
The Plot of Hiroshima mon amour ……………………………... 2
Reading Method …………………………………………………. 4
A Survey of the Terrain …………………………………………. 8
Friendship, Peut-être, and Aimance ……………………………. 13
Heidegger’s Thought on Technology and the
Reframing of Engagement …………………………………….. 20
The Rise of Film Studies: Decontextualization,
Cinephilia, Auteur ……………………………………………. 27
A Plan of the Work …………………………………………… 32
CHAPTER ONE
THE EARLY DEBATE ON “MAD LOVE” (I):
SADOUL’S “NATIONAL COMMUNISM” AND
THE POLITICAL LEGACY OF SURREALISM …………….. 36
An Overview of the Debate ……………………………………. 36
The First Exchange in Les Lettres Françaises …………………. 37
“Mad Love” and the Political Legacy of Surrealism (I):
The “National Communism” of Sadoul and Aragon ………….. 44
“Mad Love” and the Political Legacy of Surrealism (II):
Breton’s Love as an Individualizing Force …………………….. 57
Georges Sadoul’s “The Universe and the Dew” ……………….. 64
From Stalinism to Aimance and the Peut-être …………………. 82
CHAPTER TWO
THE EARLY DEBATE ON “MAD LOVE” (II):
THE WOMAN CONDITION OR
MICHÈLE FIRK’S POLITICS OF AIMANCE ………………... 86
The Stakes of the Debate ………………………………………. 86
The Rhetorical Situation of Positif …………………………….. 94
“Mad Love” and the Unconscious in Ado Kyrou …………….. 103
“Mad Love” vs. Technocracy in Robert Benayoun ………...... 113
Firk and the Roundtable on Hiroshima mon amour ………….. 120
From the Politics of Aimance to the Politics of the
Peut-être ………………………………………………………. 134
CHAPTER THREE RESNAIS’ POLITICS OF THE PEUT-ÊTRE ……………….. 136
Surrealism and the Sociology of Private Life ………………… 136
The Politics of the Peut-être and Resnais’
Ambiguity of Technology …………………………………….. 146
iv
The Rhetorical Situation of the Brussels Seminar:
The Troubled Neutrality of Filmology ……………………….. 152
Morin’s Absorption of “Mad Love” into Sociology ………….. 159
Morin’s Reading of Hiroshima mon amour for the
Brussels Seminar ……………………………………………… 172
The Rhetorical Situation of Resnais’ Interview for
Esprit: Between Leftism and Modernization …………………. 180
The Permeable House: Resnais’ Interview for the
Brussels Seminar ……………………………………………… 186
Toward the Language of the Modern World:
Resnais’ Interview for Esprit …………………………………. 198
CHAPTER FOUR
THE LANGUAGE OF THE MODERN WORLD:
FROM THE CAHIERS TO THE SITUATIONISTS …………. 203
Technology vs. Decontextualization ………………………….. 203
The Cahiers and the Contested Legacy of André Bazin ……… 208
The Cahiers’ Roundtable on Hiroshima mon amour ……….... 215
The Situationists between Modernism and the
Marxism of Daily Life ………………………………………... 229
The Situationists’ Reading of Hiroshima mon amour ……….. 234
Sadoul’s Mystery of the Everyday ……………………………. 245
Mesnil and the Commitment of the Cinematic Ontology …….. 254
CHAPTER FIVE
STRUCTURES OF FORGETTING ………………………….. 263
“Commitment” vs. Abstraction ……………………………….. 263
Chaste Wives and Colonial Ghosts in the Brussels Seminar …. 271
Metz’s Narration vs. Pasolini’s Connotation …………………. 278
Janice Etzkowitz and Debbie Glassman ……………………… 282
Benayoun from Commitment to the Atomic Imaginary ……… 286
Deleuze’s Time-Image ……………………………………….. 290
Kristeva and the Language of Madness ………………………. 300
The Forgetting of Past Commitment in Forest’s
Commitment for the Present ………………………………….. 312
AFTERWORD ………………………………………………………………………... 318
BIBLIOGRAPHY …………………………………………………………………….. 323
v
1
INTRODUCTION
ON PEARLS OF “MAD LOVE” AND “TECHNOLOGICAL OBJECTS”
Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
The Problem
This dissertation examines love and technology as springboards of rhetorical
controversies in the early criticism of Hiroshima mon amour. In the first part, I examine critical
essays from authors of different orientations of the French Left composed between June 1959
and April 1962 that specifically single out these aspects of the film as particularly contentious. In
the second, I show how later readings tend to forget the original political charge of these themes
in order to privilege neutrally formal aspects that are more conducive to a certain kind of
academic scrutiny. I argue that the dialectical return of an engaged reading of love and
technology in the criticism of the Eighties cannot be understood without first grasping the depth
of this forgetting, which still informs the main lines of more recent critical works on Hiroshima
mon amour.
In other words, my dissertation reacts against an established academic tradition that
privileges the intricate coherence of formal elements in the film, or examines its complex
representation of the theme of memory, but forgets the substantive importance of modern
technology and the striking impact of “mad love” in the early reception of the film.
Consequently, the dominant trend in Film Studies still ignores how these aspects could join
forces in articulating in and through this film an opposition against Gaullist technocracy and
Stalinist teleology, thereby opening the way to new conceptions of “engagement” that were so
thematic an element of post war French life. I argue that a careful scrutiny of the situated
2
rhetorical dimension of love and technology in the critical debate of the late Fifties and early
Sixties not only illuminates the tense political background and changing dimension of
commitment in the French context, but also enables us to cast a new and interesting light on
Hiroshima mon amour as a film.
Readers may be familiar with Resnais‟ celebrated film. However, the issues with which I
am dealing tend to be marginalized in the recent scholarship on Hiroshima mon amour.
Therefore, I begin with an account of its plot that particularly highlights the topics of mad love
and technology as a reference for my study.
The Plot of Hiroshima mon amour
Hiroshima mon amour is staged in a modern Hiroshima in full economic swing, still
showing the scars of the past, but sublimated in an aura of commemoration. It is the summer of
1957. A love story between a French woman and a Japanese man lasts twenty-four hours.1 The
screenplay that Duras published in 1960 calls them only by pronouns: Elle and Lui (Duras 1991).
Elle came to Hiroshima to act in a movie on peace. Lui is an architect with an interest in the
French revolution. He lost his family in the bombing, but was away from the city as a soldier
when the bomb fell.2 The opening shot shows their interlaced bodies covered with sweat or
nuclear cinder. She tells him what she has seen: the suffering of maimed bodies, the museum of
the bomb, the hospital, the Dome, a Mecca of peace for nuclear tourists. He denies that she has
seen anything at Hiroshima. The sufferings of Hiroshima remain non-representable, even if they
have to be remembered. They have become the impending fate of annihilation for every human
being on the planet, but they also prefigure the reality of contamination and pollution that
1 This temporal span reminds us of the Aristotelian unity of time that was so important in
classical French tragedies. From it comes the Japanese title of the movie: Nijūyo jikan no jōji (The
Twenty-four Hour Love-Affair).
2 The first Japanese version of the movie, with a telling displacement, indicated that he was “on
vacation,” deflecting the implication that, like the majority of the Japanese armed force, Lui might have
been in the colonies at the time. See the anonymous Japanese article in Kinema jumpō (1959, p. 109):
“Kare ha ano toki, natuyasumi de Hiroshima ni inakatta.” [At that time, he was on summer vacation away
from Hiroshima.] All translation are mine unless expressly indicated.
3
threatens us through the danger of nuclear test fallout. The everyday life, the private life of
sickness and impeded reproduction, becomes exposed as the new ground from which the anger
of the people can ignite struggles.
When Elle ends the account of her visit, for the first time we see the faces of the
anonymous lovers. They are in a hotel room of the late „50s, with every comfort and traffic
sounds in the streets. The scandal is that theirs is a banal affair of adultery without future in a
modern city that could be anywhere, but also a story of amour fou in Hiroshima. He asks her
what Hiroshima had been for her in France. It was the end of the war, she replies, everybody was
full of joy. But then an unknown fear started, followed by indifference, and the fear of
indifference. Her plane leaves the day after. She leaves him, but he follows her onto the set of
her movie, where a peace rally with Hiroshima‟s women and children is the last scene to be shot.
The lovers run from the crowd. While they rest after making love in Lui‟s house, at his request,
she tells him another story of amour fou.
Her lover was a German soldier during the war, when she was young in Nevers. She
recalls Nevers as a sweet place of the past where she was rushing through the countryside to
meet her love. She continues to tell her story of mad love in a coffeehouse along the river Ota.
Elle tells Lui of the passion and humiliation of her past, as she had never told anybody. Her
memory goes to Nevers and the luminous Loire. (The river Ota, in the Hiroshima night,
reappears with its neon signs in the pauses of her story.) But Nevers is also a town of forty
thousand inhabitants, where her lover was shot dead on the day before Liberation. She has been
shaven for her guilt—a tondue, shut in a cellar, too mad with grief and love not to scream. When
she recalls lying on the dead body of her lover with the bells celebrating the Liberation the
memory is overwhelming. Lui has to slap her in the face for her to continue. Like the Japanese
man and the German lover, Hiroshima and Nevers become one through a montage of sounds and
images. She runs away from Lui and her past. The telling of the story has shown that it could be
told, and has opened the gates of forgetting. Her memory is not like a photographic imprint that
the atomic blast has forever shot onto the inanimate concrete of Hiroshima. A memory of
4
shadow and stone does not exist. What remains are names. The Japanese man reaches her in her
room and they name each other with the names of the cities that have marked their lives, as a
promise for the future.
Reading Method
In my search for an alternative reading that starts from the too obvious and the forgotten,
this chapter cannot but open with the quotation from Shakespeare‟s The Tempest with which
Hannah Arendt introduces Walter Benjamin‟s method of “pearl diving” (Arendt 1968, p. 193).3
Under the influence of Surrealism, her friend had developed a critical approach based on a
predilection for capturing small things. He would extract minute details out of complete texts and
juxtapose them to restitute a new global relevance to apparently unrelated cultural trends or
material changes of a particular period. The pearl diver‟s search for quotations at the margins of
the traditional view of History illuminates previously hardly noticeable points as the actual sites
of struggle where the contradictions of a larger whole come to emerge. Accordingly, I construct
the first part of this dissertation in an attempt to follow “pearls” of love and technology collected
from the early readings of Hiroshima mon amour that recognize them as worthy of political
discussion.
The first three chapters trace the controversy over the “mad love” of Elle (the anonymous
heroine) for the German soldier as an enemy of the Nation and its perceived indictment of the
WWII Resistance. I discuss the terms of the Stalinist reevaluation of the Surrealist amour fou and
counterpoise them to different interpretations of mad love in Hiroshima mon amour that criticize
Stalinist teleology and attempt to open Marxist thought to alternative articulations. The fourth
chapter focuses on the debate concerning Resnais‟ representation of “technological objects.”
Particularly “everyday technological objects” are interrogated in their most mundane and banal
aspect for their relevance to the question of modern technology‟s transformation of experience.
3 Benjamin was a second cousin of Günther Anders (born Stern), Arendt‟s first husband.
5
Nuclear weapons are its limit case. The essays negotiate in different ways the troubling lack of a
solution of continuity between the bomb and the everyday.
My “pearl diving” approach looks not only for the new importance that displacement
attributes to minute things, but also for unthought-of correspondances between them. It is a
method of montage. Accordingly, pearl diving can illuminate the imperceptible links between
topics at first glance as different as love and technology in Hiroshima mon amour. In this
dissertation I show how they cannot be tightly isolated, but constantly permeate and
overdetermine each other. Moreover, the non-dogmatic version of Benjamin‟s dialectics refuses
the unilateral domination of the material base and is open to two-way exchanges between the
cultural and the material. In this sense, pearl diving is well situated to tracing the subtle web of
relations that connected Hiroshima mon amour as a work of art with the theoretical and political
discourses and the long-lasting material changes that traversed a modernizing society like
technocratic France at the turn of the Sixties.
In her choice of a coralline image to illustrate pearl diving, Arendt may have been
thinking of André Breton‟s L’amour fou (1937), a book in which mad love and technological
objects are also intimately connected. According to this Surrealist writer, the work of art can be
seen as a crystal—a unique and perfect creation whose very transparency taps into the social
unconscious—or as a coral “pour peu que je les réintègre comme il se doit à la vie, dans
l‟éclatant miroitement de la mer” (Breton 1992, 681).4 In the bursting mirroring of life the work
undergoes unforeseeable metamorphosis, in what Breton considered Hegelian processes of
construction and destruction. In a similar way, my rhetorical study of the early criticism of
Hiroshima mon amour aims to reinsert the film into the dynamic cultural and political context of
the period. Its crystalline uniqueness cannot be understood without considering the underlying
struggles that it brought to the fore. Breton and Benjamin‟s conceptions of dialectics are both
equally appropriately resistant to the overvaluation of the base of dialectical materialism. They
4 “If I duly reintegrate them to life, in the bursting mirroring of the sea.”
6
allow us to capture the bidirectional passages between the material conditions and the collective
myths that the film engages. But they need to be supplemented with close attention to the clash
of rhetorical controversies and to the ethoi that the critics construct, mobilizing the legacies of
their past in order to negotiate difficult situations and to propose new identities for themselves
and for the audience.
The radical approach of pearl diving acquires, in fact, all its force if we stress its inherent
rhetorical dimension. Love and technology are points of Hiroshima mon amour that ignited a
debate at the peak of what Régis Debray (1986, p. 109) calls “l‟âge de l‟édition” of the French
public sphere,5 when a highly diversified press had a major power in crafting and shifting
political and philosophical categories. Only from this perspective can we evaluate the importance
of “mad love” in Resnais‟ film. It was the most harshly disputed ground in the early critical
essays on Hiroshima mon amour, which either criticized or praised it from a militant point of
view. The representation of mad love touches the core of the self-definition of the post-war
French Left in relation to recent national history. It can certainly not be dismissed as an
innocuous variation on the Hollywood genre of historical melodrama or as a “conte exceptionnel
pour la presse du cœur” (Queval 1959, p. 127).6
In its attack on the characterization of WWII Resistance as a chauvinistic enterprise, in
fact, Elle‟s “mad love” for the German soldier threatened the very roots of the mythical
justification of post-war Stalinism. Consequently, it challenged the Stalinist direction of
communal ventures that united different voices of the French Left during the Cold War,
particularly the anti-nuclear “Peace Movement.” Simultaneously, the articulation of love (or
private life) and technology (the atomic bomb, but also the everyday technological objects of a
prosperous modernity) undermines the teleological faith of Cold War Marxism that relegates
subjective issues to a far-away post-revolutionary time of “good” technological development.
5 “The age of publishing.”
6 “Exceptional story for romantic fiction magazines.”
7
Love had to be bureaucratically regulated and considered secondary until the utopian time of
global peace, when the full realization of Communism would make human beings the real
masters of their creations and open the way for the blossoming of complete personalities.
This polemical dimension of “pearl diving” brings us close to the concept of “rhetorical
situation” in American Rhetorical Studies. The term has undergone different formulations in the
discipline. Lloyd Bitzer reformulated it to argue that every rhetorical act arises in response to
pressing needs in the context. The essays on Hiroshima mon amour, for example, provide a
rhetorical answer to the film as an event of major proportion, as well as to the crisis of Stalinism
in France. Richard Vatz opposed to Bitzer an author-centered view of the rhetorical situation.
From his viewpoint, the various authors who wrote about Hiroshima mon amour in the French
press “created” the situation through their interpretive interventions. Finally, Barbara Biesecker
developed a successful dialectical mediation of the two positions. The rhetorical act not only
answers trends that manifest themselves in a given context, but also works towards a
reformulation of the audience‟s political identity that deeply modifies the situation. The key term
becomes “articulation.” As Biesecker (1989, p. 111) writes, in fact, “In this essay I want to
suggest that a re-examination of the symbolic action (the text) and the subject (audience) that
proceeds from within Jacques Derrida‟s thematic of différance enables us to rethink the
rhetorical situation as articulation.”
From this perspective, the controversy over Hiroshima mon amour in the French press
becomes something more than the mere opposition of self-sufficient monads with unshakable
ideological convictions. It also goes beyond a simple alliance of interests between otherwise
unchanged partners. On the contrary, the debate about love and technology in Hiroshima mon
amour articulates previously unrelated issues in a revolutionary way that signal the birth pangs of
new political subjectivities in a time of crisis. It can be read as a performative response to the
demise of Stalinist categories after the Hungarian uprising of 1956. The ensuing lack of a
comprehensive and compulsory direction in the cultural Left provided the freedom and the need
8
to recraft identities, draw new articulations that opened to minority groups, including women,
and invent new forms of engagement.
Pearl diving as a method of rhetorical criticism extracts contentious moments from a
group of sources that are extremely different in kind, focus, or strategies, but that answer to each
other in a debate. It further connects these moments to the rhetorical situation of the journals that
hosted them, to the concerns of political self-redefinition of the critics, and to material changes
and broader cultural controversies of the time. Relations between the debate on love and
technology and the contemporary political activities of Duras, Resnais, and their friends are
particularly valuable. Thus, my search for “pearls” of irreducible singularity does not bow to the
sociological requirements of statistical significance that follow the major trends in a large group
of texts of wide-circulation. I am more interested in the stories that these marginal micro-events
tell to someone who listens carefully. Accordingly, my analysis focuses for its material on a
small number of essays, roundtables, and interviews that appeared in journals addressed to either
a specialized or a general readership (Les Lettres Françaises, Esprit, Positif, Les Cahiers du
Cinéma, L’Internationale Situationniste). Contributions on The Last Year in Marienbad or the
young French cinema are part of the bounty, as they often provided the occasion for polemical
readings of the theme of technology in Hiroshima mon amour. As such, they cast a revealing
light on the evolution of a critic‟s position. In all their forms, these “pearls” raise the question of
what “the Left” means in a time of crisis with no univocal solution.
A Survey of the Terrain
My rhetorical-hermeneutic focus differentiates my study from the purely sociological
emphasis that guided André Gérard-Libois in his analysis of fifty responses to Hiroshima mon
amour in French and Belgian dailies and weeklies (Ravar 1962, p. 31-40). His essay “Analyse
des critiques” deserves careful consideration as the only extended review of the early criticism
on the film. It appeared in the proceedings of the 1960 seminar that the Free University of
Brussels dedicated to Hiroshima mon amour, which I will further discuss in the second part of
9
the dissertation, as its basic choices initiated a trend toward a decontextualized reading of the
film. Even if it involved politically committed friends of Duras such as Clara Malraux and Edgar
Morin, in fact, the seminar was fundamentally conceived as a filmological enterprise for an
academic audience. Accordingly, it aimed to develop standards of objectivity and scientific
criteria of organization that could promote the study of cinema as a respectable and independent
discipline. Its focus on generality and its anxiety about Film Studies as a discipline failed to
capture the uniqueness of the debate that was born around Hiroshima mon amour.
Gérard-Libois conforms to sociological guidelines in limiting his selection to samples of
the press whose wide-circulation and frequency guarantee a direct influence on public opinion
(p. 33). However, these criteria exclude the contribution of specialized cinema journals (such as
the Cahiers or Positif), politically active marginal publications (such as L’Internationale
Situationniste), and monthlies with a tradition of deeper reflection and wider outlook (such as
Esprit). In other words, the review does not consult the very sources that were the most likely to
perceive and develop the new political articulations that Hiroshima mon amour made possible.
A sociological outlook informs also the organization of the material into binary
oppositions. Left and Right are counterpoised and implicitly presented as single-willed and
compact political groupings. Similarly, the theme of “Love” is starkly opposed to “War,” despite
Resnais‟ stated aim of “engluer une histoire d‟amour dans un contexte qui tienne compte de
l‟horreur de la guerre” (p.37).7 Only a few lines under the heading of “Memory” recall the rare
critics who explored “une dimension philosophique” that accounts for the irreducible
contradictions of human life (p. 38).8
This oppositional structure allows noticing how it was mainly the Leftist press that saw in
the film “une volonté de pacifisme militant” (p. 38).9 For example, Marcel Smeets commends
7 “Gluing a love story into a context that takes into account the horror of the war.”
8 “A philosophical dimension.”
9 “A will to militant pacifism.”
10
Hiroshima mon amour in the Socialist weekly Le Monde du Travail for “sa plaidoirie, non
déguisée mais pessimiste, en faveur de la paix et de la suspension des essais atomiques” (p.
37).10 The statement of the Belgian critic raises the question of the announced French nuclear
tests as a new banner for the Gaullist policy of grandeur. The importance of this issue cannot be
underestimated. I will show in the second half of the dissertation how later structural and
poststructural essays on Hiroshima mon amour forget the film‟s political thrust as an implicit
indictment of Gaullist technocratic ambitions, with some embarrassing consequences. However,
Smeets‟ “peace movement rhetoric”—as Gérard-Libois‟essay in general—is too respectful of the
draconian distinctions and the status quo of the Cold War era. It does not allow for a deeper
reflection on the grey areas of dramatic intermingling between war and love or between war and
private life. On the contrary, existential thinking arises in part precisely because it enables
grasping how transformations of modern technology invade the boundaries of private life and
make it permeable to a “war” radically changed in its meaning and continuous pervasiveness.11
In the context of France at the turn of the Sixties, this awareness allowed the emergence of new
sites of struggle and an articulation between them that meant a chance for a different conception
of the political to be born. As we will see, the debate on love and technology in Hiroshima mon
amour gestures toward this chance.
Gérard-Libois concludes that Hiroshima mon amour did not cause a full-fledged
ideological querelle: “Il semble donc que sur le plan politique aussi bien que sur le plan moral, le
film n‟ait pas provoqué le scandale attendu. S‟il a fait choc, c‟est plus par sa nouveauté formelle
10 “Its not disguised but pessimist peroration for peace and the suspension of atomic tests.”
11 On this point, Derrida (1994, p. 276-278) usefully compares the thoughts of Martin Heidegger
and Carl Schmitt. Heidegger argues that the technologization of world wars reveals human beings as “raw
materials,” undermining the classical distinction between war and peace. In the same way, nuclear
weapons challenge Carl Schmitt‟s purist conception of war between enemy states as the very source of
the political. The Cold War endangers the clear oppositions “public” / “private” and “enemy” / “friend”
that the political theorist strives to maintain.
11
que par son contenu” (p. 41).12 Still the question remains that perhaps the filmologist did not
find a political and moral controversy because he was not looking for it in the right places and
with the right eyes. He did not understand that Hiroshima mon amour was shifting the ground of
the debate. To be sure, Gérard-Libois duly recounts the start of the “mad love” controversy that
Stalinist critic and fellow filmologist Georges Sadoul initiated in the weekly Les Lettres
Françaises. But he hastens to add that Resnais had already provided “appeasing explanations” on
every disturbing point in an interview with Michèle Firk in the same journal (Ravar 1962, p.
41).13 In his desire to declare the matter closed, he fails to discuss how Resnais‟ answers went
beyond the mere need to ingratiate a Stalinist audience. The first two chapters of my study,
instead, elucidate in detail the motives of the controversy that was continued in different venues.
I argue that Resnais‟ contribution to the debate can be better understood from the standpoint of
Marxist Existentialism and its challenge to Stalinist teleology. Firk, for her part, starts from the
nuclear tragedy of Hiroshima to draw articulations between the endangered realm of private life
and the public issue of the Algerian war. In this way, the pasionaria of the neo-Surrealist cinema
journal Positif opens to questions that were still secondary for the PCF, but were crucial for the
development of a New Left subjectivity.
The search for irreducible singularities that motivates pearl diving enables us to
deconstruct Gérard-Libois‟ binary oppositions, starting with the mythical antagonism of stable
and well-defined political subjectivities. At the turn of the Sixties, the French Left was actually
traversing a period of extreme unrest and redefinition; currents were clashing and alliances were
forming. The certainties of the Stalinist era had crumbled and were only artificially kept alive. A
12 “It seems then that the film has not provoked the scandal that had been foreseen, whether on
the political plan and on the moral one. If it has caused a shock, it has been more for its formal novelty
than for its content.”
13 “Ajoutons que dans un interview accordée par Alain Resnais aux Lettres Françaises le 20 juin
1959, Michèle Firk a posé, très sereinement d‟ailleurs, les questions qui auraient pu faire problème et
auxquelles Resnais a apporté des réponses apaisantes.” [We should add that in an interview that Resnais
granted to the Lettres Françaises on June 20th 1959 Michèle Firk posed, very serenely anyhow, the
questions that could have caused trouble and to which Resnais gave appeasing answers.]
12
still new and marginal field like film criticism allowed more mobility across journals than the old
and established ones. Therefore, it was the ideal alchemic athanor in which deep political
changes could be digested and new forms appear. The debates on eros and technology in
Hiroshima mon amour provided a crucible where Marxist, Surrealist, Phenomenological,
Personalist, and Situationist world views were deployed, inflected, and variously combined.
Often the stake of this redefinition was the political survival of the critics and of the journals they
represented. The impact and the harsh tones of Sadoul‟s controversy on “mad love” can be
understood only if we keep in mind this multifaceted and dangerous background. Even
filmological ventures lose part of their scientific coolness to heat up in then risky political
convergences, as did the one with the Neo-Marxists of Arguments that formed the background of
the writings on Hiroshima mon amour in the Personalist monthly Esprit.
Not surprisingly, the debate split the journals themselves, allowing contrasting voices and
positions to emerge in the open. It was a crucial moment of rhetorical redefinition of identities.
Roundtables divided the members of the editorial boards of the Cahiers and Positif. Harsh
repudiations followed the most enthusiastic of the Situationists‟ embraces. But in the close world
of brotherly friendships of French cinema criticism, Hiroshima mon amour also provided a
unique space in which women‟s voices could suddenly speak and be listened to as women. A
new era had started. Dudley Andrew‟s biography of André Bazin (1978, p. 6-7) depicts the “age
of innocence” of French cinema criticism, which symbolically ended in 1958 with the death of
Bazin, the most beloved critic of the postwar cultural scene.14 The debate on Hiroshima mon
amour one year after Bazin‟s death inaugurated a new “age of complexity.” Ideological positions
14 Andrew completed his book in the Department of Communication Studies at The University of
Iowa, which makes it a constant inspiration for my own study. As an Irish Catholic well versed in
Personalist thought, Andrew has the merit of showing how Bazin‟s interest in the context clashed with the
formalistic excesses of la politique des auteurs. However, Andrew‟s focus on the “age of innocence”
parallels his institutional view of cinema as separated from the other media. It does not allow him to
confront the reformulations that Bazinian phenomenology underwent in the Cahiers in the “age of
complexity,” with the increased importance of television in the theorization of “direct” cinema and
cinéma-vérité. Sadoul, instead, grasped this inter-media connection. On the legacy of Bazin‟s thought see
Giorgio de Vincenti (1980, p. 195-196).
13
were no more given but were undergoing deep and lasting changes, while the increased
sophistication of cinematic technique required new critical tools. Only the patience of rhetorical
pearl diving can allow us to appreciate fully the productive contradictions that made this period
so interesting and alive.
Friendship, Peut-être, and Aimance
The reference to Bazin is far from casual. In fact, his friendship and thought played a
great role in the criticism of Hiroshima mon amour, especially in the case of Esprit and the
Cahiers. Pearl diving cannot ignore the mourning and the testamentary legacy that legitimates
the choice of new directions among the surviving friends. Most importantly, the example of
Bazin illustrates how the whole corpus of the early criticism of Hiroshima mon amour can be
globally read as a debate on friendship. Revered legacies cohabit with divided loyalties;
undecidable enmities became the stimulus for the birth of Nietzschean projects of paradoxical
communities that unite friends in the lack of stable certainties. Georges Sadoul‟s view on “mad
love,” for example, cannot be fully understood unless we think of his Surrealist past and his
forced choice of camps between André Breton and Louis Aragon. His difficult loyalty to
Stalinism made him refuse the “amitié du Non” (Blanchot) of Le 14 Juillet. This paradoxical,
highly vocal, and short-lived community linked Breton and Duras in a strong opposition to the
apparently satisfactory solution of de Gaulle‟s return to power that threatened to harbor the
danger of Fascism.
The difficult choice of opposing a former hero that great part of the population admired
revitalized the “tragic” legacy of the Resistance as a complex movement with contrasting longterm aims by calling into being a new grouping of Leftist intellectuals. The “enemy” was no
more the war-time invader. Friends were no more members of the same political party and of the
same nation. This new and ambiguous meaning of friendship and enmity resembled to the
undecidable coexistence of opposite values in Nietzsche‟s thought. It did not enable thinking a
stable and unquestioned faithfulness to a pure and sanctified cause that would necessarily lead to
14
a luminous future. By contrast, it opened the way to a Nietzschean Vielleicht—or to a Derridean
peut-être—that enabled the invention of new forms of rhetorical intervention in the public
sphere. In fact, the challenge that the peut-être brought against the neat binary oppositions that
structure our understanding of politics (such as friend/enemy) enabled articulating issues that
Stalinist thought could not envision in their productive complexity. I argue that the paradoxical
articulation between war-time and peace-time technologies in Hiroshima mon amour can be best
understood on the background of these paradoxical communities of the peut-être that laid the
germs of a new way of intending the political at the turn of the Sixties. Resnais‟ interpretation of
his own film certainly gestures toward this direction.
The debate on Hiroshima mon amour provided also a new dimension to the homofraternal groups of male critic friends. In fact, it enabled women like Michèle Firk to acquire a
strong voice and to become a vanguard into an uncharted territory, beyond confirmed ideological
positions. For the first time, women cinema critics could write boldly against myths and
directions of French national policy and judge whether Resnais‟ work was revolutionary in
relation to history and society. Paradoxically, what empowered them to play a critical role in the
public sphere was their deeper “feminine understanding” in matters of intimate love. As a hama
san—or woman pearl diver—I am particularly interested in how the work of Duras as an author
of “mad love” was received and amplified by voices of women who questioned the distinction
between public and private with daring articulations based on their claim of an irreducible voice.
In this sense, Jacques Derrida might describe the polemic on love and technology in
Hiroshima mon amour as a precious incarnation of his hardly definable “aimance.” In his 1994
book Politiques de l’amitié, the French philosopher introduces this concept in order to
deconstruct the binary that opposes “love” and “friendship” (p. 88).15 In this sense, aimance
15 “L’aimance: l‟amour dans l‟amitié, l‟aimance au-delà de l‟amour et de l‟amitié selon leurs
figures déterminées par-delà tous les trajets de lecture de ce livre, par-delà toutes les époques, cultures ou
traditions de l‟aimer.” [Aimance: Love inside friendship, the aimance beyond love and friendship as they
have been determined in their figures across all the reading trajectories of this book, across all the epochs,
cultures, and traditions of loving.]
15
carries forward the deconstruction of political binary oppositions that the peut-être had started.
This time, also the distinction between the private sphere and the public sphere is under attack as
it presents only the latter as political. In fact, “love” is commonly seen as private, excessive, and
destructive of communal bonds. By contrast, “friendship” is honored as political because it
endows relationships with stability and masculine virtue. Derrida suggests that this traditional
view is predicated upon the exclusion of women from a political horizon dominated by men.
“Aimance” reevaluates the role of women by considering love and friendship in their more
original indistinction and mutual exchanges, beyond the traditional differences between active
and passive, decision and passion (p. 23). In this sense, it enables us to consider a form of
political friendship that has its roots in a “responsibility”—intended as the ability to listen and to
respond—toward the other as different and unfamiliar.
In this sense, “aimance” can perhaps almost be considered as a “love that becomes
friendship.” It inscribes into friendship the passivity that Aristotle assigned to the beloved and
that tends to be associated with women. Derrida turns it into a positive form of knowledge in a
world in which traditional political categories tremble. The traditional concept of friendship that
is linked with a mythical idea of brotherhood, in fact, requires a privileging of autochthony and a
clear distinction between friends and enemies. Carl Schmitt offered the clearest version of this
thought when he made the possibility of actually killing the enemy as the foundation of the
political. The enemy for him is in his purest form the enemy belonging to another Nation at war.
However, modern technology brought about a de-politicization of these categories, undermining
the very concept of locality with its powers of communication and destruction. The atomic bomb
crosses boundaries with its fallout that make the whole world into a scientific laboratory. The
telephone allows spying into the private, but it also undermines the Aristotelian credo of the need
to speak face to face in order to maintain friendship and shows that love can also be among
physically distant people. These drastic transformations of modern technology perform a
deconstructive task, as they retrospectively show that the possibility of a twin politics of the
16
peut-être and of aimance was there since the beginning of the Western political thought, which
constituted itself through their suppression.
Derrida‟s “aimance” indicates his belief that the contradictions that trouble clear political
concepts like “enemy” and “friend” (and “war” and “peace”) are not necessarily a form of depoliticization, but rather a chance to think another kind of politics. Or better, they are a chance to
deconstruct our conception of the political that since the very beginning was a reaction against
the fact that these distinctions are never clear-cut or free from contradictions. Love destabilizes
the given categories with its attention to savage singularities and opens the way to a deeper
auscultation of reality. Love is asymmetrical and does not desire symmetry, but it also does not
aim to construct a hierarchy. In fact, in Derrida‟s words (1994, p. 248), “la promesse ou la prière
d‟un „je t‟aime‟ doivent rester unilatérales et dissymétriques. Que l‟autre y réponde ou non, de
telle ou telle façon, aucune mutualité, aucune harmonie, aucune entente ne peut ni ne doit réduire
la disproportion infinie.”16 Love has to state its claim in order to exist and it has to take a risk in
order to do so. Circumstances are complex and things can always go wrong. Therefore, love
implies a real decision.
Like love, Derrida‟s politics of the peut-être (of the perhaps) is a politics of risk and
decisions. A politics that starts from the instability of love cannot expect reciprocity or perfect
understanding. It does not aim to the construction of a stable covenant in which conventions
would absolve the lovers/friends from deciding time and time again and from listening to the
deeper changes of the world. Stalinist theological faithfulness to the dictate of dialectical
materialism has no place here. In this sense, aimance is a form of responsibility. The politics of
the peut-être tends—as it has to—toward the construction of a politics of numbers in a
democratic sense. Love has to become political friendship, the friendship of the many. However,
this process of naturalization starts only from the more original and destabilizing claim of love to
16 “The promise or the request of an „I love you‟ must remain unilateral and asymmetrical.
Whether the other answers or not, in this way or the other, no mutuality, no harmony, no agreement can
or should reduce this infinite disproportion.”
17
address the singularity of the “who” rather than the metaphysical question of the “what.” In other
words, aimance shows that every communitarian belonging is the temporary end of a process of
naturalization and as such it can always be contested. The cosmopolitism of Kantian ethics looks
at the starry sky above us. By contrast, Blanchot‟s “friendship of the disaster” inscribes into a
future anterior the Levinasian face of the other as irremediably different from the self and as
more original than the cogito. Decisions are not only actions in accordance to unwritten ethical
rules inside the self. Rather they come from a loving passivity suspended to the beating of the
heart of the other.
France at the turn of the Sixties was a laboratory of these paradoxical communities of the
peut-être (such as Blanchot‟s “friendship of the no”). They questioned the way in which the
revolutionary brotherhood of Stalinism had entrenched into a blind faithfulness to the dead father
despite his crimes. Orthodox Communists attempted to maintain stability of the status quo
through minor transformations. This priority did not allow them to assume responsibility for the
Soviet invasion of Hungary. It also did not enable them to fully grasp the plight of the Algerians
who refused economic help if it meant a continued colonial or neo-colonial dependence on
France. By contrast, the non-Stalinist Left that Duras and her friends were articulating was born
as a paradoxical community of people with different political pasts and clashing convictions that
were united by their responsibility toward the voices of those who were not heard. The events
through which they announced their intention were risky during the full swing of the Algerian
war. The intellectuals that this decision brought together faced repression from the Government,
Fascist threats against their lives, and—more radically—the conscious and avowed possibility of
being actually mistaken in their evaluation of a complex and contradictory situation.17 Still, their
choice was admirable precisely for its clarity and for the intellectual risk that it was taking.
17 This awareness of the possibility of being mistaken is very important as it constitutes a
response to Hannah Arendt‟s claim that “love” is perverted when it leaves the private sphere to enter the
political. In fact, compassion is love‟s more detached equivalent at the political level and still allows for
political discussions, while the emotional fusion of love short-circuits them. John Durham Peters‟
example taken from the rhetoric that led to the Iraq war—“We love them. Let‟s bomb them!”—best
exemplifies Arendt‟s fear. However, this active display of compassionate muscles is precisely based on a
18
The response to the love of Elle for the German soldier in the early criticism on
Hiroshima mon amour is the ideal ground from which to observe this clash of different
conceptions of the political. The first three chapters of my dissertation analyze the early critical
debate in these terms. Georges Sadoul‟s “National Communism”—I argue—assumes a particular
virulence as a reaction against the de-territorializing principle that this love brings to bear against
the traditional conception of the enemy. By contrast, Michèle Firk and Alain Resnais‟ reading of
Elle‟s war-time love embrace this challenge to autochthony as a claim toward responsibility. Firk
proposes a political reading that from the auscultation of this love and its suffering arrives at a
claim of responsibility toward oppressed colonized populations. The springboard offered by the
Surrealist conception of amour fou becomes for her an empowering tool to construct her own
ethos as a woman that addresses the public sphere from the wisdom of her deeper understanding
of love. Resnais opposes to Sadoul a discourse of technology that challenges Stalinist teleology
and signals private life as an area that is not outside of the political, but rather an important
battlefield of political confrontation.
Through aimance, Derrida aims to revive and enrich the Greek model of philía and
particularly its legacy in the revolutionary tradition of fraternité. The French philosopher (1994,
p. 333) argues that Aristotelian philía can be enriched only by considering the radical alterity that
it had to violently suppress to constitute itself.18 Philía excludes the love/friendship between
women and between a man and a woman (that can last only through male children). In a certain
sense, also Blanchot‟s paradoxical community could not completely free itself from this mythical
tradition of political brotherhood that still informed the revolutionary rhetoric of the anti-Gaullist
hypostatization of love that renounces to responsibility, intended as a passive listening to the other that
brings to new ways of conceiving the political (i.e., in this case, for instance, refusing to re-territorialize a
concept of enemy that globalization had made obsolete or listening to the role of the women in Iraqi
families that were the greater victims of sanctions and war).
18 “Le modèle grec de la philía ne saurait être „enrichi‟ que de ce qu‟il a violemment et pour
l‟essentiel tenté d‟exclure.” [The Greek model of philía can only be „enriched” by what it has violently
and essentially attempted to exclude.]
19
journal Le 14 juillet (1958-1959). In fact, “Affirmées, niées ou neutralisées, ces valeurs
„communautaires‟ ou „communales‟ risquent toujours de faire revenir un frère” (Derrida 1994, p.
330).19 Even in the French New Left women were rare. Duras almost matched Simone de
Beauvoir for the number of petitions she signed at the turn of the Sixties. But few “sisters” could
join them in the élite club of committed intellectuals. Michèle Firk shared the same isolation in
the Leftist journal Positif. Derrida‟s aimance denounces this exclusion by showing how it is the
expression of an unresolved and fundamental tension that troubles the traditional concept of the
political. “La tension est ici à l‟intérieur du politique même. Elle travaille tous les discours qui
réservent la politique et l‟espace public à l‟homme, l‟espace domestique et privé à la femme” (p.
312).20 From this perspective, the debate on Hiroshima mon amour acquires a larger meaning as
a site for challenging the tradition of revolutionary brotherhood. It empowers modern
Antigones—beyond autochthony and nationalism—to speak directly from a technologically
endangered private life to the laws of the city.21
The politics of aimance not only enables us better to understand the nuances and the
tensions of the debate on Hiroshima mon amour at the turn of the Sixties. It also illuminates Julia
Kristeva‟s later reading of Duras‟ contribution to the film that I analyze in Chapter Five. Most
importantly, it provides an important contribution to American rhetorical studies. In fact,
Derridean deconstruction was extremely important in the discipline in the Nineties. Biesecker‟s
writings on the rhetorical situation bear witness to her friendship with her teacher Gayatri
Spivak, the translator of Derrida‟s On Grammatology. However, Derrida‟s book on friendship
19 “Whether they are affirmed, negated, or neutralized, these „communitarian‟ or „communal‟
values always threaten to bring back a brother.”
20 “The tension is here inside the political itself. It troubles all the discourses that reserve politics
and the public sphere to men, the domestic and private sphere to women.”
21 The Belgian philosopher Léopold Flam (Ravar 1962, p 233) described the love of Elle for the
German soldier as “le conflict d‟Antigone” [the conflict of Antigone], in the Hegelian sense of a conflict
between natural right and the right of the city. Flam was at the time the most famous Belgian philosopher.
His overall view of Hiroshima mon amour is so disapproving that Ravar (1962, p. 60) unflatteringly cites
it as an example of how old men disliked the film. But an alternative reading of his insight is possible.
20
shows us how it is possible to deconstruct and enlarge the very pillars of our conception of the
political. In other words, it challenges and opens rhetoric itself as a discipline that searches for
the available means of persuasion in relation to the construction of political power. It also
constitutes a platform that enables us to bring to the center parts of the discipline that have
always been considered as marginal, such as feminist rhetoric and the rhetoric of technology. In
Derrida‟s view, no politics, and therefore no rhetoric, could be conceived without them.
Heidegger‟s Thought on Technology and the Reframing of
Engagement
French post-war debates on love and technology cannot be grasped in their close
interconnection without a reference to the thought of Martin Heidegger and its reception in
France. An international thread of personal friendships can be traced from Duras and Resnais to
the German philosopher. Heidegger‟s influence was important in envisioning new forms of
political groupings that gave to love and friendship a central place in French Leftist thought, in
contrast to Stalinist orthodoxy. His name is never directly mentioned in the critical essays on
Hiroshima mon amour that I analyze in the first part of this dissertation.22 However, I will show
how the Situationists‟ polemical mention of Kostas Axelos among the inspirations of Resnais
captures a profound, if indirect, influence of the German philosopher that underlies the entire
debate on Hiroshima mon amour. Axelos, in fact, had visited Heidegger and translated his works
into the French when the German philosopher—disgraced in his home country—was on the
lookout for friends in France, Japan, and elsewhere. Axelos had been influential in making the
thought of the later Heidegger relevant to the crisis of Marxism as chief sub-editor of the
Existential Marxist journal Arguments. Also the director of Arguments, Duras‟ close friend Edgar
Morin, had a leading role in the criticism of Hiroshima mon amour. His participation as the
22 Only Nathan Weinstock briefly refers to Heidegger‟s Dasein-zum-Tode in a Sartrean
framework of existential choice in his criticism of Hiroshima mon amour for the Brussels seminar (Ravar
1962, p. 242-243).
21
main guest in the Brussels seminar not only allowed him to express his view on the film in terms
of a reframing of Leftist engagement. It also provided the ideal audience for Resnais to develop
his response to Sadoul‟s Stalinist criticism of mad love in terms that resonated with the concerns
of Existential Marxism.
In a certain sense, Resnais started a trend in recuperating Heidegger‟s thought for the
French intellectual world that Duras‟ friends brought to completion. The young soldier Resnais
and his life-long friend Frédéric de Towarnicki were the first to visit Heidegger in his house in
the Black Forest after the war. In the chaotic fall of 1945, the region was under French
occupation authorities, with no mail or telephone working. Nobody knew if the philosopher was
still alive. De Towanicki (1993, p. 26-29) describes their trip to Zähringen—which for him was
only the first of many— in his book A la rencontre de Heidegger. He later convinced Resnais to
accept the offer of the engaged producing company Argo Films to direct Night and Fog (1955).
The same company, through its affiliates, was responsible for the production of Hiroshima mon
amour, which Resnais showed to de Towarnicki for advice before completion.
The euphoria of Liberation had seen an explosion of an “existentialist” lifestyle in the
coffeehouses and nightclubs of Paris that had made the German philosopher famous despite
himself. Heidegger was labeled “the father of existentialism” without anybody knowing exactly
what that meant. In Germany, the philosopher was in disgrace, banned from publishing and
teaching for his pre-war support of the Nazi Party. Serious philosophers like Émmanuel Levinas
(who had been his student) and Jean-Paul Sartre (the new “rival”) admired his early work and
were eager to have news of his progress, but were taken aback by his compromising political
choices in the Thirties. De Towarnicki (with the help of Resnais‟ pictures) took on himself this
work of mediation, mending the threads of an interrupted philosophical dialogue. He introduced
to Heidegger the works of Sartre and presented the self-apologetic account of the philosopher‟s
embrace of Nazism to the readers of Sartre‟s journal Les Temps Modernes. His example also
enabled other philosophers to make the trip from Paris to Zähringen and to start thinking through
the political potentials of Heidegger‟s thought in the rhetorical situation of postwar France.
22
Jean Beaufret and Kostas Axelos, in particular, claimed friendship with Heidegger and
worked to make his later thought more relevant for a new audience. They spoke to Marxist
intellectuals disillusioned with Stalinism who often had been expelled from the Communist
Party. This audience found in the works of the early Marx on alienation (as political,
philosophical, technological, etc.) a lever to counter the abstractness of dialectical materialism
(the infamous diamat) and its unilateral focus on economics. They welcomed the new image of a
Heidegger that was far from fighting against Marxism. He was writing from a deep
understanding of Marx‟s early work that he had acquired in the early Thirties as teacher of
Siegfried Lanshut, the first editor of the 1844 Manuscripts. Heidegger‟s Letter on Humanism to
Jean Beaufret had announced in 1949 that here had been a Kehre (“turning”) in his thought.
However, this shift can be traced back to his seminar on Nietzsche in 1939, where he first
addressed the issue of the will-to-power of modern technology in light of his readings on
alienation. For Beaufret, therefore, “Heidegger se propose essentiellement de nous aider à
entendre ce que dit Marx” (Axelos 1969, p. 95).23 His attentive reading illuminated anew Marx‟s
early writings more than Jean-Paul Sartre could do.
The group of thinkers around the journal Arguments (some of whom participated to the
“friendship of the no” with Duras) articulated the writings of the later Heidegger to their political
aim of purging Marxist thought of its Stalinist excesses, so as to open the way to new
aggregations of the Left.24 For instance, Henri Lefebvre (1989) devotes long passages to the
German philosopher in the book La Somme et le reste that he wrote in 1959 after his exclusion
from the PCF [French Communist Party]. Lefebvre casts Heidegger‟s conception of the essence
23 “Heidegger‟s essential aim is to help us to understand what Marx says.” Jean Beaufret Henri
Lefebvre, François Chatelet, and Kostas Axelos discussed the relation between Marx and Heidegger in
two occasions in February and March 1959. Their debate was published in May in the neutralist weekly
Nouvel Observateur.
24 The title Arguments, in fact, came from a related Italian neo-Marxist journal, Franco Fortini‟s
Nuovi Argomenti. Fortini, a poet and a critic who was close friend with Edgar Morin, had chosen the title
not only for his reference to debate, but also for the medieval meaning of the Latin word argumentum as
“enema.”
23
of modern technology as Enframing against the ingrained philosophical alienation of Stalinist
dogmatism that hides the concrete problems of reality under apparently clear and forever fixed
formulas. Heidegger‟s questioning refuses the compulsory certainties of Marxist teleology and
opens to a wider problematic (Lefebvre 1989, p. 140).25 Lefebvre was not blind to the
potentially conservative character of Heidegger‟s thought and to the danger of losing the
meaning of action into an abyss of questioning. But he considered that the poetic quality of
Heidegger‟s Holzwege revealed how an overestimation of technology (with human beings as
Cartesian “masters of nature” now endowed with atomic energy and the atomic bomb) is
alienating. It deprives us of the presence of nature and other human beings. In other words,
Lefebvre sees Heidegger‟s later writings as an attempt to save a problematic concreteness that
the smooth ideological view of the teleology of progress menaces. The same concern with
concrete individuals brought Lefebvre to study everyday life as a tool in grasping spontaneous
attempts at democratization that clash with the homologizing “class subjectivism” of official
Marxism. In a France that was living the major alienation of its political failure in Algeria, it was
important to learn again to deal with the concrete to avoid the rise of personality cults (De Gaulle
and Stalin alike) that disempowered citizens and forced them back into the parceled separation of
the private.
From his doctoral dissertation on “Marx thinker of technology” that he defended in 1959,
Kostas Axelos (1961) was the member of the Arguments group who wrote most extensively on
the later Heidegger as a thinker of alienation. The Greek philosopher deploys Heidegger‟s
question concerning technology to criticize a Marxist view of history that had found in Stalinism
25 “Par rapport aux marxistes officiels, Heidegger représente le pôle opposé. D‟un côté, tout est
clair. […]. Les principes, canonisés dans les deux sens du mot (codifiés et sacralisés) s‟établissent pour
l‟éternité. Si l‟on parle de „problème,‟ c‟est une clause de style, ou bien une affaire mineure, un détail à
préciser. De l‟autre, chez Heidegger, la „problématique‟ est infinie. La totalité de l‟existant, mise en
question, glisse dans le néant ou dans l‟abîme.” [In relation to the official Marxists, Heidegger represents
the opposite pole. On the one side, everything is clear. […] The principles—canonized in the two sense of
the word (i.e. codified and turned into sacred)— are fixed for eternity. If one speaks of a “problem” it is a
clause of style, or just a minor thing, a detail to specify. On the other side, for Heidegger, the
„problematic‟ is infinite. The totality of being, put into question, slides into nothing or into the abyss.]
24
its dogmatic avatar. Axelos argues that Marxist teleology is a technological thought that belongs
to the history of Western metaphysics and that sees all areas of life from the narrow viewpoint of
the homo faber. Intellectuals have to resist this limitation and start rethinking the problems of the
present that Stalinism postpones to a utopian future after the full victory of the proletariat on a
world scale. Private life, love, and sexuality lead the list. A variation of Heidegger‟s thought on
technology that is not blind to the impact of modernization on everyday life is certainly crucial
throughout the debate of love and technology in Hiroshima mon amour. In a certain sense, in
fact, Duras‟ “friendship of the No,” represented a link between the pre-war Surrealist evaluation
of love and sexuality and the return of the same issues in the Fifties in the framework of a
different and more complex discourse of technology.
Finally, Edgar Morin (1959) shows how Heidegger‟s thought constituted a resource for a
generation of “Existentialists of Marxism” who were critical of Sartre‟s conception of
engagement. Like Duras, they had taken active part in the WWII Resistance and had joined the
Communist Party during the fight. They considered Sartre‟s thought that “everyone is always
already committed, whether they are aware of it or not, so it is better to choose” as a mere “preengagement.” It was too bland when compared with their war-time experience, and its popularity
among people that had not fully taken part in the struggle was a proof of it (p. 83-84).26 In the
years before the Cold War, Sartre‟s engagement appeared as an attempt to deal with a fascination
for the discipline of the Communist party that could rid the nihilistic conscience of its problems.
But it never succeeded in overcoming its own doubts and fears. Ironically, Sartre decided to
support in toto the Communist Party only when Cold War Stalinism had become unbearable at
26 “Aussi l‟engagement de Sartre était à la fois désir et crainte de l‟engagement. Naville avait
justement remarqué dans sa réponse à Sartre (in L’Existentialisme est un humanisme) qu‟en fait il
s‟agissait plus d‟un pré-engagement que d‟un engagement. C‟est pourquoi l‟existentialisme devait
polariser des intellectuels semi-dégagés, qui n‟avaient pas profondément vécu la résistance […].” [Thus
Sartre‟s engagement was at the same time desire and fear of commitment. [Pierre] Naville had rightly
noticed in his answer to Sartre (in Existentialism is a Humanism) that in fact it was more a precommitment than a commitment. It is for this reason that Existentialism ended up polarizing halfuncommitted intellectuals, who had not deeply lived the Resistance…]
25
the turn of the Fifties. He thought that it was the only way not to lose contacts with the working
masses that he strictly identified with the Party. By then, though, Morin and his friends had been
excluded from the PCF. Sociology taught them that modernization was impacting the identity
and life-style of the working class to an extent that Marxist theory could not account for. Not
surprisingly, they did not consider Sartre‟s move particularly wise.27
Heidegger‟s thought of technology, instead, arrived at the right time. It was never as
hegemonic as Sartre‟s engagement had been. It never saturated the field forcing all other
discourses to define themselves in relation to it. But in the rhetorical situation of the late Fifties,
it constituted a tool that enabled criticizing the teleological thought of progress that asked
militants to blindly obey their leaders. The former fighters of the Resistance had been expelled
from the Communist Party. But they could now invent other meanings for the word “Left” that
took into account the very exigency of democracy that their war experience had told them to
value. The new starting point was a critique of technocracy and bureaucratization. These
concerns are paramount in Morin‟s reading of Hiroshima mon amour as “le film du nihilisme
contemporain” that presents the decomposition of earlier revolutionary ideas, as only from their
ashes a new conception of engagement for the French Left may be glimpsed (Ravar 1962, p.
82).28
Sartre‟s view of commitment had been the major postwar ideology in the non-Communist
Left. Its demise opened the way to a major rhetorical work of reframing, combining, and creating
Leftist conceptions that gave new meanings to the relation between thought and political action.
27 See Elio Vittorini (2006, p. 42) letter to Dionys Mascolo in October 1952: “Ce con de Sartre, à
propos, je l‟ai lu. Et alors, quand les ouvriers d‟Italie, il y a un siècle, étaient pour les prêtres, on devait
être avec les prêtres pour être avec eux?” [By the way, I have read that dummy of Sartre. So, when the
Italian workers, one century ago, were siding with the priests, should one have been with the priests to be
with them?] This letter from Italian writer Elio Vittorini to his close friends Duras and Mascolo well
expresses a common reaction of former combatants of the Resistance and ex-Party members to Sartre‟s
choice of backing Stalinism in the early Fifties. Sartre cut his relations with the PCF in 1956 after the
invasion of Hungary, but it is only with the trial of Francis Jeanson in 1960 that he could partially
reassume a leading role in the French Left. The new mobilizing issue was now the Algerian War.
28 “The film of current nihilism.”
26
Pre-war Surrealism and Personalism suddenly acquired a new face that enabled them to deal with
the problems of modernization. The Surrealist focus on private life and the Personalist stress on
communication enabled them to perceive how the Stalinist teleological expectation of a
pauperization of the Western proletariat had not occurred. Instead, leisure time had increased in
importance, and it had become a critical site of political confrontation. The same awareness
enabled the Situationists to emerge as an active political movement from the cinders of the
aesthetic avant-garde. Different discourses of technology (Karl Jaspers, Günther Anders,
Émmanuel Levinas, Jacques Ellul, etc.) were mobilized to help in this transformation. The story
of the early criticism of Hiroshima mon amour as a whole constitutes one of the best points of
entry to trace these dramatic changes that had a lasting impact on the identity and self-conception
of the French Left.
I argue, however, that there is a slight difference between the embrace of sociology that
the group of Arguments developed and that Morin fully presented in his reading of Hiroshima
mon amour for the Brussel seminar and a different, more political embrace of Heidegger‟s
thought. In fact, Morin‟s sociology had a political edge but it ended up actually reinforcing the
binary opposition between the private as sociologically relevant and the public as politically
relevant. By contrast, Resnais who chance had brought to Heidegger‟s house before any other
visitor in the postwar seems to develop from the German philosopher‟s conception of Enframing
the topos of the “permeable house.” The essence of modern technology is to challenge nature and
to transform it into a “standing-reserve.” Also human beings become mere means in this
transformation that does not recognize boundaries between war and peace. The colonization of
the private, therefore, is the place from which the voice of a woman can rise and articulate
different political issues. Firk will give the best examples of this articulation in her politics of
aimance that unites a common sense in understanding matters of love with a political prudence
able to detect historical oppressions and speak against them. In this sense, Firk‟s politics of
aimance and Resnais‟ politics of the peut-être are perhaps closer to the paradoxical communities
at the turn of the Sixties. Morin‟s intervention has much in common with them, but the rhetorical
27
situation of the Brussels seminar asked him to reinforce the boundary between private and public
that his sociology of private life was building despite itself.
The Rise of Film Studies: Decontextualization, Cinephilia, Auteur
Benjamin‟s pearl diving is primarily a method of reading the past outside of tradition, in a
destructive way fertilized by the blood of the present.29 The only true faithfulness to monuments
of the past is forcibly extracting them from the order that allots them an undisturbed place in the
hierarchy of a perhaps already devalued tradition. Angles that have been ignored for decades in
the proliferation of words written on a topic can illuminate anew the total truth of the aesthetic
object. They become a way of exploding that object through questioning, respecting it in the only
way in which it can be respected. They also betray it, but they also make it alive by rewriting its
infinite potentialities through different priorities. Recent reflections about the possibility of a
politics of “aimance” constitute the precious truth for understanding the present that guides my
study of the early critical reception of Hiroshima mon amour.
Conversely, the tradition that it challenges is a certain trend toward decontextualization in
film studies that does not allow the political relevance of Resnais‟ film to emerge. The
sociological approach of Sixties‟ filmology has a negligible influence on the current form of the
academic discipline. However, the filmological venture of the Brussels seminar as a whole
constitutes a hinge in the early criticism of Hiroshima mon amour as it put into place
expectations that cater to an academic audience. Its aim, in fact, was to promote the study of film
to the rank of an autonomous academic discipline at the Free University of Brussels in the early
Sixties. Close analysis of the filmic text and neutral observation of the cinematic language are
the concerns that dominate most of its scholarly interventions.
29 Hannah Arendt (1968, p. 198) quotes from Benjamin, “The genuine picture may be old, but
the genuine thought is new. It is of the present. This present may be meager, granted. But no matter what
it is like, one must firmly take it by the horns to be able to consult the past. It is the bull whose blood must
fill the pit if the shades of the departed are to appear at its edge.”
28
If Edgar Morin still reads Hiroshima mon amour as a film that addresses the political
context of its production, the Brussels seminar also promotes a different trend that leads toward a
decontextualized reading. The issue of decolonization is the first to fade away. In later essays
that take the seminar‟s shot by shot analysis of Hiroshima mon amour as their basis, also the
questions of the Gaullist nuclear tests in Algeria and of technological modernization disappear.
Later scholars read the incipit of the film only as referring to the bombing of Hiroshima, without
following the thread that Resnais‟ montage draws from the first atomic destruction to other faces
of the nuclear problem that it indirectly generated. Similarly, academic criticism fails to fully
perceive the original revolutionary stakes of mad love. A wealth of information on the film is
paired with the incapacity of reading its significance in the rhetorical situation that it addresses.
The fifth chapter of my study reconstructs the gradual steps of this forgetting that
correspond to the establishment of film studies as an academic discipline. Christian Metz‟s
version of semiology occupies a pivotal position in this story. In fact, Metz chose to focus strictly
on the internal combinations of the filmic elements and not on the cultural connotations that
signs carry into the film from the external world. I discuss Metz‟s reading of Hiroshima mon
amour in relation with his polemics with Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini in the Sixties. In
fact, the contrast illuminates the French critic‟s preference for a semiology that values the
complexities of the narrative structure more than the ability of the film to tackle the massive
changes of the chaotic and confused world at the time of decolonization. Most of later American
readings of Hiroshima mon amour stem from this decontextualized root where internal
coherence is more important than the rhetorical effort to elaborate a new language for an
unprecedented situation of crisis of given political categories.
The criticism of Hiroshima mon amour enables us also to trace the transformations of
powerful terministic screens such as auteur and cinephilia that once defined film studies as an
academic discipline. Their power of organization and exclusion is still strong in determining
what counts as a competent study of film. They are perhaps the vehicle of boundary polishing
that most effectively hinders collaborations with scholars of neighboring fields. By the same
29
token, they are the ideal working ground for rhetoric as the humble mole-discipline that digs
tunnels under insurmountable disciplinary walls. The early debate on Hiroshima mon amour is
the ideal site for this work as it does not simply posit the unquestionable centrality of auteur and
cinephilia. On the contrary, it effectively reverses the problem by showing the original moment
when these concepts (and the classicist view of cinema that produced them) were strained and
under revision. It was a moment when a contextual reading could hardly have been avoided. This
original tension traverses the whole story of the criticism of Hiroshima mon amour, only to
resurface in the clearest way in the Eighties. The end of the fifth and last chapter of my study
describes this more recent period when a new concern for a reformulation of engagement brings
two authors—Julia Kristeva and Gilles Deleuze—to embrace cinephilia and auteur, but to
profoundly change their meaning.
Cinephilia indicated at the beginning the love for cinema of young post-war critics that
opposed their assiduous frequentations of movie theaters and their knowledge of cinematic forms
to the stuffy theoretical seriousness of filmology and to the ideological criticism of Leftist critics.
The round-table on Hiroshima mon amour by the Cahiers du Cinéma, however, started a
massive reconfiguration of the term by, first, articulating the formalism of cinephilia with the
representation of the horrors of Nazi concentration camps. Cinephilia became connected with the
unspeakable and the unrepresentable. Kristeva starts from this articulation to propose a view of
engagement that takes into account the unexplored areas of trauma and melancholia in Duras‟
work. History and mad love are seen through the lenses of psychoanalysis. Language itself can
become mad and love is always threatened by the frigidity of the subject‟s impossibility to love.
The trauma of the bomb has a parallel in the shattering of the modern psyche. The question
remains, though, whether Kristeva‟s “blank rhetoric” of the unspeakable misses the positive
reframing of engagement that the articulation of love and the discourse of technology
accomplished in the early critical readings in view of possible political action.
François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and the other “Young Turks” of the Cahiers du Cinéma
launched the idea of auteur to define how masterful directors always express a particular view of
30
the world through their mise-en-scène and how this is particularly evident in the least successful
of their films. The American production of Jean Renoir, for example, not only fully justifies his
status as auteur, but also illuminates aspects of his previous works and of his personal view of
the world that would have not appeared otherwise. The negative counterpart of this definition is
that the way in which each work addresses its particular rhetorical situation is lost, as every
single film simply helps us in understanding the artistic totality of the director‟s production.
Strictly speaking, Resnais was not an auteur of the Cahiers at the time of Hiroshima mon amour.
However, the explosion of the Nouvelle Vague made the round-table on Hiroshima mon amour a
crucial battleground where the critics tested the different views of the relation between the auteur
with the mise-en-scène that they were also developing in their new career as directors. In
particular, the relation between the auteur and modern technology was important in shaking a
conception that had its main theoretical roots in Rohmer‟s classicist view of the world.
In the Eighties, Gilles Deleuze developed this insight in dividing his auteurs into a worldview mostly influenced by machines and one mostly influenced by information technology.
Resnais falls into the second category as the monteur of unprecedented connections that work
like brain synapses. This attention to the undecidable coexistence of different temporalities and
of fragments of the communal unconscious is a potentially important insight for a rhetorical
search for articulations. However, Deleuze‟s focus on cybernetics brings him to privilege
Resnais‟ more recent production where the director consciously plays with the image of the
brain. His account ends up missing some of the specific problems that Hiroshima mon amour
addressed through a more hard-core discourse of technology that includes also machines (the
atomic bomb) and everyday technological objects as signs of modernization. Moreover, Deleuze
defines the activity of the auteur as thinking. Therefore, he is led to underestimate the way in
which Hiroshima mon amour asked the audience to judge the political situation in France at the
turn of the Fifties through a rhetorical articulation of love and technology.
Even if for simplicity sake I have so far referred to Hiroshima mon amour as Resnais‟
film, one of the major characters that make it unique is the fact that it has two equally important
31
authors. It could not exist without either of them. Morin recalls that Resnais asked Duras to write
the screenplay after months of preparatory work, because he realized that a movie on Hiroshima
could only be meaningful and say something new if it was written by a woman (Ravar 1962, p.
27). Françoise Sagan and Simone de Beauvoir had been the other options he had considered in
this search for a woman‟s voice. Duras‟ work, though, had the advantage of being less
theoretical—it was not The Second Sex—, more musical, and more easily adaptable to the stage.
In particular, Duras had just published Moderato Cantabile (1958), a story of amour fou between
a man and a woman of different social backgrounds. They revived the love of another couple that
ended with death. Resnais asked Duras not to compose “for the screen,” but to write with the
rhythm of her novel.
Critics tend to privilege either Duras or Resnais as the author of Hiroshima mon amour
and this simple gesture already helps to define their reading, even if their reasons for choosing
either one of the authors might be extremely different. For example, Sadoul‟s conception of
Marxism is very different from the one of Gilles Deleuze, but they both focus on Resnais. By
contrast, Edgar Morin, the Situationists, and Julia Kristeva claim the irreducible importance of
Duras‟ contribution. My rhetorical-hermeneutical approach aims to elucidate in each particular
case the motives that guided the choice of the defining auteur among the two main creators of
Hiroshima mon amour.
Also the image of the authors that the critics construct varies. The Brussels seminar goes
as far as to change the personal data of Duras‟ married life to make it more acceptable to an
academic audience. Sadoul stresses the consonances between Resnais‟ work and the Nouveau
Roman, but does not consider Duras as belonging to it. For the Brussels seminar, instead, the
belonging to the new avant-garde of the Nouveau Roman is an important aspect of her work. The
Cahiers stress how Duras‟ language is reminiscent of Hemingway and Faulkner. Sadoul, instead,
criticizes her style but—in a Stalinist fashion— does not mention American novelists as a
comparison. On this account, we can remember that Duras had unsuccessfully joined forces with
her husband Robert Antelme, along with Dionys Mascolo, and Elio Vittorini in the defense of
32
American writers and a more open cultural politics for the PCF in the late Forties. From this
querelle had started her alienation from the Party, which eventually led to her exclusion in 1950.
As for Resnais, most critics agree in valuing his past as a documentary-maker. However,
the shorts that they indicate as predecessors of Hiroshima mon amour form paths that diverge in
their meanings. For instance, Sadoul indicates a thread that goes from Guernica (1950) to Night
and Fog to Hiroshima mon amour, linking the atomic bombing with the concentration camps
and the Resistance in the Spanish Civil War. However, Michèle Firk adds to the list the concerns
with the damages of colonialism in Les Statues meurent aussi (1950-1953) and articulates
Hiroshima mon amour with the struggles for decolonization, particularly in Algeria. The
Cahiers, instead, find the closest link with the formal choices and the discourse on modern
technology that guides Toute la mémoire du monde (1956), Resnais‟ short on the French
National Library.
This study of rhetorical pearl diving does not aim to reconstruct the persona of the
auteurs as atemporal and decontextualized creators. Instead, it attempts to immerse them into the
rhetorical situation that they addressed. This situation was politically tense. Duras was involved
in the “friendship of the no” that gathered Leftist intellectuals around the short-lived journal Le
14 juillet. The stated opposition to De Gaulle‟s return to power became a lever to envision a
different conception of a non-Stalinist Left that could overcome the lack of attention to political
matters in a modernized France. Resnais joined her in 1960 in the Manifesto of the 121 in
support of conscientious objection in the Algerian war. My rhetorical “pearl diving” considers
Hiroshima mon amour as part of this wider commitment that Derrida describes as the politics of
the peut-être.
A Plan of the Work
In the first chapter, I examine the beginning of the debate on “mad love” in the Stalinist
journal Les Lettres Françaises right after the première of the film at Cannes. I then focus
particularly on how the Stalinist critic Georges Sadoul negotiated his own Surrealist past in order
33
to move toward a humanistic view of aesthetics that contrasted with the Manichean excesses of
Zhdanovism. However, Sadoul strenuously defended a view of the Resistance that was based on
the “National Communist” idea of a communal fight against the German invader. This
autochthonous view of the enemy did not allow him to articulate “mad love” with the difficult
choices that faced French Leftist intellectuals in relation with the Algerian War.
Chapter Two and Three show the other face of the early debate on “mad love.” In
Chapter Two, in particular, I examine Michèle Firk‟s contribution to this controversy for Positif.
I argue that it can be read in terms of Derrida‟s politics of aimance. In fact, Firk engages the
Surrealist tradition of “mad love” of her cinema journal. But she does not privilege the role of
individual unconscious that post-war Surrealism had chosen as the core of their elaborations.
Rather, she envisions the Surrealist legacy also from the point of view of a discourse of
technology that makes private life into a central site of political contention and into a source of
political responsibility. I particularly show how Firk‟s “mad love” becomes the first link of
rhetorical articulations that address wider political oppressions.
In Chapter Three, I show that Alain Resnais‟ responses to Sadoul for the Brussels
seminar and Esprit undermine Stalinist teleology to open up the possibility of a politics of the
peut-être. In these terms, I argue that his reading deeply resonate with the paradoxical
communities that rose against the failed de-Stalinization of the Communist Party and raised the
troubling question of Algerian independence at the turn of the Sixties. However, Resnais also
challenges the strict boundary that Edgar Morin‟s sociology constructed between a sociologically
relevant private life and a politically relevant public life. In this sense, Resnais‟ interview
appears to join Firk‟s concerns and justify her opinion that he moved toward a more advance
conception of the political than most of his critics of the Left.
Chapter Four analyzes the early debate on modern technology. Most precisely, I discuss
critical texts that not only address the question of nuclear weapons, but also dwell on the issue of
modernization and on its meaning for private life. Moreover, I analyze how particular views of
cinema as the art of mechanical reproduction are implicated in these readings. Some of these
34
readings engage in different ways the legacy of André Bazin. The Cahiers stage a roundtable in
which Bazin‟s heirs split on the meaning of the phenomenological heritage of their master,
particularly in relation with the representation of modern technology. The Personalist journal
Esprit presented itself as the real heir of Bazin‟s Leftist commitment, and attempted to draw a
link between Emmanuel Mounier‟s theory of communication and technological modernization.
Georges Sadoul—the friend and the rival—recuperates a Surrealist view of the mystery of the
everyday that enables him to deal with the transformations of modern technology, even when
they clash with the Stalinist dogma of progressive pauperization. The Situationists, however,
develop another aspect of Breton‟s Surrealism. According to them, the greatest merit of Resnais‟
film is to gesture toward a destruction of the spectacle from inside. In their reading, the critical
tendency of the avant-garde to destroy itself as a form of art for art‟s sake rejoins the Marxist
theorization on private life close to Henri Lefebvre.
Chapter Five examines the trend of forgetting of the issues raised by the early debates on
love and technology. It begins with the highly contradictory filmological venture of the Brussels
seminar that launched the study of the film in a process of academization of film studies as a
discipline. It continues with the semiological reading of Christian Metz that privileged to focus
on the narrative complexity of the film to the exclusion of the rhetorical situation of its
production and first reception. Both trends join in Janice Etzkowitz‟s dissertation on Hiroshima
mon amour as a form of “cinematic literature” that greatly influenced further studies in the
America academia. This line shows a progressive distancing from topics that were important in
the first reactions, such as decolonization struggles and the role of technological modernization
in the politicization of private life. The honing of the formalistic reading of the film and the
establishment of the terministic screens that define film studies as a discipline entailed a
progressive inability to grasp the political tensions that traversed Hiroshima mon amour as a
film. Accordingly, its attempt to gesture toward an alternative form of political engagement was
gradually lost.
35
The second part of Chapter Five, however, shows a return of the political repressed in the
later readings on Hiroshima mon amour in the Eighties. Kristeva‟s feminist reading as a
practicing psychoanalyst interested in how art is able to capture the language of madness that
guides us revives the questions of private life as a contested battleground. Deleuze reads
Hiroshima mou amour in terms of a discourse of technology, arguing that cybernetics and
information technology influence the synaptic associations of undecidable contraries in Resnais‟
films. These critical texts effectively recuperate a form of political resonance. However, I argue
that they have lost an ability to look at Hiroshima mon amour in terms of the concrete points of
tension that the debate on “mad love” and technology illuminated. Significantly, Robert
Benayoun had read Hiroshima mon amour in terms of an indictment of the French bomb in its
relation with colonization. In the Eighties, however, the most important aspect of the film is for
him the semiological representation of the cultural myths of the nuclear era. The final example of
Philippe Forest forgetting that Hiroshima mon amour had ever been an indictment of the French
nuclear tests shows the extent of this paradigm change and of the forms of commitment that it
makes impossible. Only a careful and patient study of the rhetorical situation can unearth this
lost dimension and evaluate what its role for the present might be.
36
CHAPTER ONE
THE EARLY DEBATE ON “MAD LOVE” (I): SADOUL‟S “NATIONAL
COMMUNISM” AND THE POLITICAL LEGACY OF SURREALISM
An Overview of the Debate
Two articles on Hiroshima mon amour share the first and the seventh pages of no. 773 of
the Communist cultural weekly Les Lettres Françaises. Their authors are the three protagonists
of the debate over mad love that I explore in this chapter and the next. They all belong to that
broad and contested political entity that is the French Left. The young and inexperienced cinema
critic Michèle Firk interviews the director Alain Resnais at the top of the page. The famous
Stalinist cinema historian and critic Georges Sadoul follows at the bottom. The issue covers the
central week of May 1959 and includes the reactions to the first part of the Festival of Cannes. It
is not the last occasion in which the three authors will examine the question of “mad love” in
Hiroshima mon amour. They all deepened and expanded their views on the issue in different
venues during the following year. Together, these contributions stage a debate in which the
critics respond to each other or purposely ignore part of the others‟ argument. Their aim is to
construct a view of the film that helps them to negotiate their complex subject positions in an
equally complex rhetorical situation.
I begin this chapter with a discussion of the first stage of the debate. I argue that we can
better understand the way in which these articles address the question of “mad love” and respond
to each other if we grasp the Surrealist legacy that they openly evoke. Particularly, I argue that it
is important to understand how this tradition had become again a crucial player in the Leftist
political arena at the turn of the Sixties. This introduction helps us to understand the rhetorical
nuances of Sadoul‟s second and more complete essay in Les Lettres Françaises. I argue that the
Communist critic renews his ties with Surrealism to address the failure of a Zhdanovist world
view in the context of a global crisis of Stalinist categories. However, his reading of “mad love”
in Hiroshima mon amour shows his unwillingness to renounce the authority that a “National
37
Communist” view of the Resistance in WWII still lent to the French Communist Party. In other
words, I argue that Sadoul‟s reading stages the tragedy of faithfulness of a man who had
renounced his Surrealist past to join a cause in which he believed, and in which he still attempted
to believe despite his disillusions.
In the next two chapters, I discuss Firk‟s and Resnais‟ answers to Sadoul‟s intervention
on the question of “mad love” in Hiroshima mon amour. My broader argument is that Jacques
Derrida‟s politics of aimance and politics of the peut-être can help us understand how their
criticism countered Sadoul‟s “National Communism” and joined the most advanced events in the
construction of the French Left at the turn of the Sixties. In fact, Resnais staged a discourse of
technology that challenged Stalinist teleology and opened it up to the irresolvable ambiguity of
reality and to the risky decision of a peut-être. Firk, on her part, addressed the collapse of public
and private in a woman‟s voice, challenging the clear-cut distinctions that found the traditional
conception of the political and opening the way for a politics of aimance. The Surrealist concept
of “mad love” remains a reference that underlies the various positions of this debate, providing a
communal resource for mutual understanding and allowing differences to appear in a clear way.
In this context, amour fou is not simply intended as a literary concept. It is rather a lever that
allows uncovering a new area of political engagement in the endangered field of private life and
in the ambiguities of decolonization struggles.
The First Exchange in Les Lettres Françaises
The first article of Les Lettres Françaises that I analyze is titled “Hiroshima, mon amour,
film scandaleux?” Alain Resnais answers here the questions of Michèle Firk concerning the
heated discussions that the première of his film had raised. Firk does not yet elaborate a coherent
and powerfully personal reading of the film. For this development we have to wait for the roundtable staged by the neo-Surrealist cinema journal Positif in which the young woman takes the
lead. Here, her role is still limited to asking questions concerning aspects of Hiroshima mon
amour that could have offended the sensibility of a Stalinist audience. She was undoubtedly
38
perfect for the job given her subject position as a young woman member of the Communist
Party. In fact, she was well situated to address the disturbing way in which the representation of
love in Resnais‟ films challenged the communal memory of WWII. In particular, Firk insists on
the major controversial point of the relation of the French woman with a German soldier in
Occupied France. The sympathetic representation of a case of “horizontal collaboration” had
shocked some audience members. The young and still unknown woman critic does not directly
comment on the issue and asks all the expected questions. But she closes her interview with an
embrace of Surrealist scandal and mad love that prefigures her future reading in Positif. In fact,
she wishes that Resnais‟ future films could match the scandal of Hiroshima mon amour and of
L’Âge d’or, the Surrealist film on mad love that Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali directed in the
Thirties (Firk and Resnais 1959, p. 7).1
Resnais answers Firk‟s questions by defending a reading of Elle‟s love story that goes
beyond a positive embrace or a downright condemnation. He claims the right to an ambiguity
that challenges the audience and forces them to participate. In his literature review of the early
criticism on Hiroshima mon amour for the Brussels seminar, André Gérard-Libois defined his
answers as “appeasing” (Ravar 1962, p. 41). However, Resnais adds an element that challenges
his Communist audience of Les Lettres Françaises when he links the episode of the German
soldier to the present circumstances of the Algerian war. More precisely, Resnais draws a
comparison between the German soldier and a French private of the turn of the Sixties that does
not defect even if he does not agree with his country‟s politics in Algeria. In Resnais‟ words, in
fact, “En temps de guerre, les soldats, même sans être d‟accord, ne désertent pas toujours. Je
pense à la guerre d‟Algérie: les combattants qui la désapprouvent ne rejoignent pas tous les rangs
1 “Souhaitons, Alain Resnais, que vos prochains films soient aussi „scandaleux‟ que votre film
préféré, L’Age d’or, aussi „scandaleux‟ qu‟Hiroshima mon amour. Ce sera l‟occasion d‟une nouvelle
bataille et, pour le cinéma, d‟une nouvelle victoire.” [Let‟s hope, Alain Resnais, that your next films will
be as “scandalous” as your favorite film, The Golden Age, as “scandalous” as Hiroshima mon amour.
This will be the occasion of a new battle and, for cinema, of a new victory.]
39
du F.L.N ” (Firk and Resnais 1959, p. 7).2 Orthodox Stalinists, in fact, adopted a conservative
stance concerning Algerian independence and conscience objection. The same issues, instead,
represented an engine of aggregation for other elements of the Left. In particular, the circle of
Duras‟ friends (the group of the Rue Saint-Benoît) played a crucial role in bringing together
Leftists of different ideological convictions in common actions on the question of Algeria.
The shot from the film that accompanies Resnais‟ interview visually reinforces the
controversial reading of the impossible story of “mad love” between enemies. It represents Lui
slapping Elle‟s face in the coffeehouse along the river Ota while she is telling the story of her
love for the German soldier. Resnais refers to the gesture in his interview in order to stress the
effort of imagination that the film requires from the audience, when they are confronted with
images that are not easy to decipher: “On doit donc comprendre, lorsqu‟il gifle la femme, qu‟il
est jaloux de cet autre amour qu‟elle lui raconte, et qu‟il veut la sortir de son état d‟hypnose,
mais aussi que toute cette histoire le dégoute et le révolte” (p. 7).3 Significantly, in his later essay
on Hiroshima mon amour for Les Lettres Françaises Georges Sadoul returns to the episode, and
even makes Lui‟s slap in Elle‟s face the very turning point of their tragic love story. But he
particularly stresses the last explanation among all those that Resnais offers, i.e. the story of
Elle‟s love for an enemy in uniform disgusts the politically conscious Japanese man, as well as
the audience. This negative reading contrasts with Michèle Firk‟s more sympathetic
understanding of Elle‟s love and suffering in the Positif‟ roundtable, where they actually become
the basis for a political articulation that links nuclear annihilation with the victims of the Shoah
and the oppression against colonized populations. The difference between the reading of Firk and
Sadoul indicates a generational gap between two fellow Communists. They also design different
2 “In wartime, soldiers—even if they do not agree— do not always defect. I think of the Algerian
war: the servicemen who disapprove of it do not always join the ranks of the F.L.N. [Algerian National
Liberation Front].”
3 “One has to understand, when he slaps the woman, that he is jealous of this other love of which
she tells him, or that he wants to take her out of her hypnotic status, but also that all this story disgusts
and revolts him.”
40
ways to conceive women‟s romantic and sexual choices. For Sadoul, love is ennobling when it is
part of the faithful texture of National Communism. For Firk, love should be let free to explore
different ways to problematize the public-private binary and to envision different views of
engagement.
The second article on Hiroshima mon amour on the front page of Les Lettres Françaises
of mid-May 1959 is Georges Sadoul‟s essay “Un grand film, un grand homme.” It appears right
under Firk‟s interview to which it partly responds. In its complex, Sadoul‟s article takes the form
of a long review of the first days of the Festival that covers in great detail the contributions of
different countries. However, from the beginning Sadoul singles out Hiroshima mon amour and
Alain Resnais, to whom the title pays explicit homage. The Stalinist critic sees the force of the
film in the controversy that it generated, “il suscite comme toutes les œuvres hors série des
discussions passionnées, pour ou contre” (p. 7).4 He strongly argues that a film that had raised as
much indignation against the war and made such an enormous contribution to the history of
cinema as Hiroshima mon amour should have represented France in the official competition. In
fact, the organizers of the Festival had not chosen the film to compete for official prizes because
of its political character. They read as inconvenient for the Gaullist government that had
announced a test of the first French atomic bomb. Edgar Morin recalls the events that led to its
exclusion:
Les objections virent alors du côté du festival et Hiroshima, mon
amour n‟a pas été sélectionné. Les objections disaient : „C‟est un film qui
va déplaire aux U.S.A. parce qu‟on montre une bombe américaine.‟ […]
Les producteurs ont utilisé comme argument l‟accord des Américains, à
quoi il leur fut répondu que de toutes façons le film avait des caractères
politiques, qu‟il était incompatible avec la cinquième République, etc.
(Ravar 1962, p. 28).5
4 “Like every unclassifiable work it generates passionate discussions, pro and con.”
5 “The objections came then from the side of the festival and Hiroshima mon amour was not
selected. The objections said, “It is a movie that will be displeasing to the U.S.A. because it shows an
American bomb.” […] The producers used in their support the agreement of the Americans, only to
receive the answer that in any case the movie had a political character, that it was incompatible with the
Fifth Republic, etc.”
41
Sadoul exalts the courage and the mastery of Resnais as an engaged director who
confronted the audience with the horrors of nuclear war. The beginning of his article vividly
describes the shock that accompanied the audience even outside of the projection hall, through
the streets of Cannes: “Plusieurs heures après le mot fin, dans la soirée et dans la nuit de mai, sur
la Croisette, sur les marches du palais, sur les élégances et les ridicules, sur l‟Estérel et sur les
automobiles, sur les visages et sur le ciel, s‟écrit, en surimpression, un mot: enfer” (p. 7).6 No
film had yet condemned so strongly not only the massacre of Hiroshima, but also the impending
danger of a nuclear war. In fact, filmic documentation on the bombing of Hiroshima had only
recently been available to the public. As film historian Sylvie Lindeperg (2000, p. 110) writes, “à
l‟exception de très rares photographies et de quelques vues aériennes, les images du
bombardement et des atomisés ne furent livrées à la presse qu‟avec le retard d‟une longue
décennie.”7 The American censorship during the postwar Occupation of Japan had allowed only
aerial views and rare still photographs of the destruction and the hibakusha to circulate until the
mid Fifties. The ban on visual representation subsided only when the consecration of Hiroshima
as the city of world peace became a powerful rhetorical backing for President Eisenhower‟s
Atom for Peace policy. In this sense, the documentary approach of the visuals in the first fifteen
minutes of Resnais‟ film brought an important contribution to the rhetoric of the antinuclear
Peace Movement, which in France was mostly under Communist control.
Sadoul‟s reference to love still is comparatively short in his first article on Hiroshima
mon amour, in contrast with his lengthy condemnation of nuclear war. In fact, for Sadoul the two
themes cannot be separated. “Alain Resnais a ordonné une étrange danse macabre, où les
6 “Several hours after the word „the end,‟ in the evening and night of May, on the Croisette, on
the staircase of the palace, on the elegant and snob, on the Ésterel and on the cars, on the faces and on the
sky, there is written—in double exposure— one word: Hell.”
7 “With the exception of rare photos and some aerial views, the images of the bombing and its
victims were released to the press only after a long decade.”
42
squelettes atomiques entraînent les corps unis de deux amants” (p. 7).8 The tragic love of the
French woman and of the Japanese man recalls the heroes of classical love stories. But our torn
and disrupted world of the atomic age cannot but profoundly transform the old love themes.
“Roméo et Juliette…Ce thème domine tout une partie de notre monde déchiré” (p. 7).9 Sadoul
shows how Resnais‟ film juxtaposes on the same level the immense suffering that the bomb
caused and the individual suffering of Elle, uniting the two themes in a communal condemnation
of war. “Ce film respire et inspire l‟horreur de la guerre. Parce qu‟elle massacre et dégrade tous
les hommes, parce qu‟elle massacre et dégrade une seule âme” (p. 7).10
Sadoul‟s first essay on Hiroshima mon amour does not dwell on the treatment of love,
but it concisely suggests most of the hints that the critic will further develop in his longer study
of the film one month later. In particular, Sadoul addresses the problematic story of Elle‟s love
for the German soldier. The critic ignores Resnais‟ reference to conscientious objection in the
Algerian war. Instead, he charges Marguerite Duras with a failure in representing the soldier‟s
death and Elle‟s punishment as a tondue in tragic tones. The style in which Elle recalls Nevers
rises to the lyric heights of Paul Eluard only to sink to the level of a cheap over-refinement that
contrasts with Resnais‟ sublime control of his means and can be read as offensive sarcasm. “En
dehors de son sens (qui indigne certains) la réplique „Je m‟honore d‟avoir été déshonorée‟
apporte le clinquant du Boulevard, là où il faudrait un lyrisme tragique” (p. 7).11 Duras‟
contribution is, therefore, “Le défaut du diamant Hiroshima” (p. 7).12
8 “Alain Resnais has disposed a strange Dance of Death, in which the atomic skeletons carry
along the united bodies of the two lovers.”
9 “Romeo and Juliet…This theme dominates a great part of our disrupted world.”
10 “This film breathes and inspires horror of the war. For war massacres and degrades all human
beings; for it massacres and degrades even one soul.”
11 “Apart from its sense (that fills some people with indignation) the reply „I am honored of
having being dishonored‟ carries the empty glitter of Boulevard Theater, where tragic lyricism would be
needed.”
12 “The defect in the diamond Hiroshima.”
43
However, Sadoul‟s most serious charge against the novelist concerns the content of her
screenplay. In particular, the critic strongly objects to Duras‟ justification of the love between
Elle and the German soldier in terms of Surrealist amour fou. According to Duras‟ presentation
of the film, in fact, love transcends historical and social circumstances. The morality of war
cannot interfere with the morality of love and its uncontrollable choices. “Car je ne m‟accorde
pas avec le manifeste moralisateur de la romancière quand il dit „On peut aimer n‟importe qui,
n‟importe quand, n‟importe comment. Le monde entier est sur ce point d‟accord.‟” (p. 7).13
Sadoul retorts, on the contrary, “„N‟importe qui.‟ Vraiment ? Cette morale du n‟importe quoi est
la négation de l‟amour lui-même, et d‟abord de “l‟amour fou.‟” (p. 7).14 In fact, the publicity
campaign for the exploitation of the film insisted on the theme of “mad love.” The posters
carried Jacqueline Michel‟s hymn to love in Le Parisien, “un amour fou, hurlant, scandaleux, un
amour-cri” (Ravar 1962, p. 37).15
The tension between Sadoul‟s essay and Resnais‟ interview in Les Lettres Françaises
demonstrates that love in Hiroshima mon amour was far from being only a matter of harmless
sentimentality safely contained in the quiet of the private sphere. Sadoul, Resnais, and Firk
further developed their respective positions. In their later essays on the film they articulated love
with different issues of direct political resonance. Accordingly, Sadoul attacked “mad love” in
order to defend a “national” view of the Resistance during World War II. Resnais read the
sequences of “mad love” for audiences interested in the discourse of technology as a lever to
undermine the constrictive world-view imposed by Stalinist teleology. Firk, in turn, interpreted
the love of Elle from her subject position as a young woman, a Jew, and an activist in the pro-
13 “Because I do not agree with the moralizing manifesto of the novelist when it says, „It does
not matter whomever one loves, it does not matter when, it does not matter how. The whole world agrees
on this point.‟”
14 “„It does not matter whom.‟ Really? This morality of the „everything goes‟ is the negation of
love and particularly of „mad love.‟”
15 “A mad love, howling, scandalous, love-scream.”
44
Algerian underground movement. In other words, love was a terrain of contention in the early
readings of Hiroshima mon amour. It also closely articulated with a discourse of technology. In
the rhetorical situation at the turn of the Sixties the discussion on love provided an arena for
clashing needs to reformulate a viable identity for the French Left that could address both the
crisis of Stalinism and the rise of modernization.
“Mad Love” and the Political Legacy of Surrealism (I): The
“National Communism” of Sadoul and Aragon
In order to fully understand the political implications of these readings it is first important
to elucidate what was at stake in their respective references to Surrealist amour fou. As my study
is not a history of ideas, my aim is not simply to read the positions of these authors in terms of a
communal cultural root. Rather, I intend to show how sharing the communal language of the
historical avant-garde enabled them to develop contrasting positions that addressed the rhetorical
situation in different ways. Their readings can respond to each other because they share a view
of Surrealism as a movement engaged in finding new ways for political action, even if they have
extremely different ideas of what the ultimate meaning of this action should be. In the conflicted
Surrealist legacy, they follow the transformations of two contrasting lines. One of them refers to
the founding of the movement, André Breton. The other has his leader in the former Surrealist
Aragon, who had become an orthodox Communist.
In political terms, the difference is between a Stalinism in crisis and a rising, internally
contradictory Left. The latter could found a precarious thread of unity in Surrealism‟s strong
stance against colonization and in its interest in the political aspects of private life. For these
reasons, in this section I will not attempt to confine myself to a limiting literary definition of a
changing and multifaceted conception like “mad love.” Its progressive elaboration was too
closely entangled with the actual biographical events and political involvements of its creators to
be fully captured in a few words. Moreover, even its broader lines had taken shape in the two
decades between the wars. At the turn of the Sixties they were articulating with different issues,
45
such as the greater role of the media and leisure time. Therefore, this section and the next trace
the points of tension within the political sphere that made “mad love” and its contrasted history
into resources for gesturing toward different conceptions of political commitment. Only these
broader relations can illuminate the rhetorical situation that Hiroshima mon amour and its critics
were addressing.
The first necessary remark is that this political understanding of Surrealism was far from
dominant at the turn of the Sixties. Musty conceptions of pre-war Surrealism had become
diffused and commonsensical in post-war France, while their power of rupture in the social and
political sphere had often been lost. “Mad love,” in particular, had been stripped of its links with
Marxist revolution and social experimentations of new forms of life. It had been transformed into
a religious, family-oriented, and patriotic feeling. In other words, it was now everything that prewar Surrealists strove to destroy with the uncontainable excess of true mutual passion.16
Needless to say, the media played a crucial role in this process of incorporation and
neutralization of Surrealist scandal. In the late Fifties, the Situationists were the first to grasp the
conservative collusion between the media and emptied Surrealist values. Eventually this insight
developed into the “mass Surrealism” that the Italian Marxist intellectual Franco Fortini (2003,
p. 339) condemned in the Eighties. According to Fortini, the irrational connection between news,
entertainment, and advertising in television deflected the audience‟s ability to critically grasp
political meanings. In other words, Surrealism had apparently triumphed. But its basic tenets of
16 Duras‟ partner Dionys Mascolo (1953, p. 234) develops this theme in his book on
Communism: “Cette jeune bourgeoisie „intelligente‟ et sensible, veut bien faire preuve d‟assez
d‟indulgence à l‟égard du surréalisme, depuis un peu de temps, pour le trouver en fin de compte tout à fait
compatible avec l‟Eglise et la Famille, toutes les traditions, le Travail, la Patrie et l‟Armée. […] Elle le
gifle de compliments: comme celui de n‟avoir pu se résoudre finalement à travailler à la transformation
du monde. Elle le traîne dans la boue de ce qu‟elle a en commun avec lui : le surréalisme c‟est l‟amour
fou, et si tu me parles d‟amour, je te tiens le dieu d‟amour en réserve (au besoin rajeuni ou „renouvelé‟ par
toi).” [This “intelligent” and sensitive young bourgeoisie has been treating Surrealism with a certain
indulgence, lately, just to find it all the more compatible with the Church and the Family, all traditions,
Work, the Fatherland and the Army. They slap it with compliments: It could never put itself seriously at
transforming the world. They drag it into the mud of what they have in common with it: Surrealism is
mad love, and if you speak of love, I keep the god of love as last resort (if needed just rejuvenated or
“renewed” by you).]
46
transforming the world (according to Marx) and changing society (according to Rimbaud) had
been abandoned.
The story that the early criticism of Hiroshima mon amour tells is a different one. But it
is partly a conscious reaction against this neutralizing trend. It is not bent to an uncritical
exaltation of the glorious cultural past of the avant-garde, and it is motivated with concerns with
the present. The aspect that it wants to recuperate from Surrealism is the most forgotten, i.e. the
political. In the narrow window that committed Leftist intellectuals carved at the turn of the
Sixties, Surrealism could still function as a rhetorical force. It could help shaping committed
movements in favor of decolonization, or against Stalinist bureaucratization and Gaullist
technocracy. Even in the Stalinist camp, it provided resources in reconfiguring a jeopardized
party identity and starting wider conversations across the Left. The way in which Sadoul,
Resnais, and Firk interpret the Surrealist legacy from their different subject positions illuminates
the rhetorical charge of “mad love” not only per se, but also as a tool to inflect the direction and
the choices of the French Left as a whole.
The three authors belong to different generations, with different relations with
Surrealism. Georges Sadoul, in particular, had been an active member of the movement in his
youth. Aragon had introduced him to the group in the mid-Twenties. He had also close ties with
Luis Buñuel, the main author of L’Âge d’or,17 and he greatly admired André Breton. In fact, he
figures as the friend of the poet in Les Vases communicants (1932), the poetic prose that with
Nadja (1927) and L’Amour fou forms Breton‟s autobiographical trilogy on “mad love.” In Les
Vases communicants, love and dreams appear as ways to counteract the reductive strictures of
Communist orthodoxy and tap into deeper emotional resources that can sustain the enthusiasm
for a Marxist revolution. However, when the book appeared, Sadoul had already left the
Surrealist movement with Aragon and few others. They had recanted their old ideas, broken with
17 Buñuel (1982, p. 133-134) recalls in his autobiography: “Pour ma part je me sentais très
proche d‟Aragon, de Georges Sadoul, de Max Ernst et de Pierre Unik.” [On my part I felt very close to
Aragon, Georges Sadoul, Max Ernst and Pierre Unik.]
47
their old friend, and confirmed their alliance to the Communist Party.18 This traumatic bond
between Aragon and Sadoul solidified their friendship that lasted for their whole life, until the
death of Sadoul in 1965.
Several Surrealists, including Breton, had joined the PCF in the late Twenties, but they
still intended to remain faithful to their program of exploring areas of the human unconscious
and behavior that exceeded the strict economic focus of pre-war Communism. Hence, their
relation with the Party had often been tense, until the sharp break at the end of the Thirties in
reaction to the Moscow trials and the growing nationalism against Germany that had followed
the Laval-Stalin Pact. Aragon and Sadoul‟s allegiance, instead, entailed a place in the party
mechanism, under its strict bureaucratic control on aesthetic politics. The latter concretized in
Socialist Realism as the optimist platform in which writers as “engineers of human souls”
(Stalin) could contribute to the creation of the new men and women of triumphant Communism.
Or, as Breton would say, they had to sacrifice the freedom of art to explore the mystery of the
unconscious and to envision new forms of social life to the paralyzing dictates of propaganda.
“Mad love” was one of the first victims of this Stalinist turn. According to Breton, L’Âge
d’Or enacted an exemplary love. “L‟amour, en tout ce qu‟il peut avoir pour deux êtres
d‟absolument limité à eux, d‟isolant du reste du monde, ne s‟est jamais manifesté d‟une manière
aussi libre, avec tant de tranquille audace” (1992, p. 746).19 However, Breton indignantly
complains in L’Amour fou (1937) that Buñuel had agreed to the requests of the PCF and had
18 Louis Aragon (1935, p. 53-54) wrote: “ Et cela m‟a coûté, à deux ou trois près, de rompre avec
tous mes amis qui tenaient davantage aux nuages et que ne comprenaient pas que je voulusse marcher les
pieds sur le sol. […] J‟ai donc rompu avec ces écrivains, ces artistes qui me tenaient pour l‟un des leurs,
et qui représentent l‟extrême pointe de la pensée humaine au temps de l‟impérialisme, avec ses grandeurs
et ses faiblesses, et qui se sont appelés les surréalistes.” [And it has cost me, apart from two or three
exceptions, to break with all my friends who loved the clouds better and did not understand how I wanted
to walk with my feet on the ground. […] Therefore I broke with these writers, these artists who
considered me one of them, and who represent the vanguard of human thought at the time of imperialism,
with its grandeurs and weaknesses, and who called themselves the surrealists.]
19 “Love, with everything that can exist between two beings that is absolutely limited to them,
which isolates them from the rest of the world, never manifested itself in so free a way, with such tranquil
audacity.”
48
shown to an audience of factory workers an expunged version of the film under the title “Dans
les eaux glacées du calcul égoïste.” [“In the frozen waters of egoistic calculation.”] The original
title alluded to the luminous example of a love that could become inspiration for future—and
better—ages. By contrast, the new title treated it as mere selfish display, detrimental to the cause
of the proletariat. These divergences increased as Sadoul and Aragon—as former Surrealists—
were often asked to rebuke Breton‟s criticism in the Party‟s press. In order to understand what
“mad love” could mean at the turn of the Sixties, therefore, it is important to follow the
progressive bifurcation of these two lines that provided a lasting reference for French
intellectuals.
The war saw Breton and other Surrealists as refugees in New York. Sadoul, instead,
helped Aragon to organize the intellectual Resistance in the South of France. They embraced the
conception of “National Communism” of the French Communist leader Maurice Thorez. And
they mobilized the resources of proletarian patriotism to create a wide underground alliance.
Aragon sang the internal Resistance in lyrical love poems to his wife, Elsa Triolet, and to France.
His poems presented the tradition of courtly love and the roman de geste [gest] as the immortal
source of the prestige of the French Nation (in opposition to the German conception of race).20
The strength of French medieval culture was that it combined the heroic themes of the North
with the refined sentiments of the South. Its influence irradiated in most European cultures. Even
Shakespeare‟s immortal lovers, Romeo and Juliet, must separate at the song of the lark, herald of
the morn, which is rare in England and shows the French derivation of this imaginary of love.
Breton and Benjamin Péret criticized the nationalism of Aragon‟s patriotic lyrics, which
contrasted with the basic values of Surrealism. On the contrary, the poet‟s former lover, the
20 Aragon (1967, p. 81-82) writes in “A Brocelandie”: “J‟expliquai à Politzer le fond de ma
pensée, et le plan que je me proposais de développer: aux mythes de la race opposer les images de la
Nation, reprenant ainsi dans un autre domaine la leçon donnée par Maurice Thorez à une des assises de
notre parti, à Montreuil.” [I explained to [Georges] Politzer the bottom of my thought, and the plan that I
intended to develop: To oppose to the myths of race the images of the Nation, applying to another field
the lesson that Maurice Thorez had given us at one of the meetings of our party, at Montreuil.]
49
British heiress Nancy Cunard, valiantly defended them in English speaking countries, recalling
how Aragon saw France as the cradle of internationalist thought. His war-time nationalism and
his convinced internationalism coincided.
In the same spirit, Aragon also played a major role in the foundation of Les Lettres
Françaises. The journal was born as an illegal underground paper. It united anti-fascist
intellectuals of different convictions, but with a strong Communist presence. During the war the
Communist Party had been the major force of the internal Resistance. Its active involvement
often contrasted with the Gaullist strategy of waiting for the attack from the allied forces. Duras
and several of her friends had joined the fight in its ranks. Others joined at Liberation for the
glorious image of the Party of the “fusilés,” i.e. the martyrs shot for the freedom of France and of
the proletariat. Les Lettres Françaises partook fully in this aura of martyrdom, with the image of
its founding editor, Jacques Decour. After the war, the PCF had become the major party of
France, despite its failure to bring about a real Marxist revolution on a European scale as Duras
had wished.21 Les Lettres Françaises took the lead in the purge of collaborationist writers and
emerged as an important voice in post-war French culture.
The beginning of the Cold War saw Les Lettres Françaises also financially dependent on
the PCF (Daix 2004, p. 204). Aragon and Sadoul had to repudiate even more strongly their own
Surrealist past and accept the dictates of Zhdanovism (Daix 1994, p. 437). The Soviet bureaucrat
Andreï Zhdanov formulated this doctrine in 1947 as the cultural policy that adapted Socialist
Realism to the division of the world into two opposite blocks. Culture had to consciously become
an ideological weapon against American capitalism, particularly in its McCarthyist excesses.
Writers were now seen merely as propaganda officials under bureaucratic control.22
21 Laura Adler (1998, p. 231) describes Duras‟ frame of mind after the war: “Marguerite assiste,
impuissante et rageuse, à la confiscation de la Libération. […]. La Révolution n‟aura pas lieu. La vie
politique a repris selon les règles d‟antan.” [Marguerite witnesses, in an impotent fury, the confiscation of
Liberation. […]. The Revolution will not take place. Political life has resumed according to its old rules.]
22 Elio Vittorini (1957, p. 356) comments: “Era davvero riuscita l‟operazione Zdanov in Russia?
Stava davvero riuscendo l‟operazione McCarthy in America? Questa è stata l‟oscurità degli anni intorno
al ‟52. Insomma che davvero l‟uomo fosse destinato a diventare il mostruoso “funzionario” integrale
50
Independence of thought was sacrificed to strict obedience to the Party line. Accordingly, Les
Lettres Françaises mobilized in support of Lysenko‟s biology and of the educational character of
the Gulag. The Stalin Prize was the highest literary distinction. In practical terms, though,
sophisticated Parisian writers adapted with difficulties to the obscurantist cultural rules that
Zhdanov had developed for a still largely underdeveloped country.23 The directions on which
they could achieve some unity of intent were proletarian nationalism, opposition to massive
American cultural invasion, and the defense of decency (such as in the labeling of American
novelist Henry Miller as a pornographic writer).
Following the lead of their friend, the Italian Communist writer Elio Vittorini, Duras and
her friends were particularly vocal in rejecting Zhdanovist control. They considered it as an
attempt to dampen the spirit of democratization that had been born from the grass-roots
experience of the Resistance. They claimed a “Protestant” outlook against the Party‟s cathedral.
Writers for them should be let free to explore the uncharted territories where the seeds of future
revolutions lie, even when they appear contrary to short-term political strategies. In different
terms, their claim resembled Breton‟s attempt to oppose the bureaucratization of the Party‟s
cultural politics in the Thirties. The failure of their protest at the end of the Forties marked the
beginning of their estrangement from the PCF, which eventually lead to their exclusion. Their
opposition to Zhdanovism matched their interest in the rhythmical quality and in the sense of
deeper complexity that characterized the best American writers in their approach to reality. The
prefigurato dal romanticismo di Hegel.” [Had the Zhdanov operation really succeeded in Russia? Was the
McCarthy operation really succeeding in America? This has been the darkness of the years around ‟52. In
a word, that man was really destined to become the monstrous integral “bureaucrat” that Hegel‟s
romanticism had foreseen.]
23 Guy Debord (2006, p. 315) writes in his 1957‟s essay “Rapport sur la construction des
situations et sur les conditions de l‟organisation et de l‟action de la tendance situationniste
internationale” : “Jdanov—avec le goût caractéristique du parvenu—se reconnaît dans le petit-bourgeois
qui est contre la décomposition des valeurs culturelles du siècle dernier; et ne voit rien d‟autre à tenter
qu‟une restauration autoritaire de ces valeurs.” [Zhdanov—with the characteristic taste of the parvenu—
recognizes himself in the petty bourgeois that is against the decomposition of last century‟s cultural
values; and he can conceive nothing more than attempting an authoritarian restoration of these values.]
51
works of William Faulkner, for example, were hardly reducible to the “good versus bad” or
“innocent versus guilty” contrast that Stalinist Manichaeism entailed. Sadoul‟s general lack of
appreciation for Duras‟ style and his lack of references to the American influences on it (which,
for example, the Cahiers remarked in their critique of Hiroshima mon amour) does perhaps
partly stem also from her dissident past against Stalinist aesthetic politics.
Aragon‟s responsibility as “porte-parole en France de la théorie du „réalisme socialiste‟”
(Nadeau 1963, p. 56).24 and his wartime role as the poet of “National Communism” merged in
the six volumes of his historical novel Les Communistes that appeared in original version
between 1949 and 1952. This long novel tells the beginning of the organization of the internal
Resistance, starting from the legal repression against Party members that followed the
Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact (and brushing over the actual attempts of collaboration between
French Communist leaders and Fascist authorities). In other words, the book covers a period in
French history when Communists were considered traitors who received orders directly from
Moscow. In the heated period of the Cold War, this accusation resurfaced. “National
Communism” could then play a crucial role in defending the Party‟s attachment to France, while
opposing the Atlantic alliance and projects of a united Europe as detrimental forms of
internationalism.
Aragon (1998, p. viii) stated that the title of his novel should be read in the feminine, as
The Communist Women. Women and love have, in fact, a central role. Women organized the
Communist Resistance while men where at the warfront or in prison. As for love, it becomes the
ennobling force that leads to chosing the side of the suffering proletariat in the struggle. Cécile, a
privileged woman married to a Fascist industrialist, understands the reality of class relation and
oppression through the eyes of her lover, the poor student Jean. Even in his absence, her “mad
love” for Jean makes her care for a wounded soldier and for the children of an incarcerated
Communist, Jean‟s nieces. In the same way, his love for Cécile helps Jean to overcome the
24 “Spokesman in France for the theory of „Socialist Realism‟.”
52
temptation of a Fascist “amitié des hommes,” i.e. a “friendship of men” based on complicity,
team-spirit, and sport. For these “friends,” in fact, love is just a myth of the past that could still
have some political relevance in small towns like Juliet‟s Verona, but that is unable to grasp
modern problems on a world-wide scale. Such “friendship” has its enemy in Communism and its
aim in the abolition of Trade Unions (p. 373-374). In contrast, Aragon‟s love is the grass-roots
energy that allows couples to fight for their own individual happiness that is endangered by
unjust political circumstances. Gradually they realize that their own happiness coincides with the
lot of other couples who are in a similar predicament. They finally understand that only the fight
for the great and persecuted Communist family can fulfill their fundamental need.
The Marxist Humanist intellectual Roger Garaudy traced the roots of this conception of
love in Aragon‟s Surrealist past. His 1961 book Aragon, in fact, is the first study of the poet that
did not divide his life and work into two distinct and incompatible periods. In Garaudy‟s words,
“rien ne nous autorise à rompre la continuité du cheminement d‟Aragon” (1961, p. 8).25
However, the thrust of Garaudy‟s book is to show how Aragon‟s deep understanding of
Surrealism had turned into a resource that had enabled him to craft a rich and resilient
Communist aesthetics. From this point of view, Garaudy argues that Aragon‟s love had always
been closer to reality than the mystical tones of Breton‟s amour fou, easing the transition toward
Marxist materialism. Similarly, in Les Communistes Aragon transforms Surrealist “mad love”
into a mythical passion able to galvanize Thorez‟s conception of “National Communist” as it
resonates with the shared cultural unconscious of France. In Aragon‟s national epopee, in fact,
“dans le cœur d‟un homme une même vibration émeut sa vie sentimentale la plus intime et la
conscience de sa responsabilité devant son peuple et devant l‟avenir de l‟homme” (Garaudy
1961, p. 433).26
25 “Nothing authorizes us to break the continuity of Aragon‟s path.”
26 “In the heart of a man the same vibration moves the innermost of his sentimental life and the
conscience of his responsibility before his people and the future of mankind.”
53
Aragon‟s love brings all the worthy elements in the nation—particularly women— to rise
together against the invader and to accept the guidance of Communism. In other words, the
needs of war rescue women from their passive cast as “objects” of love and make them into
active subjects in organizing the underground. However, Aragon‟s ennobling love is far from
Derrida‟s politics of aimance. In fact, it molds the women‟s contribution into the nationalistic
terms of a territorial defense of France against a foreign invader. It also concretely expresses the
“familial” inspiration of the myth of Communist brotherhood, under the image of the beloved
father Stalin who should be trusted even after the German-Russian Pact. Moreover, it sublimates
the internationalist solidarity of the proletariat beyond enemy lines—that Trotskyists and Breton
supported—in terms of the myth of France as the cradle of internationalist thought.
His friend‟s ennobling model of love doubtlessly influenced Sadoul‟s negative judgment
of Duras‟ “mad love” between Elle and the German soldier in Hiroshima mon amour. In fact,
love does not bring Elle to choose the right side of History. She does not embrace the proletarian
cause and does not fight with her own people against the invaders. On the contrary, love isolates
her from the world and does not make her aware of the consequences of her actions. She has
loved an enemy soldier. Her punishment has been excessive for her fault. But her choice cannot
be justified from a “National Communism” point of view. Sadoul‟s later criticism of the film for
Les Lettres Françaises insists on this point. The link with Aragon‟s thought on love appears even
more clearly as Sadoul brings the theme of the Resistance to the fore.
However, I argue that it would be mistaken to read Sadoul‟s interventions on Hiroshima
mon amour in purely Zhdanovist terms. Zhdanovism and “National Communism” did not
completely overlap. Zhdanovism preferred proletariat topics rather than Resistance struggles that
could be suspected of Titoism. Thorez‟ “National Communism” dated from the end of the
Thirties, well before the Zhdanovist turn, and it had not completely reconciled itself with the new
course. Most importantly, at the turn of the Sixties Stalinist cultural hegemony was moving away
from a Zhdanovist confrontational approach toward a more accepting Marxist Humanism.
54
“National Communism”—which was still alive in the early Sixties27— had to articulate with this
trend in order to survive. Therefore, I argue that the rhetorical situation that Sadoul‟s intervention
on Hiroshima mon amour attempts to negotiate is precisely the crisis of Zhdanovism and of its
Manichaeistic certainties in cultural policy.
In fact, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 had led to a sort of chaotic interregnum in
Stalinist aesthetics that eventually brought to the consolidation of Marxist Humanism in the mid
Sixties. The Stalinist intellectuals of Les Lettres Françaises were now freely and eagerly
embracing avant-garde movements such as the Nouveau Roman and opening to wider
conversations with the cultural Left. Sadoul‟s Surrealist past and his multifaceted activities in the
highly mobile field of cinema history and criticism positioned him at the forefront of this turn.
Sadoul was still the most recognizable film critic of the French Left after the death of André
Bazin in 1958. Since the early years of the post-war he had participated in movements that united
members of different political affiliations, such as academic filmology and the ciné-clubs
associations for popular education.
Sadoul also contributed to different cinema journals, including the Cahiers and Positif.
His extensive international contacts enabled him to write for the Cahiers on Asian and Eastern
European cinema while the younger critics were still concentrating almost exclusively on
Western productions. Among his scoops was an interview with Teshigahara Hiroshi, the author
of The Woman in the Dunes (1964), a film that refers to Hiroshima mon amour and shares a
similar background of Surrealism and Existential discourse of technology. The Japanese director
discusses his own Surrealist past and his admiration for Resnais as a director who always looked
for new problems and new cinematographic possibilities (Sadoul 1965, p. 34-47). Moreover,
Sadoul‟s knowledge of the Russian avant-garde provided an invaluable assistance to Jean Rouch
in his theorization of cinéma-vérité, thus heralding the new theoretical turn of the Cahiers in the
27 Pierre Daix (1994, p. 490) argues: “En 1960, la page du „communisme national‟ n‟était pas
encore tournée.” [In 1960, the page of “National Communism” had not yet been turned.]
55
Sixties.28 Sadoul wrote less for Positif, but he protected since the beginning its Leftist hot-heads.
To several of them (including Michèle Firk) he offered the possibility to write for Les Lettres
Françaises. Positif had eventually embraced a form of Surrealism that had as its motto Breton‟s
“amour fou.” Ado Kyrou and Robert Benayoun had heralded this change of direction in a journal
that in its early Lyonnais period recognized Sadoul and Aragon as its major cultural
influences.29
At the turn of the Sixties, several voices of the Left—including Positif and Esprit—
criticized Sadoul for siding with the Nouvelle Vague, despite its characters of vague anarchism
and its praise of art for art‟s sake. However, they agreed with his warm support of Resnais and
his friends—like Chris Marker and Agnès Varda—who were developing a new conception of
engaged cinema from their experiences in the documentary. In both cases, Sadoul foresaw the
possible birth of a French cinematic tradition that could perhaps match the importance of Italian
Neorealism in the early post-war years. Sadoul (1959b, p. 6) labeled this trend NeoRomanticism. In fact, “une certaine fureur de vivre, le goût d‟un certain scandale, un certain
sourire et un certain dandysme rattachent la poésie 1830 et le cinéma 1960.”30 However, a
distinction was necessary. “Les spectres qui hantent désormais l‟Europe ont peu de rapport avec
28 Jean Rouch prefaced Sadoul‟s (1971) book on Dziga Vertov. Rouch adopted the term cinéma-
vérité as a direct translation of Vertov‟s Kino-Pravda which he had found in Sadoul‟s early account of the
Russian director‟s technique. A rich collaboration between Sadoul and Rouch ensued.
29 André Desvallées (Chardère 2000, p. 227) describes this early period of Positif: “Je me
souviens que, sans être complètement militants, nous prétendions nous situer plus près d‟Eluard et
d‟Aragon que de Breton ou de Tzara, et que, même si nous étions agacés par ce qui nous paraissait chez
Sadoul comme du stalinisme, nous partagions l‟essentiel de ses vues en matière de cinéma.” [I remember
that, without being completely militant, we intended to situate ourselves closer to Eluard and Aragon than
to Breton or Tzara, and that, even if we were bothered by what appeared to us as Sadoul‟s Stalinism, we
essentially shared his views in matter of cinema.]
30 “A certain passion for living, the taste for a certain scandal, a certain smile and a certain
dandyism connect the poetry of 1830 with the cinema of 1960.”
56
les „nonnes sanglantes‟ et le style troubadour s‟accommode mal du nylon, des plastiques ou des
produits atomiques” (p. 6).31
American film studies remembers Georges Sadoul almost exclusively for his Zhdanovist
polemics of the early Fifties. Dudley Andrew (1978, p.138-144), for example, describes the
“mindless dogmatism” with which Sadoul countered Bazin‟s criticism of the cult of personality
in Soviet cinema in 1950. As the film spokesman of the PCF, in fact, Sadoul had to resort to
loaded Cold War rhetoric in his response from the pages of Les Lettres Françaises. Andrew
immediately corrects the picture recalling that Sadoul‟s friendship with Bazin and their mutual
admiration were deeper than their rivalry. He also reminds us that Sadoul wrote a touching
obituary at the time of Bazin‟s death, where he retrospectively conceded most of his friend‟s
arguments against Stalin. However, other accounts do not share Andrew‟s fairness. In a certain
sense, a limited conception of Sadoul‟s personality as a critic is a convenient excuse for certain
trends in the academic study of film. In fact, it justifies film studies‟ claims to constitute itself as
a discipline that rejects the temptation of Communist single-minded interest in ideology, as well
as the lure of “content-based” reading methods in general. We might wonder, however, if this
studied superficiality does not end up throwing away the baby with the bath water. It somehow
risks jeopardizing film studies‟ chances to develop more refined reading methods that could
enable it to deal with complex rhetorical situations and charged cultural and political traditions.
A rhetorical reading, instead, cannot but challenge this impoverished view. It asks us to
consider carefully the ethos that the critic brought to his writings, which in the case of Sadoul is
particularly rich. And it asks us to trace the productive tensions that the rhetorical situation
unveiled. When Sadoul wrote his essays on Hiroshima mon amour, Les Lettres Françaises was
in crisis. The Soviet crushing of the Hungarian revolution in 1956 had been a clear proof of
failed de-Stalinization. Sadoul and Aragon had reaffirmed their allegiance to the Party, but other
31 “The specters that henceforth haunt Europe have little relation with the „bloody nuns‟ and the
troubadour style does not go well with nylon, plastics, and atomic products.”
57
writers who had come from the Resistance to Les Lettres Françaises had left it (among them,
Duras‟ friend Claude Roy). The heroic propaganda of Socialist Realism was under attack as an
art that could not fully account for the role of individuals, with their irrepressible weakness,
desires, and feelings. It is impossible to correctly evaluate Sadoul‟s reading of “mad love” in
Hiroshima mon amour if we do not consider the massive displacement of cultural values that
made it possible. At the bottom of these changes there was the thought that André Breton might
have been right in the Thirties, when he argued for an art free to explore dangerous areas outside
of the reach of direct propaganda. Only this unremitting search could mobilize the deeper mental
resources that revolutionary thought needed to maintain itself in the long run.
“Mad Love” and the Political Legacy of Surrealism (II): Breton‟s
Love as an Individualizing Force
Aragon and Sadoul were friends for forty years. Breton disappeared from their lives in
1932, remaining only as a rival to be refuted. The reconciliation they wished for never came.
Breton had spent the war years in New York, while Aragon and Sadoul were active in the
internal Resistance. He had been silent in political matters until the Mid-Fifties, while they were
engaged in Party organs and ventures such as popular education and the antinuclear Peace
Movement. Marginal groups like the Situationists looked up to pre-war Surrealism for its ability
to raise the question of private life. But they spurned its excessive focus on the unconscious and
its inability to deal with the implications of modern technology. Existentialists were no kinder.
Simone de Beauvoir (1949, p. 364), for instance, criticizes the passive role of women in Breton‟s
amour fou in her book The Second Sex. “Elle est la poésie en soi, dans l‟immédiat, c‟est-à-dire
pour l‟homme; on ne nous dit pas si elle l‟est aussi pour soi. Breton ne parle pas de la femme en
tant qu‟elle est sujet.”32 In other words, Breton‟s women reveal the secrets of the world to men,
32 “She is poetry in herself, in the immediate, i.e. for man; we are never told if she is so also for
herself. Breton never speaks of woman as a subject.”
58
but they are not able to really grasp them or to convert them into action. Therefore, they can
never become fully conscious existential subjects.
However, in the Mid-Fifties, Breton had found a new audience eager to listen to him, i.e.
intellectuals who had been members of the Communist Party but had left it or had been excluded
like Duras and her friends. They had felt the influence of Sartrean engagement, but they were
disappointed by Sartre‟s blind allegiance to the Communist Party. They looked for inspiration in
the Hegelian concept of alienation and in the existential discourse of technology. Breton was for
them a model of coherence. He had joined the Party in the late Twenties, but had always been
critical of its excessive bureaucratic control and of its suffocating conception of art. The reedition in 1955 of Les Vases Communicants reminded a new generation of how Breton‟s amour
fou had been inextricably connected with this fight. At the end of the Thirties, Breton had broken
completely with the PCF after the Moscow trials and the Laval-Stalin Pact that had allowed
France to reaffirm its colonial grasp over Algeria. Moreover, he had opposed Thorez‟
Communist Nationalism for its anti-German tendencies. In the same period, L’Amour fou
reflected Breton‟s antinationalist thrust in its invocation of Freud. “Freud pour qui l‟amour
sexuel, tel même qu‟il est déjà donné, rompt les liens collectifs créés par la race, s’élève audessus des différences nationales et des hiérarchies sociales, et, ce faisant contribue dans une
grande mesure au progrès de la culture” (Breton 1992, p. 745).33
Therefore, in the mid Fifties a group of younger ex-Communists joined forces with
Breton to initiate a profound revision of the idea of the Left. Dionys Mascolo—Duras‟ partner—
signaled the first opening in his 1953‟s book Le Communisme. Surrealism had failed to bring
about a Marxist revolution and its power of scandal had faded. But the praise due to Breton was
unequivocal. “Complétant Marx sur un point très précis, et d‟une inappréciable importance, il a
le premier déduit la nécessité du communisme des nécessités de la libre expression, de
33 “Freud for whom sexual love, even how it is already given, breaks the collective ties created
by race, raises beyond national differences and social hierarchies, and, by doing so contributes in great
measure to the progress of culture.”
59
l‟imagination, du besoin de communication générale” (Mascolo 1953, p. 233-234).34 In other
words, this new generation saw the old Surrealist leader Breton as the herald of a
democratization of Communism that they had experienced in their underground activities.
Despite his failure, he had been able to hold fast to his ideals without turning into an Avida
Dollars like Salvador Dali. Breton, on his part, looked with sympathy at Mascolo‟s political
concerns: “L‟histoire, à son stade actuel, nous condamne à cette position ambivalente toute de
refus et de regret. Il faut croire qu‟elle y condamne aussi Dionys Mascolo puisque nous faisons
rigoureusement nôtres ses conclusions (le sentiment surréaliste n‟a même été jamais mieux
explicité) ” (2008, p. 864-865).35
The engine of this alliance between the “existentialists of Communism” and the new
generation of Surrealists that had gathered around Breton was the question of Algerian
independence. The Algerian war had started in 1954. It quickly became the most important
banner for an alliance of the non-Stalinist Left, together with the related issue of the right of
conscientious objection for French soldiers. By contrast, the position of the Communist Party
had been rather ambiguous since the beginning. Stalinists condemned colonial oppression, but
they voted the “special powers” that enabled the Government of the Socialist Guy Mollet to
strengthen the repression in Algeria in 1956. The PCF did not openly side for Algerian
independence for fear of alienating its nationalist base and increasing the American influence in
North Africa (Birchall 2004, p. 188). The few Party members who signed the 1960‟s Declaration
in Favor of Conscientious Objection in the Algerian War were severely reprimanded. However,
young Communists like Michèle Firk were ready to join the underground web of support to the
FLN.
34 “He [Breton] completed Marx on a very precise point, of invaluable importance. He was the
first to deduce the necessity of Communism from the necessity of free expression, of imagination, and
from the need of general communication.”
35 “History, at its current stage, condemns us to this ambivalent position which is all made of
refusal and regret. Evidently this condemnation also affects Mascolo because we make rigorously ours
his conclusions (the Surrealist feeling has never been better expressed.)”
60
Breton‟s first action with Duras‟ friend was his participation in the Comité d‟action
contre la poursuite de la guerre en Afrique du Nord.36 Duras‟ former husband Robert Antelme,
her partner Dyonis Mascolo, and her friends Edgar Morin and Louis-René des Forêts had started
the Committee in 1955. Through them Breton first joined forces with former underground
fighters of WWII. The relation between the WWII Resistance and the resistance against Algerian
oppression soon became a powerful tool in their rhetoric. The spur for this articulation was the
imprisonment of Claude Bourdet for endangering the Army‟s morale with his protest against the
Algerian War. In fact, the editor of France-Observateur had also been a hero of the underground
during the Forties (Breton 2008, p. 940). Breton‟s speech to the Committee in 1956 linked his
own commitment with Algeria with the role that the War of Rif played in the birth of an active
political consciousness in the Surrealist movement in 1925 (p. 940). In this way, he reclaimed a
lasting tradition of anti-colonialism that the former Surrealists of the PCF were no more able to
fully own. The Committee lasted only a few months. It could not overcome dissensions between
supporters of the FLN (such as Duras) and of the older rival organization of Messali Hadj (such
as Breton). However, it was the first example of a spontaneous aggregation of the French Left
outside of Communist control.
In December 1958, Breton joined other intellectuals (Albert Camus, l‟abbé Pierre, and
Jean Cocteau) in their protest in favor of conscientious objectors that the French law did not
protect. They could only emigrate or face imprisonment. On the occasion, Breton delivered a
speech that stigmatized Aragon‟s choice of unremitted faithfulness to Stalinism. He opposed an
individual conscience based on love to the empty upholding of Party honor. After the Soviet
invasion of Hungary, in fact, Aragon had recalled how Napoleon had asked one of his generals
whether he would be faithful to him to the end or listen to the civilian population that asked him
to prevent a massacre. Napoleon had scorned the general for having conscience but not honor.
Aragon‟s view of love in Les Communistes translated into faithfulness to the persecuted
36 Action Committee against the Continuation of the War in North Africa.
61
Communist Party in its fight for the freedom of the nation. However, the failed de-Stalinization
posed this conception of love before a contradiction that Aragon‟s wit could not hide. As Breton
(2008, p. 975) argues, mere faithfulness that refused any accountability justified also the Nazi
atrocities at Buchenwald and the apologists of the Moscow Trials.
By contrast, Breton commends conscientious objectors for risking everything in order to
listen to their own conscience: “La conscience, c‟est cette force individualiste, oui, par
excellence libertaire, qui, en présence de telle ou telle situation, nous introduit, pourvu que le
chemin n‟en soit pas saccagé par notre faute, au plus secret de nous-mêmes et nous impose de
nous inscrire contre ce qui constitue pour nous le scandale” (p. 975).37 The atomic escalation
and the crimes in oil-rich Algeria are monsters that feed upon patience and lack of conscience.
Conscience objectors repudiate the use of torture, the repressive methods, and the imperialist
ideology of the Algerian War as they outrage “la plus profonde dignité de la vie” (p. 975).38
According to Breton, “Le sens de cette dignité est en nous inné, nous ne pouvons le perdre qu‟en
nous dépravant. A condition de n‟avoir pas mésusé de ses composantes, qui sont la liberté et
l‟amour, c‟est là tout le diamant que nous portons en nous” (p. 975).39 Love, as a component of
conscience, is not an all-powerful panacea. It is always troubled by the possibility of being
perverted. But its impervious path is all that is left to us when faced with the unsolvable
dilemmas of our times.
In this sense, Resnais‟ comparison of the German soldier with a French private who
opposed the Algerian War was far from an “appeasing” answer to the audience of Les Lettres
37 “Conscience is this individualist force, yes, eminently libertarian, that, in the presence of this
or that situation, introduces us—as long as the path has not been ravaged due to our fault—to the
innermost secret of ourselves and imposes us to inscribe ourselves against what constitutes for us the
scandal.”
38 “The deepest dignity of life.”
39 “The sense of this dignity is inborn in us; we can lose it only if we degrade ourselves.
Provided that we do not misuse its components, which are love and liberty, here is the whole diamond
that we carry inside ourselves.”
62
Françaises. It indirectly raised the issue of conscience objection that was taboo for the
nationalist stance of the Communist Party and its ambiguous position concerning the war.
Resnais‟ allusion evokes the heterodox activities of Breton, against Aragon‟s official line. In the
next section, I examine Georges Sadoul‟s following article on Hiroshima mon amour in Les
Lettres Françaises. Also there the critic continues to ignore Resnais‟ comparison of the German
soldier with a French private in the Algerian War. But he develops the question of love to a
much greater extent. In the new essay it becomes the center of discussion as much as the horror
of nuclear war had been in the previous one.
We can perhaps read in this new importance of love an opening toward Breton‟s
conception of amour fou. Sadoul implicitly admits that the poet might have been right in the
Thirties in arguing that Communism should leave the artists free to explore the darker and more
mysterious side of human feelings, even if they do not fit into the constrictive model of official
propaganda. Still, Sadoul in Les Lettres Françaises appears to conceive this aesthetic search
mostly as a persuasive device that could make more appealing the Stalinist commitment to the
declining Peace Movement and the national view of WWII Resistance on which it was based. He
does not explore alternative ways of intending politics that might conflict with the Stalinist core
and he does not embrace Resnais‟ reference to Breton‟s activities in favor of Algerian
independence. Only later will he start to study Egyptian cinema to grasp in cultural terms the
motives of the Arabic decolonization movements that he had failed to understand at the time. His
humanistic study will then found at the root of Romeo and Juliet the pre-Islamic Bedouin love
story of Medjnoun and Leila. Also Aragon used it as a reference for his long poem Le Fou
d’Elsa (1963) that traces the Arabic roots of amour fou. But this development took place only
some time after Sadoul‟s writings on Hiroshima mon amour. At this stage—at least on the
surface—Sadoul‟s synthesis of Breton and Aragon‟s views of “mad love” still sided with the
“faithful” conception of the latter, despite its opening toward the “individualizing” version of the
first.
63
However, Breton‟s exploration of the dark sides of human personality also constituted a
symptom of the problematic aspects of Aragon‟s “faithfulness” to Stalinism that Sadoul could
not simply deny. Nothing expresses this feeling more clearly than Sadoul‟s introduction to a
selection of Aragon‟s poems, where the dilemma of their conscience appears in the open. The
critic edited them in the last year of his life for Seghers, the publisher that had printed Aragon‟s
Resistance lyrics. Sadoul‟s body was then showing the first signs of the progressive paralysis
that would kill him in 1965. This book, dedicated to his friend of forty years, in many ways is a
testament to their lives and choices. Sadoul writes:
Les années 1950 furent celles des “révisions déchirantes.” La
grandeur du Roman inachevé lui vient beaucoup d‟avoir exprimé à pleine
voix ce déchirement.
Il ne faut pas confondre douleur et désespoir. Avouer une
souffrance n‟impliquant pas ici qu‟après cela il ne restait plus qu‟à crever,
puisqu‟on avait gâché sa vie, comme si un itinéraire, individuel ou
collectif, suivait une autoroute, bien éclairé, garantie contre tous les
accidents, comme si la plus exaltante marche en avant était exemptée de
contradictions et de tragédies. Hélas, non! Gravit-on les cimes sans jamais
trébucher? (Aragon 1967, p. 50-51)40
The trust in dialectical materialism survives, but the focus now is on the avowal of
suffering, on pain, on the tragic faltering along a badly lit road. It is on the mistakes and the
crimes whose responsibility one has to bear even if he or she ignored them. It is a loud cry in the
dark. In this sense, the return of love as an individualizing force in Sadoul‟s account of
Hiroshima mon amour becomes also the return of a political repressed. Accordingly, the most
important film of the turn of the Sixties, in France and abroad,41 gave voice to this difficult
40 “The Fifties were the years of „tormenting revisions.‟ The greatness of [Aragon‟s] Roman
inachevé [1956] comes in great part from having openly expressed this torment.
We should not confuse pain and despair. It does not imply that if we avow our suffering here we
can only kick the bucket, because we have failed in our lives, as if the itinerary—individual or
collective—followed a highway, well lit, guaranteed against all accidents; as if the most exciting march
forward was exempt from contradictions and tragedies. Unfortunately not! Does one climb mountains
without faltering?”
41 Sadoul (1960b, p. 7) states: “Etant bien entendu que je place Hiroshima mon amour en dehors
et au-dessus de tout ce qui s‟est fait récemment, chez nous et ailleurs.” [It is understood that I place
Hiroshima mon amour above and beyond everything that had been done recently, at home or abroad.]
64
relation between the universal reasons of world history in materialistic terms and the suffering of
the individuals confronted by it. Louis Althusser criticized the Marxist Humanist turn of the
Sixties as a mere façade of the failed de-Stalinization of the Communist Party. He accused its
most vocal supporter, the young bureaucrat Roger Garaudy, of promoting a politics of collusion
with the Gaullist government in the framework of the new Soviet strategy of coexistence (Mark
Poster 1975, p. 340-341). However, Sadoul‟s “testament” shows the other side of this humanistic
turn in the old guard of Party intellectuals. It was a way to deal with the traumatic truth about
Stalinism and to save some hope at the individual level—or at the level of close friendships—
from the ruins of a once unquestionable faith. There are perhaps rare occasions when the whole
life of a critic is staked in his judgment of a film. This introduction aimed to show that this is
perhaps one of them.
Georges Sadoul‟s “The Universe and the Dew”
At the end of the Fifties, Hiroshima mon amour provided Sadoul with the occasion to
reevaluate his own Surrealist past as a tool that could help him to find new ways of dealing with
his Stalinist present. The broad crisis of Stalinism had given birth to attempts at democratization
in Eastern Europe that had unleashed Soviet repression. These movements faced Western
Communist intellectuals with tragic choices. After the Hungarian invasion, Sadoul had
reaffirmed his allegiance to the Party, but not without internal struggles. Art was the litmus paper
of these changes that translated into a general loss of authority of Zhdanovist categories in the
aesthetic domain. Behind the Iron Curtain new experiences were multiplying. They explored
areas that went beyond the propagandistic thrust of Socialist Realism or revitalized alternative
traditions of it such as populist Gorkian forms. Polish cinema was at the forefront of this
movement that aimed to maintain a commitment to social issues, but also to explore them from
indirect and problematic angles. Also Les Lettres Françaises was renouncing Zhdanovism and
was looking back to the French Romantics. They revived Victor Hugo‟s chant to France‟s
exemplarity as the cradle of universal and revolutionary values and Stendhal‟s love stories that
65
stand out from a fresco of the tensions of the Napoleonic years. Forward, they embraced the
indirect representation of their own troubled times in the Nouveau Roman.
One of the consequences of this wide displacement of Stalinist aesthetics is that love and
its dark, painful sides resurfaced. The militant mentality of Stalinism postponed the solution of
the problems of love to a far-away future when all economic disparities would be overcome,
States and politics would disappear, and Communism would finally be realized on a world-scale.
Then love would automatically become an integrated part of the new well-developed and polyfunctional human personalities of Marxist utopia. Until the birth of this new society, Marxist
teleology demanded the subordination of love to the struggles against Fascism and capitalism to
hasten the inevitable course of History. By contrast, the importance that Sadoul assigns to love in
his second reading of Hiroshima mon amour performs an interruption in the smooth progression
of this teleological mentality. In this sense, it joins the broader European movement that
addressed through art the crisis of Stalinist categories.
Sadoul (1979, p. 175-188) published his second essay on Hiroshima mon amour in Les
Lettres françaises in the no. 778 of June 1959. It is his first essay completely devoted to Resnais‟
film and develops most of the themes that the critic had sketched in his review of Cannes one
month earlier. The horrors of atomic destruction that had monopolized the critic‟s attention at
Cannes become relatively less important in judging the film‟s lasting hold over the audience.
Instead, the theme of love as an individualizing force emerges. The title of the essay, “L‟Univers
et la rosée,”42 recalls decades of discussions among supporters of Socialist Realism on the role
of individual feelings in the face of the global movement of the rising Communist humanity. The
topos of the universe reflected in a dewdrop recalls the Stoic conception of the microcosm and
the macrocosm, according to which human beings could find in themselves correspondences to
the rules of nature and could attain virtue in conforming to them. In terms of Communist
42 “The Universe and the Dew.”
66
aesthetics the relation between the two terms dominates Karl Radek‟s intervention at the Soviet
Writers‟ Congress of 1934:
Even when the artist depicts the great in the small, when he wants
to show the world in a drop of water, in the destinies of one small man, he
cannot accomplish his task without having in his brain an image of the
movement of the entire world. While the literature of dying capitalism
invokes the aid of the irrational, of the unconscious and the sub-conscious,
the literature of socialist realism demands a consciousness of the fate of
humanity […]. (Scott 1977, p. 157-8)
The mentor of the German Communist Party considered James Joyce‟s attention to the
unconscious as an example of decaying and selfish capitalist art. But he also wanted to counter
the accusation that Socialist Realism was a de-personalizing art form. Radek argued that the new
social conditions of the Soviet Union witnessed daily the exciting birth of millions of new, free
and complete personalities to which art should give a clear direction in their march toward the
future. Therefore, each representation of an individual life should reflect the revolutionary aim of
the world. The Congress as a whole had raised hope for a renewal of Socialist Realism in André
Breton, especially for Bukharin‟s statement that poetry could contribute to the Revolution by
exploring deeper sides of personal imaginary. However, the purge of most of the speakers of the
Congress in the Moscow Trials of the following years did not allow this possibility to be
explored.
By the middle of the Fifties, the topos was undergoing a radical reformulation also
among official members of Soviet cinematography. Sadoul refers to this new meaning when he
inscribes Hiroshima mon amour under the sign of filmmaker Alexandr Dovzhenko, whom he
had interviewed in Moscow just before his death in 1956 (Sadoul 1960a, p. 28-44). The critic
now openly praises Resnais for his scandalous attempt to place the Universe and the dew on the
same level:
“Une goutte de rosée peut contenir tout l‟univers.” Cette phrase
de Dovjenko pourrait servir d‟exergue à Hiroshima où la rosée d‟un grand
amour met en question le destin de notre univers. L‟idée était exaltante,
magnifique, de placer sur un pied d‟égalité le dommage causé à la rosée et
à l‟univers. L‟anéantissement infernal de 200 000 Japonais et le choc subi
par une jeune fille amoureuse et “méchante.” Pour Resnais, l‟horreur est
67
comme la paix, indivisible. Il la condamne en petit comme en colossal.
(Sadoul 1979, p. 178)43
In fact, Dovzhenko‟s reference to “the universe and the dew” indicated a crisis inside the
conception of Socialist Realism. The dogmatic apology of the heroic realization of Communist
personalities had proven to be too one-dimensional. It tended to exclude deeper and multifaceted
aspects of human reality. The Ukrainian filmmaker, instead, reevaluates the tenderness of love.
He argues that suffering will always be a part of human life on Earth and is not just a “difficulty
to overcome” with bureaucratic optimism in view of a perfect world. Audiences look for themes
closer to their lives in Capitalist productions. Therefore, progressive artists can no more ignore
pain and passion if they want to reach the hearths of their contemporaries (de Vincenti 1980, p.
141). Sadoul‟s admiration of Resnais‟ fusion of the tragedy of intimate love and the tragedy of
Hiroshima stems from a similar concern with suffering as inseparable from human existence.
Zhdanovism resolved the memory of the nuclear holocaust in a positive struggle for pacifism in
Communist terms. But the irreducible singularity of suffering in Hiroshima mon amour adds a
dimension that was lost in the propagandistic tones of Cold War rhetoric.
Also Breton had offered his interpretation of the topos in his 1932‟s book Les Vases
Communicants. Sadoul appears as the author‟s friend in this account of the problematic sides of
amour fou. Breton composed it during the year that led to the splitting of the Surrealist
movement. The book directly addresses the relation with Communist aesthetics that was the
main cause of dissent. Breton recalls how the two major poets of the Soviet Revolution, Vladimir
Mayakovski and Sergey Yesenin, ended up committing suicide for their inability to conform to
the total submission of individuality that the cause of the proletariat required. In both cases,
private life had eventually prevailed:
43 “„A drop of dew can contain the whole universe.‟ This sentence by Dovzhenko could serve as
inscription on Hiroshima where the dew of a great love puts into question the destiny of our universe. The
idea was exalting, magnificent, to put on the same level the damage caused to the dew and to the universe.
The infernal annihilation of 200,000 Japanese and the shock suffered by a „bad‟ girl in love. For Resnais,
horror is like peace, indivisible. He condemns it on the little scale as on the colossal one.”
68
Il est inadmissible que dans la société nouvelle la vie privée, avec
ses chances et ses déceptions, demeure la grande distributrice comme
aussi la grande privatrice des énergies. Le seul moyen de l‟éviter est de
préparer à l‟existence subjective une revanche éclatante sur le terrain de la
connaissance, de la conscience sans faiblesse et sans honte. Toute erreur
dans l‟interprétation de l‟homme entraîne une erreur dans l‟interprétation
de l‟univers: elle est, par suite, un obstacle à sa transformation. (Breton
1992, p. 195-196)44
Breton reverses the priorities of the topos. It is not possible to understand the Universe
without first understanding the depth of the individual. The “dew” assumes the painful and
emotional form of the unconscious, “bulles troubles, déformantes qui se lèvent à toute heure du
fond marécageux de l‟inconscient de l‟individu” (p. 156).45 Breton does not accept the Stalinist
injunction that the problematic aspects of love should wait to be addressed until the birth of the
new humanity is realized. He agrees that the elimination of private property will eliminate the
reasons that force some of the most exemplary couples to separate despite their love. But he also
thinks that love will become a form of instability even for realized Communism without a full
awareness of its uncontrollable power. Therefore, Communist aesthetics should promote the
poetic forms that have traditionally explored these uncharted territories where even Freudian
psychoanalysis has just started to venture. Without a thorough study of the self, social
transformation cannot be complete. “La transformation sociale ne sera vraiment effective et
complète que le jour où l‟on en aura fini avec ces germes corrupteurs. On n‟en finira avec eux
qu‟en acceptant, pour pouvoir l‟intégrer à celle de l‟être collectif, de réhabiliter l‟étude du moi”
(p. 156).46
44“It is unacceptable that in the new society private life, with its chances and deceptions, still
remains the great distributor and the great depriver of energies. The only way to avoid it is to prepare for
subjective existence a spectacular revenge on the terrain of knowledge, of consciousness without
weakness and shame. Every mistake in the interpretation of man entails a mistake in the interpretation of
the Universe: it is, consequently, an obstacle to its transformation.”
45 “Troubled, deforming bubbles that rise at all time from the marshy depth of the individual
unconscious.”
46 “Social transformation will not be really effective and complete until the day when these
corruptive germs are fully dealt with. The only way to get rid of them is to accept to rehabilitate the study
of the self, in order to integrate it into the study of the collective being.”
69
Breton thought that a study of the self that refused oversimplification could lend an
invaluable assistance also to the first stages of the Marxist revolution. It could make propaganda
more effective by stirring deeper strata of the human mind where long-term emotional resources
are stored. Bureaucratization had dampened the enthusiasm for the Soviet Revolution. But artists
who explored the depth of the unconscious were preparing the enlarged rationality of the
revolutionary of the future, and were better moving to action the revolutionary of the present.
The two temporalities of revolution could not be separated without jeopardizing its global aim.
The transformation of the world under the banner of the proletariat cannot bring to a halt the
slower changes in everyday and private life. As Breton wrote about the suicide of Mayakovski in
his essay “ЛЮБОВНАЯ ЛОДКА РАЗБИЛАСЬ О БЬІТ,” in fact, “ La vie enthousiasmante du
prolétariat en lutte, la vie stupéfiante et brisante de l‟esprit livré aux bêtes de lui-même, de notre
part il serait par trop vain de ne vouloir faire qu‟un de ces deux drames distincts” (1992, p.
318).47
Also Aragon had been an admirer of Mayakovski. His wife Elsa was the sister of
Mayakovski‟s partner Lili Brik. But for him the poet of the Russian Revolution was mainly the
voice that had taught him how to sing the “real world” and the triumphant cause of the working
class. Despite the importance of love in Les Communistes, Aragon sublimates the internal drama
of his characters in their ability to see the wider course of History and in their final commitment
to the Party. Ideological discussions and strategic considerations outnumber by far the pages
devoted to love in the six volumes of his novel. Sadoul‟s second essay on Hiroshima mon amour,
instead, takes the risk of upsetting the balance. He follows Breton‟s line of thought when he
attributes the lasting mesmerizing power of Hiroshima mon amour to its representation of love,
even after the initial shock of the nuclear massacre had partly subsided:
47 “The enthusiastic life of the fighting proletariat, the stupefying and crushing life of the spirit
delivered to its own beasts, on our part it would be too vain to want to collapse these two distinct
tragedies into one.”
70
La première fois sa possession dura plusieurs heures, quand j‟en
fus dégagé, j‟attribuai la violence de l‟effet à l‟introduction qui décrit
l‟atomisation. A la seconde vision ce cri d‟horreur m‟assourdit moins, et je
pus aborder l‟histoire d‟amour la tête froide (si l‟on peut dire). Et pourtant
image après image, parole après parole, la possession reprit. Ce film est
sorcier. (Sadoul 1979, p. 175)48
Sadoul dwells on the love between the French woman and the Japanese man. Their
tragedy moves him. He introduces the two protagonists as waiting for the nightingale‟s song that
will separate them like a new Romeo and Juliet (p. 176). He even complains that the
philosophical monologue on forgetting at the end of the film spoils in part the passionate
description of the two lovers. “Sa dernière partie est un soliloque sur l‟oubli, parfois fort beau,
mais qui lasse dans la mesure où l‟on s‟explique mal que deux amants passionnées n‟occupent
pas leurs derniers moments aux moyens d‟éviter leur séparation plutôt qu‟à philosopher sur ses
conséquences futures” (p. 181).49 Sadoul also renews the ties with the Surrealist tradition in
which the uncontrollable force of amour fou merges the woman with the mysterious décor of
modern cities, such as Paris in Breton‟s Nadja. Elle drowns into the electric light of Hiroshima.
“Qui oubliera, par exemple, le visage de la femme ivre, noyée dans la boue d‟une lumière
trouble, quand elle descend au fond de sa confidence?” (p. 181).50 Only in this case Hiroshima is
the city of the bomb that witnessed horrible destructions. Love borders the scandal of death by
modern technology. “La parole s‟allie paradoxalement aux images: „Tu me tues, tu me fais du
48 “The first time its possession lasted several hours; when I could free myself from it, I
attributed the violence of the effect to the introduction that describes the atomization. During the second
vision this horror cry was less deafening, and I could approach the love story with a cool head (so to
speak). And yet image after image, word after word, the possession restarted. This film is bewitching.”
49 “Its last part is a soliloquy on forgetting, sometimes quite beautiful, but that becomes tiring to
the extent that it is not clear why two passionate lovers do not employ their last moments to find ways to
avoid their separation rather than to philosophize on its future consequences.”
50 “Who will forget, for instance, the image of the drunken woman, drowned into the mud of a
gloomy light, when she descends down to the bottom of her secret?”
71
bien.‟ Dit pour la première fois ce leitmotiv que commente un travelling dans les rues, prend un
sens étrange, et quasi érotique” (p. 181).51
Sadoul‟s enthusiastic support of Resnais‟ grandiose conception of the role of individual
love in Hiroshima mon amour did not find the approval of another critic who aligned himself
with a Socialist Realist view of criticism. Giorgio Aristarco was the director of Cinema nuovo.
Sadoul occasionally collaborated with this journal across the Alps that enjoyed some repute in
France for its Marxist polemics on neo-realism.52 Aristarco did not agree with Sadoul‟s support
of the young French cinema. Particularly, the Italian critic did not recognize the innovative
importance of love and suffering in Hiroshima mon amour. He accused Sadoul‟s reading of
mysticism for stressing the way in which, through Elle, “Nevers e Hiroshima diventano un‟unica
cosa, un unico mondo” (Aristarco 1960, p. 519).53 Aristarco, instead, thought that this praise of
love as a unifying force was conservative, as it hindered a dialectical understanding of love and
pacifism as historically situated phenomena. “L‟amore non è soltanto un fatto privato, che
trascende qualsiasi fenomeno storico eliminando responsabilità personali e collettive; né il
pacifismo può essere inteso così astrattamente. Anche per questo vago umanitarismo Hiroshima
non rompe con la tradizione” (p. 519).54 In other words, Sadoul‟s Neo-Romanticism was guilty
of obfuscating the scientific outlook that is the strength of Marxism.
51 “Words are paradoxically allied with images: „You kill me, you do me good.” When it is said
for the first time, this leitmotif that comments on a tracking shot into the streets takes up a strange, and
almost erotic meaning.”
52 See Alain Resnais (Liandrat-Guigues and Leutrat 2006, p. 191): “On était très branchés sur
l‟Italie à cette époque-là. Je sais que je m‟étais abonné à Cinema nuovo.... Je suivais les discussions sur le
„bozzettismo‟ et Zavattini...” [We were very driven toward Italy at that time. I know that I had subscribed
to Cinema nuovo... I was following the discussions on “bozzettismo” and Zavattini …]
53 “Nevers and Hiroshima become the same thing, the same world.”
54 “Love is not just a private affair, which transcends any historical phenomenon eliminating
personal and collective responsibilities; and pacifism cannot be conceived so abstractly. Also for this
vague humanitarianism Hiroshima does not break with tradition.”
72
However, Aristarco admits that a serious examination of the French cultural background
that underlies Hiroshima mon amour might provide deeper insights on the film. The research
should focus in particular on contributions from the formal and ideological sources of the avantgarde (p. 519). Sadoul—I showed—was particularly well positioned to perform this cultural
reading in account of his Surrealist past. He was also well aware of Breton‟s more recent
attempts to articulate a non-Stalinist Left with former party members under the influence of
Existentialist thought. Existentialism had tapped into the Pascalian heritage of French thought
and had brought to honor the themes of death, suffering, old age, weakness and individual
feelings that Communism undervalued. In this sense, Existential thought could function as a
lever against the bureaucratic strictness and the de-humanizing teleological thrust of Stalinism.
Breton in the pre-war years had conceived “mad love” in connection with Marxist revolution
against the inequalities of capitalist society. But he had also contrasted the mechanical view of
dialectical materialism that ignored individual feelings, and he had cut any relations with the
PCF when he had grasped the crimes of Stalinism. Therefore, he appeared as a predecessor and a
guide in this struggle.
In his criticism of Hiroshima mon amour Sadoul appears to accept Breton‟s criticism
concerning the Stalinist undervaluation of love and individual suffering. His reading of the love
story of Elle and Lui signals the crisis of Zhdanovist categories. However, Sadoul remains
faithful to the core of Stalinist politics and does not follow the New Left‟s stress on
decolonization. This choice is evident in the way in which he situates Hiroshima mon amour as
the culmination of Resnais‟ “best shorts,” Guernica (1950-1) and Night and Fog (1955):
Si leur forme fut parfaite, les meilleurs courts métrages de Resnais
ne furent pas des arpèges gratuits. Guernica exaltait l‟héroïque résistance
espagnole. Nuit et brouillard condamne avec violence la guerre et la
barbarie nazie. Hiroshima est la suite logique, la somme et
l‟aboutissement de ces deux films clés. (Sadoul 1979, p. 178)55
55 “If their form was perfect, Resnais‟ best shorts were not innocent arpeggios. Guernica exalted
the heroic Spanish Resistance. Night and Fog condemns with violence the war and Nazi barbarity.
Hiroshima is the logic continuation, the sum, and the culmination of these two key films.”
73
The two shorts that Sadoul chooses share a pacifist message. But they also have in
common strong relations with the internal Resistance of WWII. Guernica explores the
homonymous work by Pablo Picasso, who was a Communist Party member. The Spanish
Republic ordered the painting to commemorate the bombing of the Basque village during the
civil war. The heroic Resistance of the Spanish Republic against Franco became an inspiration
to the French internal Resistance against Fascism. Significantly, Aragon opens his novel on the
underground, Les Communistes, with the image of defeated Republican fighters attempting to
cross the French border. Communists had played a heroic role in the fight. However, André
Breton challenged this reading of history and accused Stalin of having attempted to eliminate his
anarchist and Trotskyist allies.
As for Night and Fog, Claude Lanzmann—the director of Shoah—accused Resnais of
having neglected the Jewish genocide. Resnais conceded this fault, but he also recalled how the
knowledge about the Shoah was still extremely fragmentary in 1955.56 In fact, the figure of the
political deportee was the most visible in the French public memory of the Fifties. Associations
of former Resistance fighters and Deportation survivers assisted in providing documentation for
the film and were a strong voice in the controversy that followed its exclusion from the official
selection of Cannes.57 Only the German translation of the screenplay and then the American
exploitation of the documentary at the time of the Eichmann trial led to the now widespread
reading of Night and Fog as a documentary on the Jewish genocide. In term of a Communist
56 Alain Resnais (Liandrat-Guigues and Leutrat 2006, p. 217) states: “ A l‟époque, la notion de la
Shoah n‟existait pas. […] Nous ne connaissions pas les chiffres. Six millions de Juifs sur neuf millions,
nous ne le savions pas. […] Avant cette série américaine sur l‟holocauste, les gens ne se rendaient pas
compte et sans Lanzmann la notion de Shoah n‟aurait pas été perçue de la même manière. ” [At the time
the notion of Shoah did not exist. […] We did not know the numbers. Six millions of Jews out of nine
millions, we did not know it. Before that American serial on the Holocaust, people were not aware of it
and without Lanzmann the notion of Shoah would not have been perceived in the same way.]
57 Lindeperg (2007, p. 157-158) writes: “L‟entrée en lice des associations et des grandes figures
de la Resistance et de la Déportation modifie la nature de la controverse en en déplaçant les enjeux sur le
terrain politique et mémoriel. ” [The associations and the great figures of the Resistance and of the
Deportation modified the nature of the controversy by joining the debate and displacing its stakes onto the
political and memorial ground.]
74
view of the Resistance, the camps represented the most extreme battlefield where the heroism
and the leadership of political detainees against the Nazi invaders could emerge in the most
extreme circumstances.
In the next chapter, however, I show that Michèle Firk displaced this heroic reading of
Night and Fog in her intervention on Hiroshima mon amour for Positif. In her reading, the
memory of the massacre of the Jewish people enables drawing an articulation with the massacre
of the Algerian population and colonial oppression. In this way, Firk reactivates the intention of
Alain Resnais and the former deportee Jean Cayrol who wanted to make the French audience
aware that concentration camps were not only a thing of the past. In fact, France was employing
similar oppressive and dehumanizing practices during the Algerian war in the Fifties (Lindeperg
2007, p. 161).
Moreover, Sadoul‟s choice of these two shorts as the antecedents of Hiroshima mon
amour constructs a clear binary opposition between war and peace. This binary was at the basis
of the antinuclear strategy of the Peace Movement in France. The Communist-led movement
supported progresses in the peaceful use of nuclear technology, praising the contribution of the
Communist scientist Frédéric Joliot-Curie and of French workers to its development. However, it
did not tackle the relation between the production of fissile material for the bomb and the
promotion of the peaceful use of nuclear energy (for the “real national interest”). The two aspects
were actually codependent in the technocratic development of the French nuclear program that
had chosen to produce less efficiently nuclear energy in order to better achieve stable weapongrade plutonium.58 On the contrary, Chapter Three shows that Resnais‟ reading of the film in his
58 The historian of technology Gabrielle Hecht (1998, p. 69-71) explains: “For the CEA [Atomic
Energy Commission], the key point in making weapons-grade plutonium was to obtain as much PU239 as
possible with few „poisonous‟ isotopes of plutonium as possible. […] CEA engineers calculated that, at
the optimal irradiation for producing the right balance of isotopes, any given fuel rod should not stay in
the reactor longer than 250 days. Had G2 been designed to produce electricity, this short irradiation
period would have represented an extremely inefficient use of fuel, since it involved removing the rods
before they had yielded maximum heat.”
75
later interviews alludes precisely to this issue when it blurs the clear distinction between war and
peace in the name of an Existentialist discourse of technology.
The rhetorical link between the WWII Resistance and antinuclear politics was
particularly developed in the French case. At the time of the bombing of Hiroshima the
Communist Party had rejoiced for the strike against the enemy and had forbidden its members to
denounce it.59 However, the Leftist antinuclear rhetoric of the Cold War found in the communal
memory of the underground fighters of WWII the means to overcome this first omission. Its first
germ, the Combattants de la Paix, was founded in 1948 by the editor of Action, the Communist
weekly that popularized Hegel‟s writings on alienation and that launched Duras and her
underground friends as committed writers. The association gathered former Resistance fighters
of different ideologies (like the Catholic future editor of Esprit Jean-Marie Domenach) that
shared a strong anti-Fascist commitment. The Mouvement de la Paix that continued its action
was more strictly under Stalinist control. Both Aragon and Sadoul were active in it. But also this
larger movement still defined itself through the memory of the underground and it revived it
periodically through group visits from Paris to the heroic sites of the struggles in the provinces
(Daix 1994, p. 443).
In other words, the ideology of the French anti-nuclear movement had a strong
component of “National Communism.” It presented itself as an association that could act for the
“real national interest,” as the Communist Party had done during the war. However, by the midFifties the French Peace Movement had lost momentum. At the turn of the Sixties it failed to
59 Duras‟ friend Claude Roy (1972, p. 167) describes the behavior of the poet Paul Eluard in his
novel Nous, which is the portrait of a generation: “Quand les journaux arrivèrent à Vézelay, tous, et
L’Humanité la première, applaudissaient à ce beau coup porté à l‟ennemi, à cette victoire de la science et
de la stratégie. Je ne sais ce qui se passa alors: si Paul [Eluard] s‟autocensura, et remit son texte dans un
tiroir, persuadé de l‟inutilité de protester, seul, dans le concert des loups qui approuvaient. Ou si le Parti
lui demanda d‟être discipliné. Ce que je sais, c‟est que jusqu‟à la fin de sa vie, il se reprocha avec
véhémence son silence d‟alors.” [When the newspapers arrived to Vézelay, all of them, and particularly
L’Humanité, rejoiced at this hit against the enemy, at this victory of science and strategy. I don‟t know
what happened then: If Paul [Eluard] censored himself and shut his text into a drawer, persuaded of the
futility of protesting—alone—against the concert of approving wolves. Or if the Party asked for
discipline. I know only that until the end of his life, he vehemently reproached himself for his silence.]
76
effectively protest against the announced Gaullist atomic test in the Algerian Sahara. Its
premises, in fact, did not allow it to address the articulation of the dangers of nuclear technology
with the decolonization struggles that the most advanced fringes of the Left could see as the site
of a different kind of Resistance. The gap between the two positions is evident when we compare
the different nuances that Sadoul and Firk found in their reading of the “mad love” between Elle
and the German soldier in Hiroshima mon amour. Sadoul‟s acceptance of love finds an obstacle
in his need to perform a painstaking attempt to defend the memory of the internal Resistance of
WWII and of its leaders. By contrast, Firk‟s reading in Positif articulates Elle‟s effort to deal
with the suffering for her traumatic love story with the possibility that she might finally
understand in part the immense suffering caused by the atomic bombing in Hiroshima. In turn,
this heightened conscience enables the audience to think the oppression of the colonial
populations.
In “L‟Univers et la rosée” Sadoul wholeheartedly embraced the individualizing power of
love in the face of the destinies of the universe. However, it is symptomatic that his reading of
the love story between Elle and the German soldier is not as positive as the one between Elle and
the Japanese man. The slap in the face that Elle receives from the Japanese man while she is
telling him of her ancient loves stories returns twice in Sadoul‟s article to remind us of this
difference. We can recall that Les Lettres Françaises had chosen a shot from this very sequence
to illustrate its first two articles on Hiroshima mon amour during the festival of Cannes. Now
Sadoul turns the slap into the dramatic turning point of the love tragedy between Elle and Lui:
Le nœud dramatique de la tragédie amoureuse est la gifle reçue par
la femme. Ce geste de l‟homme a plusieurs raisons: elle est ivre, elle est en
pleine crise d‟hystérie, l‟évocation prolongée d‟un ancien amour heurte
l‟amour présent. Enfin, cette histoire de Nevers choque les convictions de
l‟homme (sans doute progressiste): il est gêné (comme nous) d‟entendre
exalter cette union avec un ennemi en uniforme. Ces raisons seraient plus
claires et plus compréhensibles si, revenue à elle, la femme ne proférait
pas cette sentence: „J‟ai eu l‟honneur d‟avoir été déshonorée. Sentir les
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ciseaux sur sa tête vous donne de la bêtise humaine une intelligence
extraordinaire.‟ (Sadoul 1979, p. 178-179)60
This paragraph counterpoises the contributions of the two authors, Resnais and Duras.
Resnais had provided several reasons for the Japanese man to slap Elle in his interview to
Michèle Firk. The director wanted to show that his conception of cinema refrained from a
Manichean distinction between negative and positive characters. He felt an attachment toward
his heroine, but sometimes he also considered her as highly irritating. This oscillation between
sympathy and antipathy replaced the coup de theatre in this narration in which the main action
was the return of the past (Firk and Resnais 1959, p. 7). Sadoul starts from a careful auscultation
of Resnais words, but he subtly turns their meaning into his own direction. He stresses
particularly the irritation of the Japanese man, and adds explicitly that the reason for this
irritation is the love of Elle for “an enemy in uniform” that she exalts in her story. Duras‟
contribution, instead, is more difficult to assimilate for the Stalinist critic. Sadoul piles up the
examples of too brilliant replies that show Elle‟s lack of contrition for her mistake. They
constitute for him a stylistic mishap on the part of the novelist that clashes with Resnais‟ rigorous
construction.
The second reference to the slap in the face significantly raises the most important issue
for Sadoul, i.e. the defense of the Resistance. This reference was absent in his first article on
Hiroshima mon amour. However, here the critic has to rebuke the judgment of some viewers
who had seen the episode of Nevers as an indictment of the underground. Sadoul openly
embraces Breton‟s conception of a love that goes beyond nations and races. He refuses the
negative reactions that brought older men in the audience to reject the love between Elle and Lui
on racial grounds. But the force of love crashes against the need to protect the “National
60 “The dramatic turning point of the love tragedy is the slap in the face that the woman receives.
This gesture by the man has several reasons: She is drunk, she is in full hysteric crisis, and the prolonged
evocation of an ancient love hurts the present love. Finally, this story of Nevers shocks the convictions of
the man (undoubtedly progressive): he is disturbed (as we are) when he hears exalting this union with an
enemy in uniform. These reasons would be clearer and easier to understand if, when she comes back to
her senses, the woman would not pronounce this sentence: „I had the honor of being dishonored. You
have an extraordinary understanding of human stupidity when you feel the scissors on your head.”
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Communist” point of view and its leading role during the war that still constituted a vital
resource for the Stalinist identity in the late Fifties.
Innocente de tout crime ou délit, l‟héroïne d‟Hiroshima mon
amour n‟est pas en tout point sympathique. Elle est giflée non seulement
par le Japonais mais par Resnais.
“J‟étais méchante, je voulais du mal à tout le monde,” répétait-elle
en racontant son passé. Si le film trouve monstrueux l‟humiliation et le
châtiment, il n‟approuve pas pour autant le “péché de jeunesse.” On
n‟aurait donc pas raison de lui reprocher une mise en cause de la
Résistance. A moins de considérer qu‟aujourd‟hui encore les horreurs
passés rendent impossible l‟amour d‟une Française pour un Japonais—ou,
pourquoi pas, pour un Italien? (Sadoul 1979, p. 180-181)61
The central point of contention is the fact that part of the audience had read Elle‟s
humiliation as a monstrous form of punishment that members of the Resistance had perpetrated
or silently tolerated. Sadoul hastens to recall his own experience of the Liberation in order to
deny that his comrades of the underground could ever have instigated or ordered such violent
acts. On the contrary, they would intervene to stop them. “Je n‟ai pas vu autour de moi, à la
Libération, les chefs de la Resistance ordonner de tondre ces filles-là. Au contraire, si la foule
mettait en action un mot d‟ordre lancé (si j‟ai bonne mémoire) par la radio de Londres, ils
intervenaient pour arrêter les sabbats qui scandalisèrent (à bon escient) Paul Eluard” (p. 180).62
Sadoul blames the external influence of radio London (from which Gaullists were speaking) for
fomenting disorders among French people. On the contrary, the Communist leaders and
intellectuals of the Resistance (such as Eluard) maintained the sound judgment and the authority
to prevent these pointless escalations.
61 “While innocent of any crime or offense, the heroine of Hiroshima mon amour is not likable
on all accounts. She is slapped not only by the Japanese man, but also by Resnais.
„I was bad, I hated everybody,” she repeated while telling her past. If the film finds the humiliation and
the punishment monstrous, it also does not approve the “sin of youth.” Therefore there could be no reason
to reproach it for indicting the Resistance. Unless we think that even today the horrors of the past make it
impossible for a French woman to love a Japanese—or, why not, an Italian?
62 “I have not seen around me—during the Liberation—that the leaders of the Resistance ordered
to shave those girls. On the contrary, if the mob carried out a slogan launched (if I well remember) by
Radio London, they would intervene to stop the Sabbaths that scandalized (and rightly so) Paul Eluard.”
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Hiroshima mon amour was not the first feature film that represented the story of a French
girl that who a relationship with the enemy and that underwent public humiliation at Liberation.
The director Henri-Georges Clouzot had presented the dark sides of the Resistance in his film
Manon (1949). The film presented images of tondues that villagers assaulted and pushed
violently through the streets with swastikas painted on their bodies. Clouzot had found in
archival documents of the Liberation these taboo images that clashed with the patriotic tone of
national heroism in the early films on the war (Lindeperg 1997, p. 271). However, a pro-Gaullist
leader of the internal Resistance intervened at the last moment and rescued Clouzot‟s heroine
from being shaven. Also Hiroshima mon amour appeared at a time of renewed enthusiasm for
the heroism of the Resistance, due to the return to power of General de Gaulle. But its shock was
due to the fact that it was the first film in which the heroine herself is a tondue. Here, the
repressed returns and no leaders of the Resistance are there to prevent it from painfully
resurfacing.
Sadoul‟s concern with the Resistance is also the key to understanding his negative view
of Duras‟ conception of “mad love.” In fact, “L‟Univers et la rosée” is the first essay in which
the critic introduces the theme of the Resistance. But it is also the one in which he develops to
the largest extent his criticism of Duras‟ interpretation of Breton‟s individualizing love. Sadoul
quotes from the novelist‟s preface to her screenplay. There, Duras paraphrased the message of
Breton‟s L’Amour fou as the right to love no matter whom, no matter when, no matter how:
C‟est le propre de l‟amour de choisir seul et d‟être totalement
étranger aux considérations sociales et historiques qui font les autres choix
moins libres que le sien. Les ennemis d‟Hiroshima mon amour
l‟attaqueront sans doute en fonction d‟une morale étrangère à l‟amour. Car
l‟amour a sa morale qui est la négation de la morale elle-même. D‟où
qu‟elle vienne et si fondée soit-elle de toutes les façons. Mais qui ne le sait
pas? (Sadoul 1979, p. 179-180)63
63 “It is typical of love to choose by itself and to be totally foreign to social and historical
considerations that make the other choices less free than its own. The enemies of Hiroshima mon amour
will doubtlessly attack it in function of a moral that is foreign to love. For love has its own moral that is
the negation of morality itself. From wherever the latter comes and however well-founded it may be in
any way. But who doesn‟t know that?”
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In L’Amour fou Breton had cast love against the values of the bourgeoisie (religion,
traditional family, patriotism). But he had also condemned the economic reductionism of
Stalinist bureaucracy that considered selfish and indecent the isolating and self-sufficient mutual
passion of L’Âge d’or. For Breton, instead, it was an exemplary love that could open new
perspectives for a better age in the future. In this sense, Duras seems to find in Breton‟s
conception of mad love a lever to undermine the rights of any moral code that pretends to be
absolute, even if it comes from the Marxist idea to which both Breton and Duras subscribed. In
fact, love indicates that social morality is a construction that can always potentially be subject to
revisions. It asks a question more original than the question of morality, because it shows
through which exclusions morality has been constituted.
Sadoul hastens to reply in terms that reestablish the orthodoxy of dialectical materialism.
The critic accuses Duras of a “moralisme à rebours” that is based on contempt for reality (p.
180).64 It can pretend to be superior only because it ignores social and historical considerations
that are too fundamental to be ignored. “Who” is the object of love depends also on these
circumstances and Duras‟ claims show their absurdity if they are pushed at their extreme
consequences:
Imaginons l‟héroïne d‟Hiroshima s‟écrier: “Sais-tu bien qui je
suis ? La chienne de Buchenwald!” Du coup éclate l‟absurdité de la thèse
élaborée par la scénariste. Aucun homme digne de ce nom ne continuerait,
ensuite, d‟aimer pareillement cette “n‟importe qui.” La jeune fille de
Nevers ne fut ni tortionnaire ni dénonciatrice. Elle nous est présentée
comme une innocente, un peu “folle de son corps.” (p. 180)65
According to Sadoul, Elle‟s love for the German soldier was not a crime, but blinded her
to the reality of the Nazi crimes and to her responsibility toward her own people. Sadoul vividly
64 “Upside-down moralism.”
65 “Let‟s imagine the heroine of Hiroshima who screams: „Do you really know who I am? The
bitch of Buchenwald!‟ Immediately appears all the absurdity of the thesis that the screenplay writer has
elaborated. No man worthy of this name would continue—afterward—to love in the same way this „no
matter whom.‟ The girl of Nevers was neither a torturer nor an informer. She is presented to us as an
innocent, a little „mad with her body.‟”
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shows the difference between Aragon‟s ennobling conception of love and the morality of the
“whatever goes” that the critic reads in Duras‟ reference to Breton. If historical circumstances
were really alien to love, in fact, nothing would prevent a progressive man like Lui to love even
the infamous “Bitch of Buchenwald”—one of the cruelest Nazi torturers. However, Sadoul‟s
example is particularly badly chosen, despite its superficial effectiveness in scoring a point in the
debate against Duras and Breton. In fact, an insoluble question haunts these lines. Did Sadoul
know that Duras‟ former husband, Robert Antelme, had been a political deportee to
Buchenwald? Antelme had told the story of his daily fight for survival as a human being against
the dehumanizing apparatus of Nazi concentration camps in his book L’Espèce humaine (1947).
If Sadoul was aware of it, this paragraph would appear almost as an ad personam attack that
festers on the wounds of the rival in the worst Zhdanovist taste. However, Sadoul was not
personally close to Duras and her circle and he probably did not realize that his example could
raise painful memories. The fact that the critic completely dropped his criticism of Duras‟ “mad
love” in his later writing on Hiroshima mon amour for the journal Esprit would seem an indirect
way to apologize for his involuntary lapse.
We may recall that also Breton had evoked the example of Buchenwald in his speech on
conscience objection for the Algerian War in 1958. In that occasion, the Surrealist leader had
indicted Aragon for his faithfulness to Stalinism that prevented him from listening to his own
conscience at the time of the Soviet invasion of Hungary. By association, Breton‟s criticism
aimed also Sadoul who had followed the example of his friend in renewing his allegiance to the
Communist Party. Breton added that the horrors of Nazi concentration camps were the result of a
similar blind devotion to a higher cause that absolved its followers from any individual
responsibility. In these circumstances, freedom and love—the constitutive elements of
conscience—were at risk of degenerating. In this sense, Sadoul‟s reference to Buchenwald would
seem to be primarily an answer to Breton‟s intervention. It reminds the ancient friend that the
acceptance of dialectical materialism and strict party discipline had actually enabled Stalinists to
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lead the fight against Nazi horrors. In this case, love and conscience had found the right side of
History in their faithfulness to the Party.
Sadoul‟s example of the “Bitch of Buchenwald” vividly evokes Nazi barbarity. It
reminded the audience that the German soldier—“an enemy in uniform”—was a member of an
army of invaders that held a racist and annihilating ideology. In this sense, it reinforced the
wartime Stalinist motto “à chacun son Boche!” [to each one his Boche] that asked Party
members to give the example in killing Germans and collaborators. By the same token, however,
it tended to marginalize the minority tendencies in the French Left that during the war had
opposed a “class against class” politics to the territorial emphasis of “National Communism.”
Duras‟ Trotskyist friends, for example, considered German privates as equally victims of Fascist
exploitation as the French proletariat and produced material in German to persuade them to
defect the imperialist war. Even Antelme had recalled in L’Espèce humaine the rare episodes in
which German civilians would risk being sent to concentration camps to share in utmost secret
brief moments of solidarity with the deportees, challenging a system that was dehumanizing for
them as well as for the victims whose humanity it was supposed to annihilate.
From Stalinism to Aimance and the Peut-être.
In the rhetorical situation at the turn of the Sixties these nuances were important. In fact,
contrasting political choices in the French Left invoked different interpretations of the communal
memory of the Resistance as justifications for their actions. In this sense, Sadoul‟s reading of
“mad love” in Hiroshima mon amour was not only the aesthetic appreciation of a film, but it also
expressed his position in this broader political debate. Several members of the Left thought that
the fight against the German invaders had been the “easy” choice of WWII. It had been more
difficult not to trust Marshal Pétain—the hero of Verdun—that appeared to offer a possible
solution to France‟s own problems, even if it entailed collaborating with the Nazis and enforcing
racial policies. Even Communist leaders had attempted to collaborate with Fascism to guarantee
the survival of the Party organ, L’Humanité. The return to power of General de Gaulle in 1958
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presented an even more difficult scenario. The General, in fact, put his authority as the rescuer of
France during WWII in the service of the State to find a solution to the Algerian crisis. There
was the possibility that he might assist the process of decolonization. However, Fascists in
France and in white Algeria loomed behind the paternal figure of the General and might have
attempted to impose their wishes despite him.
In this sense, the Stalinist “faithfulness” to the myth of “National Communism” as a
popular uprising in the name of France‟s real soul failed to account for the ambiguous situation
and the deep changes that faced French politics at the turn of the Sixties. Derrida recalls the
fascination of Communists for Carl Schmitt‟s work that considers the possibility of killing the
enemy of the State as the very foundation of the political. Schmitt considers the public as
absolutely opposed to the private, and war as absolutely opposed to peace. His conception of the
enemy requires the confrontation of two Nations. However, Schmitt‟s later thought had to deal
with the troubling fact that the purity of these distinctions was disappearing. In this sense, the
“partisan” that was an originally marginal figure that had become crucial in WWII was the sign
of this transformation. In fact, partisans fight against a regular army without being one, as did the
freedom fighters in the Algerian war. However, Schmitt shows that the Stalinist myth of the
national and autochthonous partisan had achieved a rhetorical goal. It had brought back to the
figure of the partisan that territorial and familial aspect that the advancements in modern
technology had necessarily undermined in reality (Derrida 1994, p. 163). By contrast, Derrida‟s
deconstructive stance aims to show that modern technology has simply exposed the fact that,
since the beginning, “l‟autochtonisme tellurique est déjà une réponse réactive à une délocalisation” (p. 164).66 In fact, “cette pulsion territoriale a toujours été en elle-même contredite,
tourmentée, déplacée, dé-localisée” (p. 164).67 The deconstruction of the territorial drive that
66 “Telluric autochthonism is already a reactive response to a de-localization.”
67 “This territorial drive itself has always been contradictory, tormented, displaced, delocalized.”
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underlies our conception of the political is precisely the engine toward the possibility of a
politics of aimance and of the peut-être.
The contradiction in Sadoul‟s reading of Hiroshima mon amour in Les Lettres Françaises
bears witness to this tension. In fact, Sadoul embraces the love between Elle and Lui as it is
possible to articulate it with the humanitarian values of the Peace Movement and with a
humanistic view of Surrealism. In both cases, the link can be made with France‟s tradition as the
cradle of humanism and internationalist thought. However, Sadoul violently rejects the “mad
love” between Elle and the German soldier because it shows that the autochthonism of “National
Communism” had been since the beginning a rhetorical construction. The decision of joining the
underground during WWII had proven to be the right one. However, the underground was a
composed force of clashing ideologies with more long-terms aims than the simple fight against a
territorial enemy. This paradoxical composition of the Resistance, in turn, was the rhetorical
motive of new movements that were attempting to form a non-Stalinist Left at the turn of the
Sixties. In their eyes, “National Communism” and a form of faithfulness to the Communist party
that had become a matter of honor rather than conscience could not respond to the most
important issues of the times. In particular, it could not address how the Algerian fight for
independence was important also in terms of French politics. Its spur, in fact, enabled a
composite and variegated Left to convene with the aim to conceive a more responsible way to
intend politics.
In the next two chapters, I show how this response to Sadoul‟s “National Communism”
in terms of the creation of a non-Stalinist Left orients the later readings of Resnais and Firk on
Hiroshima mon amour. Resnais‟ later interviews, in fact, can be read in terms of the friendship
of the peut-être. Derrida sees this political attempt to deal with the ambiguity of reality as a
Nietzschean response to the crisis of the traditional dichotomies that oriented a traditional view
of the political in a stable and territorial sense. Stable dichotomies such as friend-enemy lose
their certainty. At the turn of the Sixties, Resnais joined Duras and Breton in the trend of events
that originated the theorization of paradoxical communities. In this sense, Resnais‟ reading of
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Hiroshima mon amour is perhaps an ideal ground from which to trace how an Existential
discourse of technology undermined Stalinist teleology and enabled a politics of paradoxical
temporalities to be born. In addition, I also show that Firk‟s intervention on “mad love” in
Hiroshima mon amour in Positif is close to Derrida‟s politics of aimance. In fact, it deconstructs
the stable distinction between public and private that condemns women either not to have a voice
in politics or to have only a voice that conforms to standards of decency that neutralize their
difference. For Firk, instead, the private enables us to understand the political; it is a love that
becomes friendship. In the next chapter, I discuss how Firk‟s politics of aimance can be read as
the attempt to articulate a “woman condition.” In fact, it faces the transformations of modern
technology like Hannah Arendt‟s “human condition,” but it does not undervalue the political
potential of the private.
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CHAPTER TWO
THE EARLY DEBATE ON ―MAD LOVE‖ (II): THE WOMAN CONDITION
OR MICHÈLE FIRK‘S POLITICS OF AIMANCE
The Stakes of the Debate
In the previous chapter, I argued that we can better understand Georges Sadoul‘s
paradoxical readings of ―mad love‖ in Hiroshima mon amour in light of Michèle Firk‘s interview
with Resnais for Les Lettres Françaises in May 1959. I showed how the Stalinist critic embraced
Breton‘s ―mad love‖ as a resource that allowed him to negotiate the crisis of Zhdanovism and to
move toward a less Manichean conception of Humanism. However, Duras‘ articulation of ―mad
love‖ with an alternative, non territorial conception of the ―enemy‖ conflicted with the myth of
―National Communism.‖ Therefore, Sadoul harshly rejected Duras‘ view in order to protect a
particular memory of the Resistance that justified his continued faithfulness to the core of
Stalinist principles. For similar reasons, he also ignored how Resnais had compared Elle‘s
German lover with a French private who did not agree with the Algerian War in his interview
with Firk. In fact, the patriotic tones of ―National Communism‖ did not allow the PCF to adopt a
clear stance in favor of conscientious objection and the Algerian independence.
In this chapter and in the next, I examine the continuation of this debate on the
representation of ―mad love‖ in Hiroshima mon amour. Michèle Firk and Alain Resnais both
returned to the arena with more fully developed views in the following months. They both
opposed to Sadoul‘s authority as the most important Communist critic a view that had its roots in
a different conception of the Left. In particular, Firk was the strongest voice in the roundtable on
Hiroshima mon amour that the Neo-Surrealist cinema journal Positif organized in November
1959. There, she articulated ―mad love‖ as a form of knowledge with her own persona as a
woman able to recognize and indict massacres. She implicitly claimed her commitment to stop
them even when her actions did not fit the priorities of her own party, the PCF. In other words,
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Firk follows Breton‘s view that transformations in private life are important per se and should
not be subordinated to Party priorities, as only in this way they can prepare a different future.
In this chapter, I particularly explore Firk‘s contribution to the debate. I argue that her
persona is of particular interest for her contradictory identity as a Communist Party member and
a sexually liberated young woman who had just started a most promising career in a Surrealist
cinema journal involved in the creation of the New Left. I also argue that this paradoxical
position enabled her to channel Positif‘s thought on ―mad love‖ and to transform it in order to
overcome the journal‘s masculine limitations as a committed brotherhood. In fact, her reading of
love in Hiroshima mon amour enabled her to claim the political importance of a woman‘s voice.
In this sense, her statements profoundly innovated on Breton‘s views on amour fou that Ado
Kyrou and other critics of Positif considered as the most important reference for their conception
of cinema. Her intervention stems from a deep knowledge of the rhetorical situation of the
journal but it is also able to enlarge the terms of the debate in order to develop a less
conservative and more productive view of ―mad love.‖
At the same time, ―mad love‖ as a thought of private life allowed Firk to carve new
spaces of political intervention that conflicted with the subordination of individual affections to
higher aims that the Stalinist rhetoric of dialectical materialism required. In doing so, she went
beyond Sadoul‘s embrace of a vague humanism and directly challenged the political strategy of
her own party concerning Algeria. In this way—I finally argue—she gives us an important
example of what Jacques Derrida describes as the politics of aimance. The French philosopher
defines aimance as a risky choice of love for the different and for the irremediably distant that is
suspended to the beating of the heart of the other. As a political friendship, aimance challenges
the traditional distinction between the private and public sphere. In this way, it enlarges the very
concept of the political and reinserts into the Greek political category of philía the sexual
difference that it had eliminated by confining the role of women to the private sphere.
In the next chapter, I examine the contribution of the other illustrious participant to the
debate on ―mad love.‖ Resnais addressed Sadoul‘s concerns regarding the love story of Nevers
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in two more interviews in 1960. The first was for the academic audience of the Brussels seminar.
The second opened a special issue of the Personalist journal Esprit on the new developments of
French cinema at the turn of the Sixties. The rhetorical situations of the two interviews were very
different on the surface, but they shared common points. They both shared connections with the
filmological movement, to which Sadoul belonged. And they both raised the question of the
sociology of modernization and leisure time that had a particular political meaning at the time for
its challenge to the Stalinist belief in the necessary pauperization of the proletariat in capitalist
countries. In this context, sociology showed that there were other potentially politically active
subjects apart from factory workers. The fact that women embraced Hiroshima mon amour
indicated the presence of a more aware feminine public that reflected deep changes in social
belief and behaviors. I argue that Resnais channels this thought of modernization for its
challenge to Stalinist teleology. But he also inflects it into a more openly political direction
through a different discourse of technology when he asks the audience to judge moments of the
film such as the ―mad love‖ of Nevers that question the binary oppositions private/public,
enemy/friend, and civilian/ military. In other words, Resnais demands an active audience that is
able to question the clear-cut separations that were the basis of Sadoul‘s ―National
Communism.‖
This chapter and the next join forces in showing that the power of persuasion of Firk and
Resnais‘ positions does not stem simply from their adoption of Breton‘s thought about ―mad
love‖ as a cultural reference in a vacuum. Rather, their effectiveness derives also from the
rhetorical articulation of the Surrealist thought of private life with Existentialist and sociological
discourses of technology at the turn of the Sixties. Modern technology had made private life and
everyday life more important in the self-definition of the individual, but it had also turned them
into major terrains of struggle. The risk was that a de-politicizing technocracy took hold of these
domains and neutralized the critical awareness of French citizens concerning questions that were
of vital importance for them. Also General de Gaulle—whom in the Forties Hannah Arendt still
considered as the only authentically nationalist leader left in Europe— had been interpolated into
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a discourse of technocracy. Therefore, he did not seem motivated enough in steering
technological progress in every field of life into a direction that was more conducive to real
democratic participation.
In this sense, the words of Firk and Resnais in the debate on Hiroshima mon amour also
resonate with the paradoxical communities that French Surrealists formed with the
―Existentalists of Communism‖ (Morin) and that profoundly innovated the way of conceiving
the political. In fact, Breton joined forces with Duras and her friends in the ―friendship of the
No‖ of the journal Le 14 juillet that protested against de Gaulle‘s return to power in 1958. In
turn, this alliance became the germ for the famous Manifesto of the 121 in favor of conscientious
objection in the Algerian War in1960. The deeper aim of both actions was the construction of an
alternative Left based on a different vision of commitment. Significantly, Positif‘s Surrealist
critic Robert Benayoun praised Resnais in the first issue of Le 14 juillet for the contribution of
his films in this direction. Resnais eventually was among the first signatories of the Manifesto of
the 121 with his future wife Florence Malraux. Firk did not take part in Le 14 Juillet and did not
sign the Manifesto, which the PCF did not support. However, she certainly was aware of the
content and the meaning of these events, whose front-line participants included several critics of
Positif. Among the three other participants to the roundtable on Hiroshima mon amour, for
example, Louis Seguin was among the first signatories of the Manifesto. Roger Tailleur and Paul
Louis Thirard—Michèle‘s lovers—joined him right after. The involvement of Positif in favor of
the Manifesto of the 121 was so clear that an editorial against the material and moral pressures
that the State had imposed on its signatories opened the issue of November 1960. Moreover,
even if Firk did not directly participate in these intellectual protests, her underground activities in
favor of the FLN (Algerian National Liberation Front) were precisely one of the points that the
Manifesto was trying to protect. It clearly stated: ―Nous respectons et jugeons justifiée la
conduite des Français qui estiment de leur devoir d‘apporter aide et protection aux Algériens
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opprimés au nom du peuple français‖ (Sirinelli 1990, p. 213).1 Therefore, it is not surprising if
we can hear an echo of the paradoxical communities of the French Left in her criticism of
Hiroshima mon amour.
I discuss in the next chapter how Resnais‘ interviews on ―mad love‖ in Hiroshima mon
amour deploy an ambiguity that is not a simple claim for artistic polysemy, but rather a strategy
in line with Derrida‘s politics of the peut-être. In fact, this ambiguity asks for a risky choice and
is reflexively directed to question and enlarge the very foundations of the political like the
paradoxical communities at the turn of the Sixties. As for Firk, her voice as a woman can
consciously take a stand against the politics of her own country and her own Party because as a
woman she is felt to inhabit more closely a private sphere that has already become a contested
notion. The wisdom proper to the private sphere, her understanding of love and suffering,
becomes the very basis of a broad articulation that invests the reading of history and the direction
of French politics in the present. The protest against the atomic bomb and its effects on everyday
life evokes the condemnation of the Shoah and of ongoing colonial oppression. In this sense,
Firk‘s focus on Elle‘s problematic relationship with the German soldier and on her ability to face
her own suffering becomes a way to claim the ability of a woman to deal with the political
repressed. In Frik‘s reading, the tortures and oppressions of the Algerian population return as a
negated reality that troubles the foundations of French politics.
Breton‘s conception of ―mad love‖ considered woman as the poetic source of knowledge
about the hidden forces of nature. She was the Sphinx or rather the Melusina whose snake-like
body was in contact with the mystery of the earth. In the modern city, woman wandered through
the streets, suddenly revealing the particular feeling of a certain district or offering unsuspected
keys to the imaginary double of modern technology. However—as de Beauvoir argued—she just
evoked this convulsive beauty for the man. The knowledge that she revealed was not for her own
1 ―We respect and deem justified the actions of the French citizens that consider their duty to
provide help and protection to the Algerians oppressed in the name of the French people.‖
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benefit and she was unaware of her own magic. Ado Kyrou applied Breton‘s ―mad love‖ to
cinema, but he maintained this unconscious aspect of the woman‘s poetical revelation in her
cinematic appearance that can save the most boring film.
However, we can better understand Firk‘s contribution if we consider how she articulates
Breton and Kyrou‘s ―mad love‖ with a discourse on technology that indicates the private sphere
as a new political battleground. Media and atomic radiation do not spare its closed precincts.
Modern technology blurs the dividing line between war and massacre and shows how much our
clear-cut and aseptic concept of ―war‖ is in fact a rhetorical construction that could be called
with other names. Through Firk‘s persona, Breton‘s ―mad love‖ leaves the closed boundaries of
literature and cinema in which many wanted to circumscribe it. In this way, it recuperates its
revolutionary charge as a way to transform private and daily life. But it can also claim more
decisively the possibility for woman to act from the standpoint of her privileged knowledge of
these contested terrains. ―Mad love‖ enters more decisively into society as an inventional
strategy for everyday life that searches also for a new way of intending the political.
Hannah Arendt also deals with the colonizing threat of modern technology. Her book The
Human Condition (1958) takes up a topos that can be traced back at least to Montaigne‘s La
Condition humaine. Human nature is an indefinable concept. ―Human condition,‖ instead, refers
to the fact that everything that comes in contact with us, conditions us, even if it is made by us.
In her words, ―because human existence is conditioned existence, it would be impossible without
things, and things would be a heap of unrelated articles, a non-world, if they were not the
conditioners of human existence‖ (Arendt 1998, p. 9). Arendt‘s aim is to explore the conditions
of possibility for politics in a world whose stability and perdurability is eroded by modern
technology. In fact, the mass production of objects that are thought only in terms of consumption
does not provide a stable background in which political actions can be born and remembered.
The extreme example would be the complete destruction of the world and of the memory of the
human race by the atomic bomb.
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The French translation of Arendt‘s work as La Condition de l’homme moderne (1961)
stresses the importance of this threat of modern technology in her thought. Her fight against
totalitarianism makes her look back to the human condition for a possibility of resistance in the
form of plurality that leads to a politics envisioned in terms of natality and new risky
beginnings.2 However, Arendt‘s conception of politics is based on the appearance in public that
contrasts with the secrecy and the darkness that need to shield and protect the private sphere.
Moreover, she rejects the use of violence that for her is not related with political power. Feminist
and postcolonial scholars have often criticized these characteristics of Arendt‘s thought, which
seem to undermine the claim that the private can be political and that open violence may be
legitimate against naturalized violence. Firk, instead, starts from the awareness of her position as
a woman in a private life colonized by modern technology in order to most effectively articulate
her claims of intervention in the public sphere. In this sense, we might call ―the woman
condition‖ Firk‘s reading of Hiroshima mon amour in terms of a claim for political commitment
from the knowledge of the suffering of private life. Moreover, Firk‘s substitution of the word
―massacre‖ for ―war‖ blurs the distinction between legal conflict and sheer violence and justifies
a violent response to colonial oppression.
Firk‘s decision, in fact, was her commitment in the underground that sustained the
Algerian freedom fighters, despite her Party‘s disavowal of the matter. She was already active in
providing a safe refuge to tracked underground members when the roundtable on Hiroshima mon
amour took place. In 1960, after the trial of Francis Jeanson and the flight of the leaders of his
underground network to Brussels, she had the crucial role of maintaining the connections
between the groups of volunteers and fighters in France and the leadership in exile. She carried
2 Paul Ricœur (1991, p. 51) wrote: ―si l‘hypothèse ‗tout est possible‘ conduit à la destruction
totale, quelles barrières et quelles ressources la condition humaine elle-même oppose-t-elle à cette
hypothèse terroriste? C‘est ainsi qu‘il faut lire Condition de l’homme moderne comme le livre de la
résistance et de la reconstruction.‖ [If the hypothesis ‗everything goes‘ leads to total destruction, what
barriers and what resources does the human condition itself oppose to this terrorist hypothesis? This is
why we should read The Human Condition as the book of resistance and reconstruction.]
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across the borders fake documents, money, and guns. She also helped conscientious objectors
and screened committed movies in the Algerian slums. Her courage and her enthusiastic
devotion gained her the nickname of Pasionaria, in memory of the Republican heroine Dolores
Ibárruri during the Spanish Civil War. Paul-Louis Thirard—who was in love with Michèle and
who is also a protagonist of the roundtable of Positif –was soon convinced to join her in this
fight. She was disappointed when Ben Bella and the nationalist part of the FLN took power with
a coup d’état after the Algerian independence, sending in exile their revolutionary rival Boudiaf.
They were using a Socialist rhetoric, but in fact they put the country under the strict control of
the army and denied any need for social change. This disillusionment led Michèle first to Cuba
where Castro and Che were building Socialism, and finally to Guatemala where she joined the
urban guerrilla. There she committed suicide in 1968 in order not to betray her comrades under
torture. She was 31 years old (Terk 2004, p. 11).
Firk‘s risky articulation between the private and the political enacts what the Algerian
born Derrida calls ―the politics of aimance.‖ She is the partisan who shows that women are the
absolute partisans, as their actions can undermine the very distinction between public and
private, between war as the dignified foundation of the political and sheer hateful violence. She
is the partisan that Carl Schmitt needed to forget in order to build the clear-cut structure that
defends his conception of the political as based on the killing of the enemy of the State. ―Celle
qui, selon la logique même de la théorie du partisan, devient un ennemi d‘autant plus redoutable
qu‘il ne peut pas devenir une ennemie, qu‘il brouille, qu‘elle brouille et parasite les limites
rassurantes entre l‘hostilité et la haine, mais aussi entre l‘intimité et son contraire, les lois de la
guerre et la violence sans loi, le politique et ses autres, etc.‖ (Derrida 1994, p. 181).3 As Derrida
argues, Schmitt‘s phallologocentric model needs to exclude sexual difference in order to
3 ―The woman that, according to the logic itself of the theory of the partisan [by Carl Schmitt],
becomes an enemy that is all the more frightening because he cannot become a woman enemy, because he
troubles, she troubles and parasitizes the reassuring limits between hostility and hate, but also between
intimacy and its contrary, the laws of war and lawless violence, politics and its others, etc.‖
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consolidate its structure of binary oppositions that the transformations of modern technology
have rendered porous and unstable. Instead, Firk‘s actions reinsert into the political the
consciousness of a sexual difference that Schmitt‘s virtuous brotherhood can only attempt to
contain and naturalize through images of autochthony and familiar belonging.
My analysis of Firk‘s criticism of Hiroshima mon amour for Positif cannot overlook the
specific rhetorical situation of the journal in which it appeared. Biesecker‘s conception of the
rhetorical situation prescribes a close attention to the way in which each speech act negotiates a
critical conjuncture. Its rhetorical impact resides in its ability to articulate in unprecedented ways
elements that may be preexisting, but that in the new form present to the audience a new identity
in which to recognize themselves. Accordingly, in the next section I describe the concerns of
Positif at the time, particularly in relation to the construction of an alternative cinema criticism
for the Left. I then analyze more in depth two views of ―mad love‖ that were important in the
self-definition of the journal and that constituted the theoretical basis that Firk addressed and
radically reformulated in her intervention. In particular, Robert Benayoun‘s contribution to Le 14
juillet where he evokes Hiroshima mon amour constitutes a clear tie between the neo-Surrealist
thought of Positif and paradoxical communities such as the ―friendship of the No.‖ Finally, I
devote the last section of the chapter to a detailed analysis of the roundtable as a continuation of
the debate on ―mad love‖ with Georges Sadoul.
The Rhetorical Situation of Positif
Firk had played a limited role in her first interview with Resnais for Les Lettres
Françaises in May 1959. She had mostly asked for clarifications on the points of the film that the
Stalinist audience of the weekly might have considered problematic. She might actually have
intended to provide Resnais the chance to deflect the tension concerning the love story of Nevers
that had stirred a controversy at the Festival of Cannes. Her persona as a young Communist Party
member and a woman allowed her to more easily address the general concerns on this point of a
rather delicate nature. However, her activism in favor of the Algerian underground was probably
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the spur for Resnais‘ suggestion that the character of the German soldier might be thought in
terms of the dilemmas that faced the French privates in the Algerian war. In other words, Firk‘s
paradoxical persona ended up having a destabilizing influence on the interview‘s appeasing
purposes, as Resnais introduced a theme that orthodox Stalinists could not face without
ambiguity.
However, in November 1959 Firk had a more congenial and less constrained platform
from which to express her opinion on Hiroshima mon amour. In fact, from July 1959 the young
critic had become the only woman contributor to the Neo-Surrealist cinema journal Positif, after
the departure of Madeleine Vives for Rome. Despite her young age and sex—or perhaps thanks
to them—she was quickly accepted by her colleagues that she already knew from her assiduous
frequentation of cine-clubs. She soon converted Paul-Louis Thirard from Catholicism to Leftist
Communism and led him to become a member of the reseau Jeanson. And her lack of experience
did not prevent her from becoming the most authoritative voice in the roundtable that the journal
organized on Resnais‘ film. In fact, Firk had the qualities to fit the bill of the woman that
Surrealism was expecting, who united sincerity, revolt, and a desire for physical pleasure. One of
her very first articles in 1957 had been an essay on Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s The Barefoot
Contessa (1954). She identified with the suffering of the tragic heroine played by Ava Gardner,
and in the ethical base of her sexual freedom that led her to scorn riches and to give herself to
men of the people (Terk 2004, p. 47).
A group of high-school students had founded Positif in Lyon in 1952, with humanist,
anti-colonialist, and anticlerical ideas. Orthodox Communists discussed side by side with
anarchists and even a priest, all united by their love for the films. The journal had appeared
irregularly and had struggled to survive until the mid-Fifties. In this early period it situated itself
on the Left following mostly the dominant model of Sadoul and Aragon. It acquired a more
distinctive mark when the influence of the latecomers Ado Kyrou and Robert Benayoun led it to
embrace Breton‘s version of Surrealism. ―Mad love‖ soon became its slogan, and Kyrou‘s
definition (which not everybody accepted) was widely recognized as a way of life. Boris Terk,
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who later became a member of the editorial board, clearly explains the difference between the
Stalinist and the Surrealist position:
Si pour les communistes, le cinéma est le reflet des conditions
sociales et politiques de la société, pour les surréalistes, il est associé au
rêve et guide une vie plus profonde, plus libre, mieux vécue. Pour Ado
Kyrou, il est le ‗moyen d’expression rêvé du contenu latent de la vie.‘
Amour et liberté sont les grilles de lecture de la revue, ce que les
rédacteurs de Positif ont choisi dans la vie ils veulent le retrouver sur
l‘écran et ce qu‘ils apprécient sur l‘écran ils le veulent dans la vie. (2004,
p. 58)4
Positif‘s more regular appearance as a Parisian journal, its controversial choices, and its
polemical tones soon created a rivalry with the more established Cahiers du Cinéma. The
historian of the yellow journal, Antoine de Baecke (1991, p. 144), suggests that both reviews
actively cultivated this conflict that proved reciprocally beneficial.5 In fact, the presence of a
competitor in the same field and with similar characteristics contributed a powerful drive toward
the unification of divided and quarrelsome staffs around opposite banners. Moreover, this
indirect publicity was undoubtedly a sale-booster. The polarization of the journals provided
useful catchphrases that captured and magnified the rivalry for the audience‘s benefit. ―Auteur
vs. amour fou‖ and ―Right vs. Left‖ marked the loud opposition of two publications that—de
Baecke argues— were actually rather similar in many ways.
The roundtable on Hiroshima mon amour in Positif was itself an answer to the roundtable
that the Cahiers had staged on Resnais‘ film in July 1959. I discuss in Chapter Four how the
4 ―If for the Communists cinema is the reflection of the social and political conditions of society,
for the Surrealists it is associated with dreams and it is the guide toward a life that is deeper, freer, and
better lived. According to Ado Kyrou, it is the ‗mean of dreamed expression of the latent content of life.‘
Love and freedom are the reading grids of the review; the members of the editorial staff of Positif want to
find on the screen what they have chosen in real life and they want in real life what they appreciate on the
screen.‖
5 ―Rohmer, on l‘a dit, pense qu‘il vaut mieux un ennemi extérieur que d‘incessantes querelles
internes, tandis que les rédacteurs de Positif trouvent un épouvantail commode dans un rival désigné
comme ‗publication d‘extrême-droite, primaire et démodé.‘ Les stratégies internes des deux revues leur
recommandent donc l‘attaque à outrance.‖ [Rohmer—we said—thought that an exterior enemy was better
than unending internal quarrels, while the journalists of Positif found a convenient bugaboo in a rival
described as a ‗publication of the extreme Right, narrow-minded, and outmoded.‘ Therefore, the internal
strategies of the two reviews recommended attack without remission.]
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Cahiers‘ intervention attempted to negotiate the strained relation between the challenge of
technological modernization and the classicist view that Eric Rohmer had derived from the
Bazinian ontology of the cinematic form. Here, however, it is important to introduce another key
rhetorical motive of this earlier roundtable in order to grasp the stakes of Positif‘s response. De
Baecque discusses the Cahiers‘ choice of devoting a roundtable to Resnais in terms of their
difficult position in relation to the ―politique des auteurs.‖ In fact, the logic of the ―auteur‖
required the development of a level of personal intimacy between the critics and the filmmakers
that they adopted with undivided loyalty and uncritically courted with tape-recorded interviews.
In several cases, it was also a generational choice for which young critics chose to back auteurs
of the same age who were almost the mirror of their future career behind the camera. In 1959,
however, the critics of the Cahiers had become the main directors of the Nouvelle Vague. This
prescribed intimacy between the auteur and his critics suddenly turned into an object of
embarrassment and into an accusation of ―copinage‖ (de Baecque 1991, p. 13).6 Positif was
among the most vocal critics. As a result, the yellow journals remained rather silent on the
Nouvelle Vague until its crisis some years later. Therefore, the big names of the Cahiers
gathered to discuss Resnais not only for the undeniable merits of Hiroshima mon amour, but also
in order to indirectly come to terms with their new role as the frontrunners in the renovation of
French cinema.
By contrast, the critics of Positif openly rejected the ahistorical and decontextualized idea
of the auteur that had become the banner of François Truffaut and the other Young Turks of the
Cahiers. Accordingly, their roundtable on Hiroshima mon amour introduces Resnais‘ film
almost casually, among other novelties on the cinematic scene. However, it becomes
immediately clear that Hiroshima mon amour was the most important for them. In fact, the
critics of Positif adopted Resnais as an ―auteur‖ to cast against the directors of the Nouvelle
Vague. They considered the latter generally conservative or confused both as critics and as
6 ―Cronyism.‖
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filmmakers. By contrast, Resnais was a Leftist like the critics of Positif and his films
courageously addressed themes with a highly charged political content. This apparently clear-cut
opposition into Right and Left, however, concealed another pressing question for the critics of
Positif. In fact, at the turn of the Sixties nobody had really clear ideas about what being a Leftist
critic meant after the crisis of Stalinism. Therefore, this is the great question that Firk and the
other regular contributors of the Surrealist journal indirectly asked to themselves while they
discussed Hiroshima mon amour. It was the problem that their rhetorical act was meant to
address and illuminate for the audience of Positif.
In the first years of its existence Positif had taken Sadoul‘s ―content-based‖ approach as a
model. In exchange, it had often received encouragement, publicity, and advice from the
historian who had the monumental knowledge about cinema that the young critics still lacked.
However, the crisis of Zhdanovism had led Sadoul to embrace the Nouvelle Vague as an
authentic hope for the renovation of French cinema. This move disconcerted and alienated his
former admirers in Positif. For instance, in 1960 Firk criticized Sadoul for supporting the empty
anarchy of Jean-Luc Godard‘s Breathless and the dull representation of love in Jacques DoniolValcroze‘s L’Eau à la bouche, ―les pauvres audaces de l‘amour-au-château le plus répugnant, le
plus conventionnel et le plus plat‖ (p. 11).7 The ―defection‖ of a respected scholar like Sadoul
opened the question of what a serious Leftist criticism should really be:
Mais quand un critique sait qu‘il compte parmi les plus lus, parmi
les plus influents, les plus respectés, quand il sait qu‘il est considéré dans
son pays et à l‘étranger comme le représentant des opinions d‘une large
partie de la gauche française, il n‘a plus le droit d‘être frivole. Il n‘a pas le
droit de se faire le défenseur ardent, l‘âpre champion des scléroses et des
tares d‘un cinéma ‗jeune,‘ mais déjà vieillot […].
Sa sincérité ne fait aucun doute, mais quels sont ses critères? Que
veulent les lecteurs qui le considèrent comme leur guide? Existe-t-il une
critique de gauche? Si oui, quel rôle doit-elle jouer? (p. 11)8
7 ―The miserable audacity of the most disgusting, most conventional, and most boring love-inthe-castle.‖
8 ―But when a critic knows that he is among the most widely read and the most influential, when
he knows that he is considered in his country and abroad the representative of the opinions of a large part
of the French Left, he no longer has the right to be frivolous. He has not the right to present himself as the
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The question of an alternative way to envision a Leftist criticism dominated the selfreflection of Positif at the turn of the Sixties. In particular, the issue of Positif of November 1960
published different answers to Firk‘s questions. Roland Barthes opened the list of the replies, as
the author of Mythologies (1957) and perhaps the most famous Leftist intellectual of the times. It
is perhaps useful to quote it as it gives a clear picture of the broader stakes that guided Positif‘s
theorization. In fact, Barthes argued that the ghost of Zhdanovism has created an opposite trend
of de-politicization in most criticism of the Left. The ―éclectisme effréné‖ of Sadoul‘s Les
Lettres Françaises was the most telling example (Barthes 1960, p. 16).9 However, the chance
for a politically responsible Leftist criticism still existed:
Une fois de plus, l‘ombre du jdanovisme pèse. Parce que la
politisation de l‘art s‘est produite dans un régime qui l‘a imposée par la
plus rude des coercitions, on la rejette en bloc, au point parfois de tourner
le refus de la terreur en contre-terreur. Est-il si difficile de distinguer?
C‘est une chose—et haïssable—que d‘attenter à la liberté temporelle de la
création; c‘en est une autre que de demander à l‘artiste d‘être responsable
de son œuvre. Bien plus: par un paradoxe qui n‘est qu‘un ruse de
l‘histoire, c‘est précisément parce que nous vivons dans une démocratie
(encore) libérale où l‘artiste est (relativement) libre, que sa responsabilité
politique devrait s‘épanouir pleinement. (p. 18)10
The aesthetic failure of Zhdanovist realism had led to the opposite extreme of formalism,
―comme si, par un privilège spécial de l‘artiste, la ‗forme‘ planait dans le ciel sublime de
l‘universel‖ (p. 18).11 Positif considered that the Cahiers du cinéma was heading in this
ardent defender, or the harsh champion of the scleroses and the faults of a cinema that is ‗young,‘ and yet
pretty old. […]
His sincerity is not in question, but what are his criteria? What do the readers who consider him as their
guide want? Does a Leftist criticism exist? If yes, what is the role that it has to play?‖
9 ―Unrestrained eclecticism.‖
10 ―Once more, the shadow of Zhdanovism weigh down on us. As the politicization of art took
place in a regime that imposed it through the harshest coercion, we reject it as a whole, sometimes to the
point of turning the rejection of terror into counter-terror. Is it so difficult to draw a distinction? It is one
thing—and an odious one—to threaten the temporal liberty of creation; it is another thing to ask that
artists be responsible of their works. Even more: for a paradox that is only a cunning of History, it is
precisely because we live in a (still) liberal democracy where artists are (relatively) free that their political
responsibility should fully thrive.‖
11 ―As if, for a special privilege of the artist, the ‗form‘ was gliding in the sublime heaven of the
universal.‖
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direction after the death of André Bazin. Barthes typically nuanced the terms of the question
when he suggested that the form is important, but it should be contextualized and historicized in
political terms. Bertolt Brecht, for instance, taught us to reflect on the political commitment of a
work of art not only in terms of the content (ideas and morals) but also in terms of the form that
upsets the bourgeois myth of ―Nature‖ and reinvents Communism (p. 18). The example of
Brecht—we will see— is very important in understanding the debate on Hiroshima mon amour,
as it is the favorite example to which Resnais‘ compared his own method of estrangement.
Also Positif‘s publication of an excerpt from Bernard Pingaud‘s reading of Hiroshima
mon amour for the Brussels seminar clearly addresses the difficult relation between form and
political content. The novelist, academic, and contributor to Sartre‘s Temps moderns had been a
guest of the seminar at the Free University of Brussels in January 1960. His analysis of the theme
of memory in Hiroshima mon amour aimed to adapt to the medium of film the nuanced tools that
literary criticism had developed to grasp the subtle narrative structures of Proust‘s Recherche and
of the Nouveau Roman. His study was thought in terms of the interdisciplinary approach of
academic filmology, according to which older disciplines brought their contribution to the study
of film. Paradoxically, Pignaud‘s contribution is today one the most well remembered texts in the
whole history of Positif, even if originally it had not been written for the journal. For example, it
is the only text on Hiroshima mon amour that the New York Museum of Modern Art included in
the volume that celebrates the 50th anniversary of Positif (Cardish and Ciment 2002, p. 49-58).
The editors of the MOMA collection, however, do not point out its origin in the Brussels
seminar. We can only speculate that the later developments of Film Study in a decontextualized
and formalistic direction play a great role in this lack of accuracy on the editors‘ part.
However, it is interesting to note that Positif operated a displacement in the general focus
of Pingaud‘s intervention. In fact, the Surrealist journal omitted the long discussion about literary
narration and published only the conclusion of the essay that developed an Existentialist theme.
An editorial note prefaced it and stated that it is not to ―specialists‖ that one should listen in the
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case of a film like Hiroshima mon amour (Pingaud 1960, p. 1).12 In other words, the
sophisticated study of camera angles and movements of the Cahiers du Cinéma could not get to
the core of Resnais‘ film. By contrast, it was not the analysis of the cinematic form per se that
mattered for Positif. Rather, it was Pingaud‘s involvement with Existentialist engagement that
one month later would lead him to sign the Manifesto of the 121 with Duras, Resnais, Breton,
and several members of Positif. The study of the form was important only as a clue to the
conditions of possibility of this commitment. In this sense, Positif‘s editorial choice translated
the ―neutral‖ position of academic filmology into a more decided political meaning.
Pingaud argues that the representation of dialectics in Hiroshima mon amour signals a
crisis in the dialectical idea of History and in its Stalinist avatar of dialectical materialism.
History used to be conceived as a progressive development that endowed painful moments with a
teleological meaning and made them tolerable. However, the irreconcilable event of the bombing
shatters this optimistic and finally triumphal view. The dim hope that is left depends on the
always precarious and fragile Existential decision to start something new from the cinders of the
past. The uncertainty of a risky commitment open to unsolvable contradictions takes the place of
the once overpowering certainties of the liberating dialectics of History:
Les deux moments contradictoires étaient toujours dépassés et
conservés dans une synthèse ultérieure. Ici, il n‘y a plus de synthèse. […]
L‘histoire n‘a pas d‘autre sens que celui que peut lui donner une volonté
obstinée, toujours battue en brèche par l‘oubli.
Pourtant il reste un certain espoir. Il est certes normal d‘oublier ces
événements fondamentaux, collectifs ou individuels, qui engagent l‘être
tout entier et semblent le détruire irrémédiablement. Mais cette mutilation,
cette fuite, ce sacrifice, conditions de notre survie, sont aussi la
contrepartie de notre liberté. Le mouvement de l‘existence, sa capacité
d‘accueil et de renouveau, son ouverture sont à ce prix.13
12 ―Laisser la parole aux spécialistes est rien moins qu‘inutile.‖ [It is absolutely useless to let
specialists speak.]
13 Ibid., p. 9: ―The two contradictory moments were always transcended into a higher synthesis.
Here, there is no more synthesis. […] History does not have any other meaning apart from what comes
from an obstinate will, always assaulted by forgetting.
However, some hope remains. It is certainly normal to forget these fundamental events—
collective or individual—that commit the whole being and seem to destroy it irremediably. But this
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Also in the roundtable on Hiroshima mon amour in which Firk shines, the form counts
only if it illuminates a political meaning. The focus on the content is more pronounced than in
Pingaud‘s reading. In fact, the participants do not discuss Resnais‘ technical feat and they only
marginally talk about the style of Duras‘ screenplay, defending her from Sadoul‘s accusations.
Instead, Surrealist ―mad love‖ provides a shared background on which to articulate clashing
views on Leftist commitment. At the time, a Bretonian form of amour fou was Positif’s most
recognizable banner. However, if we look more closely, we can perceive different nuances and
underlying tensions in this communal belonging. Paradoxical and shifting alliances were
forming, often for personal reasons of love or friendship. The controversial character of
Hiroshima mon amour and Sadoul‘s polemical attack against the episode of Nevers were the
ideal spurs that could bring them to the fore.
The complex example of Louis Seguin—one of the protagonists of the debate—well
illustrates the intricate position that these critics had to negotiate. Seguin had never been a
member of the Communist Party, but he had a close and conflicted relation with it. In the internal
frictions of Positif he often sided with his friend Ado Kyrou. The Greek critic was the most vocal
and theoretically grounded proponent of a view of cinematic ―mad love‖ that stressed the role of
the unconscious and the interchanges between the real and the imaginary.14 Seguin later wrote
that the repressed ―sexual life‖ of the French provincial towns in which he worked as a librarian
found its safety valve in Kyrou‘s veneration of the screen persona of Louise Brooke and Cyd
Charisse and in the utopian expectation of women like them in real life (Chardère 2000, p. 246247). In the same way, the ardent desire for glamorous actresses functioned as a way to exorcise
the ghost of homophilic affections inside the all-male group of cinema fans. However, Seguin
mutilation, this flight, this sacrifice, conditions of our survival, are also the counterpart of our freedom.
The movement of existence, its ability to accept and renew, its opening are at this cost.‖
14 Louis Seguin (Chardère 2000, p. 245) recalls: ―Les divisions et les alliances étaient, à
l‘intérieur même du Comité, fréquentes et pas toujours prévisibles. […] Je me retrouvais alors très
souvent aux côtés d‘Ado Kyrou dont j‘avais lu Le Surréalisme au cinéma sur l‘alpe.‖[Divisions and
alliances were frequent and not often foreseeable, even inside the editorial board. […] I often found
myself then on the side of Ado Kyrou whose Surrealism and Cinema I had read on the Alps.]
103
did not belong to the Surrealist movement like Kyrou (Chardère 2000, p. 249). In the debate on
Hiroshima mon amour he adopted a critical stance on Elle‘s mad love for the German soldier
that confirms and even reinforces Sadoul‘s negative reading of the Nevers episode. Despite this
similarity of views with orthodox Stalinism, Seguin was one of the first signatories of the
Manifesto of the 121, joining Breton, Duras, and Resnais in a paradoxical community that
challenged the Stalinist conception of ―National Communism.‖
This complex crucible of personal, theoretical, and political choices constituted the
humus that nourished Firk as a budding woman critic at the turn of the Sixties. The tensions and
the oppositions inside her very own group enabled the young woman to express her own reading
with greater clarity and to develop a strong voice. Her performance in the roundtable on
Hiroshima mon amour could only benefit from this ongoing debate inside a review that formed
its theoretical choices in opposition to the increasing formalism of the Cahiers and to Sadoul‘s
Stalinist Surrealism. In the following sections I describe the contemporary thoughts on ―mad
love‖ and Resnais‘ work in the two authors who were perhaps the most important figures of the
journal at the time and who had been responsible for its Parisian and Surrealist turn: Ado Kyrou
and Robert Benayoun. This background knowledge is necessary in order to fully grasp the
momentous innovation that Firk‘s performance in the roundtable brought to the Surrealist
conception of amour fou.
―Mad Love‖ and the Unconscious in Ado Kyrou
Positif‘s main theoretician of ―amour fou‖ in relation with cinema was Adonis Kyrou,
better known as ―Ado.‖ He was a former partisan of the Greek Resistance who had arrived to his
French exile on the same ship as the Heideggerian philosopher Kostas Axelos. He had been
expelled by the PCF and was close to André Breton‘s alternative view of Marxism. His name
was not in the original list of the signatories of the Manifesto of the 121, but he soon joined his
friends. In fact, Breton could proudly write that all the French Surrealists signed the Manifesto.
Kyrou developed his early book Le Surréalisme au cinéma (1952) into an encyclopedic survey of
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world cinema in light of his ideas in Amour-Érotisme et Cinéma (1957). Also in this later work
he adopted Breton‘s view of love as troubling the oppressive institutions of society. The family,
the army, religion, and the State—and the cinema that caters to their interests— attempted to
repress love and to channel its destructive and exclusive force into the creation of obedient
subjects (Kyrou 1957, p. 10). Love became stereotyped and dully foreseeable in its limited
domain. Surrealism reacted to this threat by refusing the distinction between love and sex, real
needs and imaginary needs, private life and revolution. The aim was to construct a complete
image of love that would empower the audience to sincerely live their passionate life to the full
and to understand the real oppressions of the world. ―Cet amour sera plaisir, connaissance et
invite à la révolte, il changera le monde‖. Kyrou considers Buðuel‘s L’Âge d’or as the greatest
example of how a film can present a mutual passion that refuses social conventions. Love can
only fail if it cannot overcome the most difficult ones; the most internalized that have a hold on
our mind.
According to Kyrou, ―le cinéma est de par son essence même le moyen d‘expression de
l‘amour‖ (p.10). In fact, the action of watching a film has often been compared to dreaming. The
darkness of the room gives access to a wonderful universe where the latent content of life and of
the world appears. But Kyrou adds that love is at the basis of every dream and even if a film is
vulgar and stupid, the face of a woman, her gestures, and her mystery can suddenly materialize
our imagination. In this sense, cinema is a feminine word that arrives to a deepening in
knowledge through the path of desire (p. 27). ―Semblable à la poésie, le cinéma doit être amourfou‖ (p. 25).15 It should put its technical means at the service of an isolating love-scandal that
interrupts the normal course of affairs and that becomes our guide in understanding a reality that
is made also of our dreams and aspirations for a better world. In other words, cinema has to show
how love becomes knowledge that guides us to make the right choices in our existence.
15 ―Like poetry, cinema must be mad love‖
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A chance encounter can change the course of a whole life. Kyrou strives to preserve the
unconscious character of these encounters with the face of a woman, unaware of the power of
her own presence. Cinema has powerful technical means—from close-ups to spatial-temporal
montage—that can rescue the meaning of an otherwise dull story, like the reconciliation of the
married couple of Sunrise (1927) that F. W. Murnau‘s cinematic genius transformed into the tale
of faithfulness that overcomes every obstacle. However, a director like William Wyler lost his
talent when some arid esthetes only interested in splitting hairs about technical means (among
which obviously the friends-rivals of the Cahiers must be included) succeeded in convincing him
that he was an intellectual and that the depth of field was the center of his work. The
sophisticated camera movement on the wedding ring of the mutilated veteran in The Best Years
of Our Lives (1946) is a sign of this technical abjection. For Kyrou, instead, ―tous ces moyens
techniques n‘ont d‘intérêt que par rapport au contenu exprimé‖ (p. 26).16 The content of contents
is—of course—a love that empowers us in living our lives fully and passionately. Such a love
would not have the protagonists of Wyler‘s Roman Holiday (1953) separate for their social
obligation.
Kyrou likes pre-war American films as does the Cahiers. However, he paradoxically
finds their enabling character in the censorship and in the repressed sexual mores of American
people. In fact, this situation forces intelligent directors to come up with images that are all the
more erotic because they include an interdiction. For example, Josef von Sternberg skillfully
concocted the image of Marlene Dietrich coming out from a gorilla costume in Blonde Venus
(1923). More radically, the material conditions of work in Hollywood are so industrialized and
regulated that chance in more likely to happen and subvert the manifest meaning of a film. In
fact, ―le hasard, unique orchestration de rencontres insolites, de plans inconnus, joue à
Hollywood un rôle prépondérant et ceci justement parce que tout y est calculé d‘avance, minuté,
16 ―All these technical means are interesting only in relation to the content that they express.‖
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préparé sur mesures‖ (p. 147).17 When chance strikes the latent content of life appears on the
screen transcending the effort of the auteur. For Kyrou a beautiful woman is the ultimate source
of chance. Louise Brooks—the real phantom seen through a crystal of dream— can transform
any film in which she plays. Any technique fades away before her life-bringing presence. ―La vie
est rencontre; rencontre de la femme-prisme à travers laquelle le monde devient une immense
vallée de joie‖ (p. 483).18 Only the ineffable presence of rare women like Ava Gardner can
perhaps save Hollywood cinema from the threat of larger screens and technical systems that have
their pendant in the vogue of artificial, war-mongering pin-ups and are a new form of opium for
subduing audiences (p. 523).
It is interesting that this veneration of beautiful actresses has its downside in Kyrou‘s
repeated and unnecessary claims about his heterosexuality and his consequent inability to write
about beautiful men (p. 306).19 Only a woman could have written about them. For the same
reason, the Greek critic strongly argues that the numerous gay directors in Hollywood are all
failures in portraying heterosexual love stories (he ignores, though, that also the genius Murnau
was queer). Even if a strain of homophobia was present in Breton and in Buñuel, it did not
prevent them from having meaningful friendships with René Crevel and Federico García Lorca.
And Aragon was known for attending the official meetings of the PCF in a pink suit well before
making public the gay tendencies that Drieu La Rochelle had already noticed in the Twenties.
But the anxiety about sexual identity was definitely stronger at the turn of the Sixties and it
needed these boundaries to be reinforced, particularly in groups so scarce in women like the
17 ―Chance, the only orchestration of unusual encounters, of unknown plans, plays in Hollywood
a preponderant role and this precisely because there everything is calculated in advance, drafted, prepared
to measure.‖
18 ―Life is encounter; encounter of the woman-prism through whom the world becomes an
immense valley of joy.‖
19 Kyrou considers Leontine Sagan‘s Girls in Uniform (1931), which made scandal for the kiss
of a teacher to a student, as the best film on sexual education as it does not preach. But in the section on
―perversions‖ his treatment of lesbianism is rather dismissive and unsympathetic, much less enthusiastic
than the part on feet fetishism.
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close brotherhoods of young film critics. Their answer was, in many ways, an objectification of
women. There is no doubt that Firk‘s intervention during the debate on Hiroshima mon amour is
powerful because she is speaking with a woman‘s voice. But we should also consider that the
increased polishing of sexual boundaries did not allow her male colleagues to even attempt to
imagine what a woman could feel in similar circumstances. They needed her revelation and her
guarantee in order to start a discussion on this film.
Kyrou‘s focus on amour fou is a critique of the formalism of the Cahiers, but also of the
legacy of Zhdanovism that had not allowed individual feelings to take center stage. Surrealists
always thought that a film that has been censored should always be honored as a dangerous film.
Kyrou raises this objection in order to refute Georges Sadoul‘s negative opinion about the erotic
character of pre-revolutionary, non-Marxist Russian films. For the Stalinist critic, in fact, they
were part of a conservative plot to blind the common people to their everyday vital problems
(Kyrou 1957, p. 113-114). According to Kyrou, instead, Tsarist censorship knew that these films
were dangerous for the status quo. They had realized that these apparently harmless movies were
actually channeling the volcanic energies that would find their open expression in the Soviet
Revolution. Kyrou recalls that when he was in the Greek underground a Soviet book about love
in a Kolkhoz had inspired his group and given them new energies for resisting. ―Harassés par le
travail clandestin, nous essayions de vivre comme les héros du roman, dévisageant nos
camarades pour y découvrir l‘héroïne et passant de longues nuits à discuter de l‘amour libre, de
ses avantages comme de ses inconvénients‖ (p. 118).20 Love and revolt against oppressive
regimes are for him the two most liberating forces and should never be separated. The first
Soviet films underscored this point when they depicted conflicted love-stories between White
and Red Russians or between a Russian woman and a German ―enemy.‖ Therefore, it is false to
think that dedicated revolutionaries should be impervious to love.
20 ―Exhausted by the Resistance work, we attempted to live like the hero of the novel, gazing at
the faces of our comrades to find the heroine and spending long nights discussing free love, with its
advantages and inconveniences.‖
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The Greek critic also challenges the autochthonous character of the ennobling view of
love that Sadoul and Aragon considered the basis of ―National Communism.‖ Breton‘s amour
fou had an isolating thrust and an absolute claim that overcame every tie to the Nation and to the
race. Therefore, Kyrou harshly criticizes Jean-Pierre Melville‘s adaptation of a successful
Resistance novel in his film Le Silence de la mer (1949). ―Le plus gênant dans le roman de
Vercors (et le film de Melville) était l‘attitude raciste de la jeune fille qui, manifestement
amoureuse d‘un Allemand prêt à tout abandonner, à renier le nazisme pour elle, ne voit en lui
que l‘aspect du militaire occupant. Au lieu de le sauver, elle l‘envoie à la mort‖ (p. 325).21 It is
certainly not by chance that Firk evokes precisely this film in the round table on Hiroshima mon
amour. As we can see, this reference was also part of a broader polemic directed against the
Stalinist view of love.
Instead, Kyrou praises Compton Bennett‘s film So Little Time… (1952) for his courage
in depicting a love story between a German officer and a young woman in occupied Belgium.
This tender and physical love between two proud people helps her to overcome her hate for an
officer of the army that killed several members of her family. And it would have led him to join
the underground if the story was not condemned to finish tragically for both of them. ―Il est
évident que le colonel, aux yeux dessillés par l‘amour, passerait à la résistance, si les amants
n‘étaient pas tués, elle par ses compatriotes qui dans le feu de la lutte n‘ont pas eu le temps de
comprendre, lui par les hitlériens qui connaissent le danger que représentait un tel amour‖ (p.
325).22 The veteran of the Greek Resistance praises films in which love is ennobling and opens
the eyes of the German officer to the evil of Nazism. However, the chauvinistic undertones of
―National Communism‖ disappear in a love that crosses patriotic boundaries.
21 ―The most disturbing in Vercors‘ novel (and in Melville‘s film) was the racist attitude of the
girl that, manifestly in love with a German who was ready to abandon everything, to renounce Nazism for
her, sees in him only the appearance of the occupying soldier. Instead of rescuing him, she sends him to
death.‖
22 ―It is evident that the colonel, to whom love opened the eyes, would join the Resistance, if the
lovers were not killed; she by her fellow-countrymen that in the heat of the struggle do not have the time
to understand; he by the Hitlerians that know the danger that such a love represented.‖
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Kyrou did not write an essay about Hiroshima mon amour, despite his evident interest in
contested love stories between enemies and his friendship for Resnais. He also did not join the
discussion on Hiroshima mon amour in the roundtable, even if he expressed his opinion
concerning other films. In fact, paradoxically, Kyrou did not really like Hiroshima mon amour.
He considered Resnais‘ first long feature only a failed attempt on the path that led to the
perfection of Last Year in Marienbad (1961). In the later film, in fact, the cinematic fury of
Resnais plunged the audience directly into the unconscious:
La technique devient un langage visant à toucher le plus grand
nombre de spectateurs possible. Toutefois les spectateurs ne sont pas
encore prêts à recevoir un tel choc et j‘ai bien peur que le snobisme qui fit
le succès du premier film, raté, de Resnais (il s‘agit évidemment de
Hiroshima mon amour) ne puisse pas jouer pour L’Année dernière. Ce
dernier film prend le contre pied du précédent, Hiroshima s‘adressant au
conscient des spectateurs, L’Année dernière à leur subconscient. (Kyrou
1961, p. 67)23
For the Greek critic, in fact, Marienbad did not deal with memory as did Hiroshima. It
addressed itself to the oneiric part of the audience and each viewer could interpret it in different
ways that depended on his or her unconscious. This character was so pronounced that it escaped
from the control of its auteurs, Resnais and the Nouveau Roman writer Alain Robbe-Grillet.
Resnais constructed this world from his memory of the tragic charm, the hesitations and the
sudden boldnesss of the divas of the Dannunzian era of Italian cinema. Most importantly, the
geometric and crazy labyrinth of the baroque castle allowed chances encounters in the best
Surrealist tradition. ―Les chemins qui bifurquent permettent l‘explosion du hasard objectif, la
provoquent parfois‖ (p. 65).24 The love story developed through repeated and contradictory
chance encounters in a dream-like environment. Kyrou‘s essay on Marienbad stresses how
23 ―The technique becomes a language that aims to touch the greatest number of viewers
possible. However, the audience is not yet ready to welcome such a shock and I am afraid that the
snobbism that made the success of Resnais‘ first—and failed—film (it is evidently Hiroshima mon
amour) will not work for Last Year in Marienbad. The two films go into opposite directions, as
Hiroshima addresses the conscious of the audience, and Last Year their unconscious.‖
24 ―The bifurcating paths allow the explosion of objective chance, and sometimes provoke it.‖
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Resnais was close to L’Âge d’or and to Breton‘s conception of the unconscious and objective
chance. The funny side of the story is, of course, that Breton instead did not particularly
appreciate Marienbad. He was not interested in the Nouveau Roman and considered Alain
Robbe-Grillet a writer whose international success had been overrated for conservative
reasons.25
In chapter Four, I will show how the Internationale Situationniste hailed precisely the
name of Breton to trash this predominance of the unconscious in Kyrou‘s essay on Marienbad
and to withdraw their confidence from Resnais whom they had strongly supported at the time of
Hiroshima mon amour. The Situationists, in fact, wanted to present themselves as the real heirs
of Surrealism as they did not fail to engage the theme of modern technology that played a part in
Breton‘s writings of the Thirties. Guy Debord had criticized the tendency of post-war Surrealism
to overestimate the themes of the unconscious and the irrational in a prerecorded speech played
at a public meeting on Surrealism in 1958. Significantly, also Henri Lefebvre—the philosopher
of daily life— was supposed to attend this event for his sympathy toward the Situationist group.
Debord stated that the epigones of Surrealism did not develop the more important and
progressive affirmation of new ways of life that pre-war Surrealism had stressed and that
Lefebvre was continuing:
Le côté rétrograde du surréalisme s‘est manifesté d‘emblé par la
surestimation de l‘inconscient, et sa monotone exploitation artistique;
l‘idéalisme dualiste qui tend à comprendre l‘histoire comme simple
opposition entre les précurseurs de l‘irrationnel surréaliste et la tyrannie
des conceptions logiques gréco-latines; la participation à cette propagande
bourgeoise qui présente l‘amour comme la seule aventure possible dans
les conditions modernes d‘existence. (Debord 2006, p. 373)26
25 Breton (2008, p. xxxiii) stated in an interview at the turn of the Sixties: ― je crains que tout
ceci ne soit monté internationalement à des fins probablement réactionnaires. En effet, RobbeGrillet…enfin, on n‘a rien à voir avec ce personnage-là. Vous comprenez, c‘est une chose de mode
actuelle.‖ [I am afraid that all this has been exaggerated internationally most likely with reactionary aims.
As a matter of fact, Robbe-Grillet…after all, we have nothing to do with that character. You know, it is
just the fashion of the day.]
26 ―The backward side of Surrealism has revealed itself, first, in the overestimation of the
unconscious, and in its monotonous artistic exploitation; in the dualist idealism that tends to grasp history
as the mere opposition between the precursors of the Surrealist irrational and the tyranny of Greek-Latin
111
According to Debord, the consequence of this conservative choice of the younger
Surrealists was an inability to deal with the transformations of modern technology and its
possible use in envisioning richer and more significant forms of everyday life. ―Les rêves
surréalistes correspondent à l‘impuissance bourgeoise, aux nostalgies artistiques, et au refus
d‘envisager l‘emploi libérateur des moyens techniques supérieurs de notre temps‖ (p. 374).27
The Situationists maintained that love itself would be richer if it is thought in connection to the
complex urbanism of modern cities. The modern metropolis reflects the fluxes of capitalistic
development, but also can be used consciously as a tool to feel deeper and more emotionally
sophisticated passions, that would in turn create collective needs for better architectures. By
contrast, we saw that Ado Kyrou presented his cult of the beautiful and ineffable woman also as
a reaction to the technical improvements that Hollywood was adopting and that were poisoning
the world of a simpler and more erotic cinema that he had come to love. Debord‘s Situationists,
instead, intended to take up the progressive heritage of pre-war Surrealism. They explored the
role of technology in capitalist societies and developed possibilities of intervention that
challenged the progressive colonization of everyday life through a liberating use of technology.
The Situationists were right in stressing that the excessive role of the unconscious was a
conservative symptom of the limited role of technology in Kyrou‘s theorization of amour fou.
Kyrou‘s reading of ―hasard objectif‖ in his essay on Marienbad did not start from a reflection on
how Breton had created this concept to trace an innovating relation between art and everyday
technological objects. According to Breton, in fact, the perfect ability of photography to offer
perfect reproductions of reality has made mimetic art obsolete. Art has reacted to this challenge
by finding in everyday technological objects –perhaps encountered by chance in a flea market—
an imaginary double that rescues them from the imperative of immediate usefulness. Surrealist
logical conceptions; and in its participation in this bourgeois propaganda that presents love as the only
possible adventure in the modern conditions of existence.‖
27 ―Surrealist dreams correspond to bourgeois impotence, to artistic nostalgia, and to the refusal
to envision a liberating usage for the superior technical means of our time.‖
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objects as defined by Salvador Dali unite a minimum of mechanical functioning to phantoms
created through unconscious acts (Breton 1992, p. 494). In turn, this imagination tends to impose
itself and to become objective for larger groups of people, raising collective claims. Therefore, it
will certainly influence the production of unprecedented objects of the future that will be richer
in meaning and in their ability to satisfy actual human desires. In this sense, Kyrou‘s aspiration
to unite the unconscious with everyday life was crippled by his lack of interest in technology.
This defect did not allow him to envision the liberating path through which the Situationists
intended to appropriate technological progress and to displace it to recreate a chance for a richer
and politically meaningful daily life.
To conclude, Kyrou‘s theorization was certainly important in providing some of the
conditions of possibility for Firk‘s voice as a woman to be heard. He created a myth of the erotic
woman that we can encounter by chance on the screen, but that we should expect also to
encounter in real life. This thought created an expectation in the close brotherhood of film critics
for a woman in flesh and blood who would partly fulfill this description. Firk‘s momentous
appearance, her influence in the sudden conversion of some of her colleagues to the Algerian
cause, and her love stories with Thirard and Tailleur provided the feeling that this incarnation
had happened. Moreover, the polarization of sexual binaries had made her voice as a woman all
the more necessary in dealing with touchy issues that men could not address. However, Kyrou‘s
objectification of women did not guarantee that she would be heard as a subject that speaks for
herself and not just presenting ―the woman‘s position‖ for the benefit of her men colleagues. Her
underground activity for the Algerian cause provided an antidote to this threat as they allowed
her to talk about a broader situation that she knew first hand for her own involvement.
Moreover, in the next section I show that another Surrealist writer of Positif was
connecting ―mad love‖ to the question of technology, providing another resource for Firk‘s
persona as a budding woman critic.
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―Mad Love‖ vs. Technocracy in Robert Benayoun
Robert Benayoun was a Moroccan-born critic who joined the Surrealist movement in the
post-war. Like Ado Kyrou, he also had a penchant for the unconscious. But he supplemented it
with a closer attention to the question of technology. Also his reading of Last Year in Marienbad
for the no. 44 of Positif stresses the dream-like construction and the chance encounters of the
lovers. His 1962 essay ―L’Année dernière à Marienbad ou les exorcismes du réel‖ shows how
Resnais and Robbe Grillet had courageously exposed themselves to the retaliations of the most
obscure part of their minds. But Benayoun adds that the way in which the film taps into the
collective unconscious raises also the ghost of a factory of robots. The lovers are mechanically
reproduced in multiple specimens. ―J‘ai moi-même pensé que l‘on pouvait se trouver dans une
fabrique d‘androïdes: Delphine Seyrig ânonne un peu comme si elle ne disposait que d‘un
registre limité de phrases et de gestes. Elle donne parfois (cri poussé dans le bar) l‘impression
qu‘on vient de lui retirer sa clé de fonctionnement‖ (Goudet 2002, p. 101).28
On this particular point, Benayoun‘s reading recalls Georges Sadoul‘s 1961 comparison
between Marienbad and L’Âge d’or as two apparently selfish and disengaged films that,
however, both gave voice to the deepest concerns of their times. At the turn of the Sixties this
care is the anguish of a cybernetic world and of the hydrogen bomb. ―En 1961, au temps des
avenirs incertains, des angoisses, des craintes mal définies et pourtant précises. Dans ce châteaupalace géométrique s‘organise la cybernétique de mystérieuses parties de cartes, entre une
représentation dont les acteurs disent les préoccupations des spectateurs et les explications
contradictoires d‘un groupe sculpté […]‖ (Sadoul 1979, p. 219).29 In other words, Kyrou sees
28 ―I myself thought that we could have been in a factory of androids: Delphine Seyrig stammers
a little as if she had at her disposal only a limited register of sentences and gestures. Sometimes (the
scream uttered in the bar) she gives the impression that somebody has just taken away her operating key.‖
29 ―In 1961, at the time of uncertain futures, of anguishes, of hardly defined and yet precise fears.
In this geometrical castle-palace organizes itself the cybernetics of mysterious card games, between a
representation whose actors say the concerns of the audience and the contradictory explications of a
sculptural group […]. ‖
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Marienbad as a flight in a dream-like universe of tragic chance encounter, implying that it is not
escapism because dream is action from a Surrealist perspective. On the contrary, in different
ways, both Benayoun and Sadoul recuperate also the ―objective‖ character of Breton‘s ―objective
hazard‖ in the sense of an interest in modern technology.
Benayoun found the ideal situation to develop this trend of his thought, while also
continuing to connect amour fou to other tendencies that Positif had inherited from Surrealism
such as anti-colonialism and the denunciation of political censorship. In fact, the Moroccan critic
was the only member of the editorial board of Positif that joined Breton in the ―friendship of the
No‖ of Le 14 juillet. This experience projected him into an ideological crucible in which
Surrealism and Existentialism worked toward the elaboration of a shared discourse of technology
able to account for the political disaffection and the technocratic threat of Gaullist France. The
two editors symbolized the aim of an active cooperation of these two main lines of thought in a
variegated community of intellectuals of different political affiliations. The Surrealist Jean
Schuster, in fact, joined the ―Existentalist of Communism‖ Dionys Mascolo, Duras‘ partner.
Benayoun‘s most committed view of ―mad love‖ belongs to the daring articulation of this
paradoxical community. Significantly, Resnais was the author that he chose in order to draw a
synthesis between the two main positions that were at the core of Le 14 juillet. Accordingly, he
articulated mad love with the question of Algeria, the danger of nuclear technologies, and the
colonization of private life through unproblematic media representations that supplemented State
censorship on political issues. This new perspective allowed the Surrealist critic to avoid
overvaluing the individual unconscious of the single viewers in Kyrou‘s escapist fashion. Instead
he was led to consider the way in which modern technology forms a structure of containment
that can also become the condition of possibility for an alternative form of politics. In other
words, politics should be able to address the depoliticizing alienation of technology itself.
In order to better understand Benayoun‘s discussion of Resnais, it is important to sketch
the main stakes that had led to the foundation of Le 14 juillet. Duras and her friends had started
this journal de combat in 1958. Their main motive was to protest against the return to power of
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Charles de Gaulle. The General had offered his services to the Nation to solve the situation of
crisis created by the supporters of French Algeria and part of the Algerian army that menaced to
paralyze also mainland France. This turn of events represented the most dramatic failure of the
democratic government. Moreover, French people welcomed it with an apathy that seemed to
offer a favorable terrain for a Fascist development. As a war hero de Gaulle had been the only
authentically nationalist leader in Europe, but he had now been interpolated into a discourse of
technocracy that changed the meaning of his figure.
Technocracy, in fact, functions better when it is politically neutral and it escapes
democratic control. Perhaps the best example of this new figure of the General is the testing of
the first French atomic bomb in the Algerian Sahara that had been announced for February 1960.
De Gaulle had initiated the French atomic program in 1945 to supply to the country‘s chronic
lack of energy and the bomb represented for France the chance to recuperate part of the grandeur
that it had lost as a world superpower and as an imperialist country. However, most of the
developments that had led from the peaceful use of nuclear energy to the creation of the bomb
had been a matter of undisclosed technocratic choices and procedures. They had taken place
independently from the political lineup of the Governments that were supposed to check them
and from open democratic discussions with the French people.
In this sense, it is not surprising that Benayoun‘s intervention on French cinema for the
issue of July 1958 refers to the problems that the project for a film on the atomic bomb would
encounter in a France engaged in the preparation of its first open air test. In fact, such a film
would target the most symbolic incarnation of the threat that technocracy represented at every
level of French politics, and particularly in the country‘s failure to come to terms with the end of
its colonial empire. Resnais did not take part in Le 14 juillet. But other references to the
director‘s work in Benayoun‘s article and the leading role of Duras and her friends in the journal
make it clear that the film in question is indeed Hiroshima mon amour. Significantly, Benayoun
juxtaposes—with slight modifications— two of the most controversial themes of Hiroshima mon
amour, i.e. the condemnation of the atomic war and tests and the ―mad love‖ between enemies.
116
In this case the contrasted love is between a French woman and an Algerian freedom fighter,
rather than between Elle and the German soldier during WWII. We might recall, though, that
Resnais himself raised the association between the figure of the German soldier and the Algerian
war in his first interview with Firk:
Si vous brûlez de conter l‘idylle, disons d‘un fellagha et d‘une
institutrice française, allez donc en Russie: les amours d‘une jeune fille
rouge et d‘un officier blanc y font partie de la littérature la plus
rudimentaire. Si vous voulez faire le procès de la guerre atomique, en
dépit des projets d‘une bombe saharienne, allez au Japon, en
Tchécoslovaquie ou en Pologne où pour des raisons multiples, ce sujet
peut être abordé sans une intervention de la D.S.T. (Benayoun 1958, p.
16)30
Benayoun argues that at the time the conservative censorship on sexual mores that
plagued French cinema was partially weakening—thanks to the phenomenon Brigitte Bardot. By
contrast, the political censorship was only increasing. The cinematic representation of the bomb
would have immediately caused an intervention of the Domestic Intelligence Service. Films on
the Resistance like Resnais‘ Night and Fog were banned in the colonies lest they instigated the
local freedom fighters and might have been banned in France too if Gaullism turned out to be a
cover for a Fascist regime. In fact, ―Nuit et Brouillard ne fut-il pas considéré comme subversif,
parce qu‘il sous-entendait l‘existence contemporaine d‘un régime concentrationnaire français?‖
(p. 16).31 The scandal of torture was kept invisible, while the representation of happy colonists
cheering de Gaulle and the educational role of the French colonial troops abounds. Films on
conscientious objection did not receive the authorization to shoot. In this context, French
censorship would not have allowed the ―mad love‖ between an Algerian fighter and a French
woman due to the political associations that the audience could have drawn from it. All these
30 ―If you burn for the desire of telling the idyll of a fellagha and a French governess, then go to
Russia. There the love of a Red girl and a White officer are part of the most rudimentary literature. If you
want to examine the atomic war, despite the projects of a Sahara bomb, go to Japan, to Czechoslovakia or
to Poland where for multiple reasons, this subject can be treated without an intervention by the D.S.T.
[Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire: Domestic Intelligence Service]‖
31 ―Wasn‘t Night and Fog considered subversive because it implied the current existence of a
French concentrationary regime?‖
117
elements came together to create a paradoxical situation. In fact, Surrealism fought for a wider
acceptance of the potential of erotic representations. However, the relenting of censorship in this
area becomes a mere decoy that deflects attention from the growing alienation of the French
public from the political choices that they should consciously face. In this sense, Benayoun‘s
evocation of Breton‘s ―mad love‖ asks to bring back to it not so much the exploration of the
unconscious, but rather its scandalous political potential in showing concrete areas of oppression
and in upsetting the lulling system of the media.
In order to achieve this scandal, it is crucial that the woman be French and the loverenemy a man. This gender distribution is certainly a key factor in the reception of the episode of
Nevers in Hiroshima mon amour. It was a shocking element particularly for the older male
population. Moreover, for the first time the heroine of a film incarnated the taboo image of a
tondue. Sylvie Lindeperg shows that at the turn of the Sixties and during the following decade
the French cinematic representation of WWII had been enriched with the topos of the
―Allemande secourable,‖ i.e. the helpful German woman in love with a French soldier
(Lindeperg 1997, p. 386-387). As the cinema historian argues, the creation of the European
Common Market in 1959 was certainly a factor in this popularization of a theme that Renoir had
introduced in The Grand Illusion (1937). It was now necessary to preach the rapprochement
between the French and the German people whom the war had separated, but that deeper ties
united. In this sense, comparisons in the French press between the love stories of Hiroshima mon
amour and The Grand Illusion are instructive as they were often detrimental to Resnais‘ film.
For example, Max Milner writes in Esprit that the choice of a German lover in Hiroshima mon
amour is ambiguous to say the least:
Il pourrait être—et c‘est ce qu‘on croit à certain moments—
l‘affirmation de l‘unité humaine par-delà l‘absurdité de la guerre (comme
la rencontre de la femme allemande dans la Grande Illusion). Mais il
signifie beaucoup profondément, me semble-t-il, le mépris, par une sorte
de découragement anticipé de toute vraie communication, puisqu‘avec
118
l‘homme auquel elle se livre on ne voit pas que l‘héroïne ait échangé autre
chose que des baisers et des caresses. (Milner 1959, p. 406)32
As a Surrealist, Benayoun could not accept this undervaluation of a woman‘s sexuality on
the part of his Personalist (and probably Catholic) colleague. In fact, from the point of view of
―mad love‖ the risk of crossing the barriers of national belonging is always positive and a form
of knowledge. From this standpoint, Benayoun‘s version of Breton‘s amour fou challenges the
―vérités de confection‖ or the prefabricated truths of the media that dampen the critical spirit of
the French audience. It asks the Leftists readership of Le 14 juillet to think what the prospected
atomic testing in the oasis of Reggane can mean when it is consciously articulated to the issue of
decolonization in terms that are different from the Gaullist rhetoric of grandeur. The failure of
French pacifists to join an international watch on African territory against the open air testing in
Algeria for fear that their protest against the French bomb could raise the touchy issue of the
French colonies shows that this articulation could certainly not be taken for granted.33
Moreover, Benayoun‘s attack against technocracy signals the rise of leisure time and of
private life as new sites of contention, due to the progress of modern technology and the deeper
penetration of modern media into the actual lives of the people. It is important to stress that this
alternative and more dynamic conception of ―mad love‖ was available in the immediate circle of
Positif. It was a resource that could assist Firk in her powerful formulation of a political
articulation that started from the point of view of a colonized and technologically endangered
private life. In fact, it is from this contested space that Michèle Firk develops her critique of
Hiroshima mon amour. Benayoun‘s only woman colleague in Positif fully embraces Breton‘s
32 ―It could be—and this is what we believe in certain moments—the affirmation of a human
unity beyond the absurdity of the war (like the encounter with the German woman in The Grand Illusion.
But—it seems to me— it most deeply signifies contempt, for a sort of anticipated distrust of every
communication, because we don‘t see that she has exchanged more than kisses and caresses with the man
to whom she gives herself.‖
33 See Taylor (1988, p. 158): ―the hoped-for Anglo-French sponsorship for the project did not
materialize, perhaps because, despite their genuine pacifism, the French were suspicious of the Anglo-US
group‘s criticism of French nuclear weapons and testing. Chauvinism, and the suspicions of its existence
even in the Peace Movement, was a deep and fundamental problem confronting all those who looked to a
genuinely European and/or international unity over the nuclear issue.‖
119
scandalous amour fou that was the motto of the neo-Surrealist cinema journal. However, she
turns it into an empowering force that enables her to speak as a woman. ―Mad love‖ loses its
excessive mystical characters in its articulation with a thought that has its sources in a perhaps
loose interpretation of Existentialism the resources to indict the alienation of modern technology
without waiting for the teleological palingenesis that Stalinism promised for the distant future.
The woman is no longer a poetic and prophetic voice for the male poet‘s benefit as in de
Beauvoir‘s critique of Breton. Nor is she the sudden revelation of the unconscious that can
rescue even the most boring film and that will save the film industry from the threat of modern
technological innovations, as in Ado Kyrou. Instead, she is a committed subject who is able to
derive from her understanding of private love and suffering a stronger voice in speaking against
the massacres of the century and against the distorted use of modern technology that allows
them.
I show in Chapter Five that Benayoun did not raise again the issue of the French atomic
tests in Algeria in the chapter devoted to Hiroshima mon amour in his 1980‘s book Alain
Resnais. Arpenteur de l’imaginaire. In fact, by then the academization of Film Studies as a
discipline and the more abstract focus of semiology had set in place terministic screens that
influenced even independent journals like Positif and that had a decontextualizing effect on the
reading of individual films. Charged political circumstances that might have influenced their
production became difficult to discuss. By contrast, the focus on the formal refinement and on
the myths that the film mobilized and exported through intertextuality increased. In his book
Benayoun did not even recall his participation with Duras in Le 14 juillet and with Duras and
Resnais in the Manifesto of the 121. These two events, however, were crucial in forming the
political humus from which Hiroshima mon amour was born. Even if Firk did not take part in
these paradoxical communities, she actively shared their concerns.
Their influence is evident in her contribution to Positif‘s roundtable of November 1959
and particularly to its discussion on Hiroshima mon amour. In fact, the existence of Le 14 juillet
was the condition of possibility for her attempt to develop a more committed reading of ―mad
120
love‖ through a discourse of technology that drew broader articulations and questioned the
binary opposition between public and private. Firk‘s politics of aimance spoke from the
politically contested space of the private and used this knowledge to speak about the public
choices that faced French people. In doing so she fully inhabited and deeply transformed the
articulations that Benayoun had traced from Breton‘s ―mad love‖ in Le 14 juillet. In order to
trace this transformation, let‘s follow the debate step by step.
Firk and the Roundtable on Hiroshima mon amour
Louis Seguin—the devil‘s advocate of the roundtable— opens the debate on the question
of the authorship of Hiroshima mon amour. He echoes Sadoul‘s criticism of Duras‘ writing and
his opinion that the director is the real auteur of Hiroshima mon amour. Like Sadoul, he praises
Resnais for his ability to create a new style and to cross the boundaries between cinema and
literature. However, Duras is ―le Faulkner du pauvre‖ and not the best possible choice as a
screenplay writer (Goudet 2002, p. 56).34 Roger Tailleur counters that Duras is not simply a
screenplay writer, but rather the original author of Hiroshima mon amour that Resnais simply
illustrates like Orson Welles interprets Shakespeare. The film is her flesh and blood. Her
language has a beauty and such boldness that is rare in current cinema. Its musical quality
matches the ―musical tragedy‖ of the film. On this point, Tailleur indirectly targets Sadoul, who
had accused Duras precisely of having failed to maintain a tragic tone that would have been more
suitable to the representation of the episode of Nevers. Tailleur adds that the literary quality of
Duras writing touches the core interest of Positif as the journal of ―mad love.‖ In fact, ―comment
ne pas voir dans les scènes amoureuses autant de moments prodigieux, quelque chose comme le
lyrisme vadimien poussé au tragique sans perdre pour autant une once de réalisme‖ (p. 56).35
34 ―The Faulkner of the poor.‖
35 ―How can we fail to see that all the love scenes are prodigious moments, something like
[Roger] Vadim‘s lyricism pushed to the tragic without losing even an ounce of realism.‖
121
Seguin continues his reproaches on the political level. This time, he goes further than
Sadoul who limited all his major critiques to Duras. In fact, Seguin accuses Resnais himself of a
certain lack of political clarity that clashes with his well-known Leftist convictions. ―Sans aller
jusqu‘à dire que Resnais est un nazi, ou un fasciste, on peut regretter le parallèle entre la
libération de Nevers et le bombardement d‘Hiroshima, qui rappelle les slogans de Rivarol‖ (p.
58).36 In fact, the lack of contextualization renders the message unclear. Resnais almost appears
to argue in favor of unconditional peace in any circumstance, even if it means to silently accept
exterminations camps and the growth of Japanese militarism. In this sense, he recalls the
irresponsible behavior of the French partisans of non-intervention in 1937 that ended up easing
the task for the future aggressors.
This contentious remark enables Michèle Firk to jump into the discussion on a high note
and without delay. ―Moi, je trouve que son film est politiquement d‘une audace auprès de
laquelle bien des œuvres de cinéastes dûment catalogués ‗de gauche‘ peuvent sembler
réactionnaires‖ (p. 58).37 Firk strongly denies that Resnais could be even remotely associated
with Fascism. And she immediately raises the questions that we are examining in this chapter,
addressing Sadoul‘s negative view of the ―mad love‖ between Elle and the German soldier.
Sadoul considered that the Japanese man slapped Elle in the face because he was disgusted with
her love story with an ―enemy in uniform.‖ Firk is not of the same opinion. ―Si vous voulez,
prenons l‘exemple de ce qui choque le plus les détracteurs du film, soit l‘amour pendant la
guerre, d‘une Française pour un occupant allemand; eh bien, à mon avis, cela est beaucoup plus
profond que toutes les histoires de résistance qu‘on connaît par cœur…‖ (p. 58-59).38 Ado
36 ―Without saying that Resnais is a Nazi—or a Fascist—we can regret the parallel between the
liberation of Nevers and the bombing of Hiroshima, which recalls the slogans of [the Fascist journal]
Rivarol.‖
37 ―As for me, I think that his film is politically of a such daring that many works of cineastes
that are duly catalogued ‗of the Left‘ can only seem reactionary in comparison.‖
38 ―If you want, let‘s take the example that shocks the detractors of the film the most, i.e. the love
during the war, between a French woman and a German invader; well, in my opinion, this is much deeper
than all the stories of the Resistance that we know by heart… ‖
122
Kyrou had opposed to Sadoul‘s view of ―National Communism‖ the example of a film like
Bennett‘s So Little Time… in which a German officer loved a Belgian woman with a Bretonian
form of ―mad love.‖ And he had criticized the racism of Melville‘s La Silence de la mer in which
a French girl sends to death her German lover even if he was ready to join the underground for
her. However, Firk stresses that the ―mad love‖ of Hiroshima mon amour is even more radical,
because the German soldier is not an officer. Duras‘ irony that for Sadoul just tainted the tragic
tone that the situation required is fully justified by the terrible frailty of the lovers‘ status. ―En
effet, cet Allemand n‘est pas n‘importe qui, pas un officier comme dans Le Silence de la mer,
mais un simple petit troufion sans l’ombre d’un grade, l‘ironie avec laquelle Emmanuelle Riva
prononce ‗Mon amour était un ennemi de la France‘ est évidente‖ (p. 59).39
As a young woman, Firk does something that the men of Positif could not do. She
inhabits the private space and starts to ask questions about it. She even identifies with the
German kid and tries to think what he thought: ―Considérons pour une fois les choses de son
point de vue à lui…‖ (p. 49).40 The boy was 23, Elle was 19. Firk herself was only 22. If he
really was an ―enemy of France,‖ why did he want to marry a French woman? Wouldn‘t his
superiors severely punish him for loving an ―enemy of Germany‖ if he were ever discovered?
Who would continue the war if every poor little soldier did as he did? Hence, they had to hide.
As for the girl, Firk continues, ―je ne pense pas que les filles qui couchaient avec les chefs nazis
aient jamais dû prendre leurs rendez-vous dans le froid des granges et des ruines, ni qu‘à la
Libération, elles soient restées étendues dehors sur le cadavre de leur amant, au vu et au su de
tout le monde‖ (p. 49).41 Firk opposes to Sadoul‘s accusation a feminine wisdom. As a woman,
39 ―In fact, this German is not no matter whom, not an officer as in The Silence of the Sea, but a
simple littl’ private without the spit of a rank; the irony with which Emmanuelle Riva pronounces ‗My
love was an enemy of France‘ is evident.‖
40 ―Let‘s consider the things from his point of view…‖
41 ―I don‘t think that the girls that were sleeping with the Nazi chefs ever had to have their dates
in the cold of the granges and of the ruins, or that at Liberation, they have been laying outside on the
corpse of their lover, under the eyes of everybody.‖
123
she asserts the ability to deal with the particular face of love and to understand its everyday
needs. Therefore, she can correctly judge that the tragic end of this story of ―mad love‖
denounces Fascist chauvinism and the false myth of the Nation that hide the real problem,
―l‘internationalisme des classes‖ (p. 49).42
Firk is careful to attack directly only the followers of Marshal Pétain and the NeoFascists. But her reading is also in conflict with the ―National Communism‖ of her own party,
the PCF. In fact, class internationalism was not only one of the roots of Breton‘s conception of
―mad love‖ beyond nation and race. During WWII, it had also been mostly a concern of the
Trotskyite members of the Resistance who considered the German privates to be victims of
capitalistic imperialism as the French workers were. Therefore, their core strategy was
attempting to convince them to defect. Trotskyists and sympathizers of Trotskyism were also an
important component of the ―friendship of the No‖ of Le 14 juillet that attempted to construct a
non-Stalinist Left. Firk refuses to use the word ―enemy‖ for the German soldier. Instead, she
insists on the key word ―victims‖ to describe both him and the French girl, stressing their
innocence. She then quotes Elle‘s words from the end of the opening sequence about the memory
of Hiroshima, where the fear of deformed newborns and the contaminated food and water
visually stress the meaning of class exploitation.
However, she also articulates the issue of class with the exploitation in terms of race and
in terms of nations, following the linear progression of Duras‘ texts. The ability to understand the
exploitation in the private life and everyday life becomes the first link for a broader articulation
from which the politics of aimance is born:
Politiquement inconscients, la petite Française et le jeune
Allemand sont les victimes, j‘insiste sur le mot, d‘une guerre qu‘ils ne
comprennent pas, les victimes de ‗l‘inégalité posée en principe par
certains peuples contre d‘autres peuples, de l‘inégalité posée en principe
par certaines races contre d‘autres races, de l‘inégalité posée en principe
42 ―Class internationalism.‖
124
par certaines classes contre d‘autres classes,‘ dont parle le texte vers le
début. (p. 59-60)43
We can notice that actually Firk misquotes particularly the first part of Duras‘ text. In
fact, the sentence that Elle pronounces on inequality does not start with the question of ―victims‖
but with ―rage.‖ ―Contre qui la colère des villes entières ? La colère des villes entières, qu‘elles
le veuillent ou non, contre l‘inégalité posée en principe par certains peuples contre d‘autres
peuples […]‖ (Duras 1991, p. 31).44 In fact, the last part of Duras‘ text evoked the anti-nuclear
protest that started from ―ikari no Hiroshima‖ [Hiroshima of rage]. However, few people at the
time noticed that the visuals of Resnais‘ film that accompany the last part of Elle‘s evocation of
Hiroshima actually belong to the consequences of the radioactive fallout of the hydrogen bomb
test on Bikini that irradiated a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon Five. A crewmember
died and the tuna fish of the boat was reported to be contaminated. The incident started a popular
mass movement of antinuclear protest across Japan in 1954. Also in this case, women had a
central role. The wife of the dead fisherman was one of the initiators of the movement
(Yoneyama 1999, p. 13).
Probably Firk did not know these facts. Very likely none of the early critics did, until at
least the Brussels seminar of 1960. Nevertheless, it is significant that she chose to quote a part of
the film that refers to how the atomic bomb shattered the safe and repetitive boundaries of
everyday life, contaminating food and crashing families and their ability to reproduce. The
evocation of Hiroshima ends with the protest of the population that continues to suffer in the
present, in what is most intimate to them. In this way, Firk articulates her voice with other voices
of women; their closer association with the domain of private life empowered them to speak
43 ―Politically naïve, the little French girl and the young German boy are the victims—I insist on
the word—of a war that they don‘t understand, the victims ‗of the inequality posed in principle by certain
peoples against other peoples, of the inequality posed in principle by certain races against other races, of
the inequality posed in principle by certain classes against other classes,‘ about which the text speaks
toward its beginning.‖
44 ―Against whom the rage of entire cities? The rage of entire cities, whether they want it or not,
against the inequality posed in principle for certain peoples against other peoples […]. ‖
125
loudly and publicly against the bomb. The politics of aimance is born from the technological
undermining of the distinction between public and private, which is retrospectively shown to
have always been a construction. The official ―feminization of memory‖ (Lisa Yoneyama) linked
mostly images of women to the bomb as ―innocent victims‖ in order to deflect attention from
Japanese colonial atrocities. However, inadvertently, it became also the condition of possibility
for the empowerment of the women‘s voice in the protests against the bomb and against the
oppressive politics of the Japanese State and its Western allies. To paraphrase Dante‘s metaphor,
Firk is sitting on the shoulders of giantesses.
Tailleur attempts to help his lover in her debate with Seguin. He agrees with Seguin that
Resnais seems to condemn war unconditionally. But he adds that this is a form of generosity that
we expect from art and that does not eschew lucidity. Tailleur situates Hiroshima mon amour in
the progression of Guernica and Night and Fog in order to illustrate his point. We can recall that
Sadoul had also chosen the same films in order to place the anti-nuclear protest against war in
the orthodox line of the Stalinist view of the Resistance. For Tailleur, though, the central
question is time. Guernica related a specific act of war. Night and Fog did the same. But it
closed with a warning that the future torturers are already among us, which suggested that some
practices that the French army was using against the Algerian population could evoke the horror
of concentrations camps.
In this line, Hiroshima mon amour represents the future of the always pending menace of
the thousands of atomic bombs built and stocked in the world and of a new Hiroshima that could
happen anywhere else. According to Tailleur, the first part of the film is a passionate protest
against this state of affairs. In the second part, however, war assumes also somehow a positive
meaning, as a new war could bring the lovers together again. The protest then becomes a sort of
cynicism, ―une sorte de lucidité monstrueusement adulte‖ (Goudet 2002, p. 61).45 Firk replies
that this monstrous lucidity that is able to face the clashing aspects of reality is what Resnais
45 ―A sort of lucidity that is monstrously adult.‖
126
meant to reach in turning a dialectical film. But it is also the source of the unshakable unity of
Hiroshima mon amour. ―‗Tu me tues, tu me fais du bien,‘ tout le film est à l‘image de cette
phrase: de la peau viennent le plaisir et la douleur, de l‘amour la plus grande joie et la plus
grande souffrance, l‘oubli naît d‘une investigation dans la mémoire et c‘est un état d‘hypnose qui
engendre la lucidité…‖ (p. 61).46
Firk then offers her take on the topos of the microcosm and the macrocosm that Sadoul
had introduced in ―The Universe and the Dew.‖ Resnais had addressed the Stalinist audience in
terms of their expectations in his interview with Firk for Les Lettres Françaises. Dialectical
materialism required undervaluing individual dramas in comparison with the greater forces of
History. Resnais had described, therefore, ―l‘opposition entre un grande drame collectif et la
petite chose dérisoire et mesquine qu‘est comparativement le drame individuel de cette fille qui a
refusé de comprendre ce qui lui arrivait et que son caractère a poussé à accomplir des actes de
défi‖ (Firk and Resnais 1959 p. 7).47 Sadoul‘s topos of the universe and the dew, instead,
captured the scandalous balance of the individual and the immense in Hiroshima mon amour in
order to reintroduce the individual at the center of Stalinist thought. Firk agrees with Sadoul that
Elle‘s personal tragedy is not ―derisory‖ in comparison with the collective tragedy of Hiroshima
and adds that Resnais could not have been really thinking that it was. However, she develops the
theme of individual suffering to an extent that was foreign to Sadoul. In fact,
l‘atrocité de la tragédie collective d‘Hiroshima vient aussi de ce
qu‘elle est formée d‘une somme de tragédies individuelles; simplement
Resnais voit le tout et la partie, et la souffrance de milliers d‘hommes ne
diminue en rien celle d‘un seul être: au nom de quel critère peut-on
affirmer que l‘intensité de la douleur d‘une femme d‘Hiroshima,
innocente, dont les cheveux s‘arrachent par poignées, dont le corps est
mutilé ou qui accouche d‘un monstre, est plus forte que celle de la petite
46 ―‗You kill me, you do me good,‘ the whole film is in the image of this sentence: from the skin
come both pleasure and pain, from love the greatest joy and the greatest suffering; forgetting comes from
an investigation of memory and it is a state of hypnosis that engenders lucidity...‖
47 ―The opposition between an immense collective tragedy and the little derisory and miserable
thing that is in comparison the individual tragedy of this girl that has refused to understand what was
happening to her and that her character has pushed to carry out provocative acts.‖
127
tondue de Nevers, amputée de son amant, humiliée, enfermée seule dans
une cave et qui, innocente elle aussi, n‘en comprend pas davantage les
raisons. J‘ai l‘impression que Resnais est fasciné et épouvanté par cet
eternel ―massacre des innocents.‖ (Goudet 2002, p. 61-62)48
Seguin immediately replies echoing Guido Aristarco‘s claim in Cinema Nuovo that the
difference between the two tragedies should be contextualized. We can recall that Aristarco
accused love of blurring the necessary distinctions and of being responsible for the conservative
attitude of vague humanism of the film. In fact, we can understand that Firk‘s statement could be
rather shocking, even if her attempt to defend the individual tragedy of love from the standard
accusation of being ―miserable and derisory‖ partly justifies its tones. However, Firk‘s focus on
the impossibility to prove that the suffering of the tragedy of Nevers would be less intense than
the suffering of the women of Hiroshima is not only the glorification of ―mad love‖ over
everything that Positif required. It is also the only way that we have to give to suffering a face.
Emmanuel Levinas (1994, p. 162) wrote about the destructive nuclear power as ―les
forces sans visage‖ in an article published in Esprit in January 1956.49 The Jewish philosopher
argued that these man-made forces perpetuate the effects of natural disasters such as earthquakes
and volcanic eruptions in annihilating politics. They prove the vanity of traditional conceptions
of political prudence that attempts to master them. ―Les éléments débordent les Etats qui,
jusqu‘alors, les contenaient. La raison n‘apparaît pas dans la sagesse de la politique, mais dans
les vérités sans conditionnement historique, annonçant les dangers cosmiques. A la politique, se
substitue une cosmo-politique qui est une physique‖ (p. 163).50 Firk‘s attempts to understand the
48 ―The atrocity of the collective tragedy of Hiroshima comes also from the fact that it is formed
by a sum of individual tragedies; it is just that Resnais sees both the whole and the part, and the suffering
of thousands of human beings does not diminish at all that of a single being: in the name of what criterion
can we state that the intensity of the pain of a woman in Hiroshima, innocent, whose hair falls down in
handfuls, whose body is mutilated or who gives birth to a monster, is stronger than that of the little shaven
girl of Nevers, amputated of her lover, humiliated, shut alone into a cellar and who, also innocent, does
not understand the reasons for this. I have the feeling that Resnais is fascinated and frightened by this
eternal ‗massacre of the innocents.‘‖
49 ―The forces without a face.‖
50 ―The elements cross the borders of the States that, until then, contained them. Reason does not
appear in the wisdom of politics, but rather in truths without historical conditioning, announcing cosmic
dangers. From politics, we pass to a cosmo-politics that is a form of physics.‖
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suffering of the women of Hiroshima as they feel it individually in their bodies as she tries to
grasp the pain of the French girl who is closer to her way of intending the world. The sublime of
the atomic explosion does not enable us to imagine the thousands of people who died or whose
life was transformed into shame and pain. We cannot think their hopes and fears. In Levinas‘
terms, Firk‘s is an effort to restitute a face to the victims of the ―faceless forces‖ that threaten all
of us. It is also a way to envision from the cinders and the wounds a new form of politics able to
address a potential of destruction that does not recognize State borders and national belongings.
Like Derrida‘s politics of aimance, this more fundamental politics can only listen to the beating
of the heart of the other.
Firk closes the quotation above evoking the ―massacre of the innocents.‖ The Biblical
reference of this image introduces the Jewish theme that becomes preponderant in the last part of
her contribution to the roundtable on Hiroshima mon amour. The use of the term ―massacre,‖
though, enables her also to operate another rhetorical substitution that changes the meaning of
Sadoul‘s argument. As she turned the word ―enemy‖ into ―victim‖ in relation to the German
soldier, now she argues that the word ―massacre‖ should take the place of ―war.‖ Only in this
way can the real meaning of Hiroshima mon amour and of Resnais‘ previous films finally
appear. In fact, Georges Sadoul and after him Roger Tailleur considered Hiroshima mon amour
the development of Resnais‘ documentaries on ―war,‖ Guernica and Night and Fog. Firk adds
another film to this list that radically changes its meaning:
je crois qu‘en y ajoutant Les statues meurent aussi et en
remplaçant le mot de ―guerre‖ par celui de ―massacre,‖ on se rendrait
mieux compte que Resnais n‘a rien à voir avec les pacifistes condamnant
les guerres en bloc: dans Guernica et Hiroshima, il condamne la
destruction de deux villes, qui symbolise quelque chose d‘encore plus
vaste et terrifiant, menace fasciste ou peur atomique; dans Nuit et
brouillard, il condamne la destruction des groupes humains, plus
précisément les Juifs; dans les Statues, il condamne la destruction d‘une
civilisation, la civilisation noire. Jamais ce ne sont les malheurs de la
guerre qui sont en cause, mais cette ―inégalité posée en principe‖ déjà
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mentionnée, qu‘elle s‘appelle nazisme, antisémitisme, colonialisme,
racisme… (Goudet 2002, p. 63)51
Les Statues meurent aussi (1953) is a documentary that Resnais corealized with his friend
Chris Marker, who wrote the screenplay. It had been commissioned by the journal Présence
Africaine and had been shot in part in the Museum of Belgian Congo in Brussels. For its
controversial content dealing with colonization the documentary did not receive permission to be
commercially screened in France until 1965. Positif considered public censorship the ultimate
proof of the worth of a film, which resided precisely in its scandalous ability to upset normalized
oppression. Firk, therefore, evokes Les Statues meurent aussi to back her claim that Resnais is,
indeed, ―un grand cinéaste révolutionnaire‖ (p. 63).52 He is comparable to the antonomastic
form of the revolutionary director, the Eisenstein of Que viva Mexico! Marker‘s comment and
the images constitute, in Firk‘s words, ―un cri de révolte pour les esclaves contre ceux qui se sont
institués leur maîtres, pour les Noirs contre les Blancs qui se sont installés à la place de leurs
dieux, ont tué leur art et leur civilisation au profit de la leur et les ont dégradés afin de mieux se
bâtir à eux-mêmes un piédestal‖ (p. 63).53
In this film, in fact, Resnais and Marker show that statues also die. Their tone recall at
times a Heideggerian critique of technology. The ancient statues and masks that had a deep link
with the cult of the ancestors and with the ceremonies that marked the rhythm of the life of the
community have lost their meaning. They have been reduced to beautiful objects for pure
51 ―I think that if we add Les Statues meurent aussi [Statues Die Too] and we replace the word
‗war‘ with ‗massacre,‘ we would better understand that Resnais does not have anything to do with the
pacifists who condemn the war wholesale: in Guernica and Hiroshima, he condemns the destruction of
two cities, which symbolize something even broader and more terrifying, i.e. Fascist menace and atomic
fear; in Night and Fog, he condemns the destruction of human groups, more precisely the Jews; in the
Statues, he condemns the destruction of a civilization, the Black civilization. Never does he discuss the
misfortunes of war, but rather this ‗inequality posed in principle‘ that we have already mentioned,
whether it is called Nazism, anti-Semitism, colonialism, racism…‖
52 ―A great revolutionary cineaste.‖
53 ―A call to revolt for the slaves against those who have appointed themselves as their masters,
for the Blacks against the Whites that have taken the place of their gods, have killed their art and
civilization to the profit of their own, and have degraded them in order to better raise a pedestal for
themselves. ‖
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contemplation behind museum windows in Western countries. Tourists buy their reproductions
wholesale, transforming the old artisanal forms into empty mass production. White monuments
to the Unknown Black Soldier who died for the imperialist Nations substitute the cult of the
dead. Les Statues meurent aussi presents the annihilation of African culture as the most subtle
and treacherous form of colonial domination. It steals the soul of the colonized, but it also
irremediably degrades the colonizers.
Firk argues that the authorities had good reasons to fear this film. ―Ni l‘actualité ni le
sens des Statues n‘échappe à personne‖ (p. 63).54 Also the Brussels seminar on Hiroshima mon
amour would not be particularly eager to discuss this documentary at the time of growing unrests
in the uranium-rich Belgian Congo. In France at the turn of the Sixties, however, the Algerian
question was at the center of public attention. We saw that Robert Benayoun had explicitly
connected the prospect of atomic testing in the Algerian Sahara with Hiroshima mon amour. The
Algerian-born critic had also recalled that Night and Fog alluded to the French use of methods
worthy of Nazi torturers in their dealing with the Algerian population. As an activist in the group
of Francis Jeanson, Firk was risking her personal freedom to support Algerian freedom fighters.
Therefore, it is not surprising that she wholeheartedly adopts Benayoun‘s articulation between
Hiroshima mon amour and decolonization struggles in Algeria. Duras‘ denunciation of the
naturalized injustice of certain peoples against other peoples acquires a strong resonance in the
France at the turn of the Sixties precisely for its clear relation with the Algerian question. In turn,
this interpretation also throws light on the fight of the Japanese people who lived the paradox of
a technologically advanced but still in many ways semi-colonial country (right after the end of
the American occupation) and that often coded their antinuclear protests in anti-colonial terms.
Firk‘s move of adding Les Statues meurent aussi to the list of defining films that best
account for the path that led to Hiroshima mon amour powerfully shifts the terms of the debate.
In fact, the term ―massacre‖ that substitutes for ―war‖ in her description of Resnais‘ films
54 ―Nobody fails to understand the topical interest and the meaning of the Statues.‖
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undermines the Schmittian definition of the war between enemies as the very foundation of the
political. Sadoul‘s ―National Communism‖ was still a way to reintroduce into the partisan war a
territorial and autochthonous character that could allow it to fit the neat binary oppositions of
Schmitt‘s scheme. However, Firk‘s use of the term ―massacre‖ instead of ―war‖—like her use of
the word ―victim‖ instead of ―enemy‖—covers a broader but less visible area that does not fit the
classification of a struggle between military opponents. It uncovers the invisible, such as civilian
victims of military conflicts and everyday victims of naturalized oppression in time of official
―peace.‖ According to Firk, therefore, Resnais is not strictly a pacifist in the ―everything goes‖
sense. He is rather a director who has chosen to explore the dark areas where massacres happen.
He studies how they are not perceived or how they are easily forgotten because they don‘t fit
standard classifications.
This shift of perspective is nowhere as evident as in Firk‘s reading of Night and Fog. We
saw that Georges Sadoul interpreted Resnais‘ documentary mainly as a film on the Resistance. In
fact, the courage of political prisoners who overcame the most inhuman situation of the
concentration camps was the proof of the final triumph of Communism against the barbarity of
Nazism and its avatars. Also Robert Benayoun praised Night and Fog for the fear that it raised in
the French censors that had banned it in the colonies lest it incite the local Resistance against the
colonial authorities. In fact, the connection between Resnais‘ documentary and the memory of
the Resistance was so intimate that Benayoun feared that it could have been banned also in
France to prevent increasing protests against the new Gaullist Government. However, the
Maroccan-born critic opposed the implicit ―National Communism‖ in Sadoul‘s reading when he
stressed how Night and Fog was not simply a testimony to unspeakable brutality and heroism
during WWII. Rather, he argued that it was a film of the present that clearly addressed the open
wounds of the Algerian War. Sadoul‘s ambiguous position concerning Algerian independence
did not allow the Stalinist critic to illuminate this aspect of Resnais‘ documentary. However,
neither Sadoul nor Benayoun saw Night and Fog as a film on the Shoah, which remained a taboo
in the France of the Fifties.
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Michèle Firk, instead, brought this issue to the fore. Firk was a Jew. Her mother had kept
her in her arms for one whole night in a ditch to avoid the flashlight of the German soldier who
had discovered their group of thirty people while they were attempting to reach the Unoccupied
Zone. Only four of them were left in the morning. ―Michèle évoquera souvent ce franchissement
de la ligne de démarcation. Elle a connu sa judéité dans l‘expérience quotidienne de la guerre,
trop jeune pour comprendre les quelques rites encore pratiqués à la maison‖ (Terk 2004, p.
109).55 She learned to be silent as soon as she learned how to speak. Boris Terk argues that this
responsibility of a child who learned too soon that even her parents could not help her was the
spur of Firk‘s commitment for the freedom of Algeria and for her enthusiasm for the Cuban
revolution and the guerrilla fight in Guatemala (p. 109). Therefore, her subject position enabled
her to add also anti-Semitism to the articulations that can be drawn from Duras‘ ―inequality
posed in principle by certain races against other races.‖ Duras herself had hinted to the topic of
anti-Semitism in the ―underground continuity‖ of the story that Resnais had asked her to prepare
for the actors, describing the background of the characters. There, a note explained that Elle‘s
mother was living in the South because she was perhaps a Jew or separated from her husband
(Duras 1991, p. 143).
Paul Louis Thirard—who was also in love with Michèle— joined the debate praising the
intellectual character of Hiroshima mon amour that asks the audience to think, thus overcoming
the temptation to consider it a conservative film. ―Je crois que le style même d‘Hiroshima, cet
effort qu‘il impose au spectateur, constitue un antidote à ses prétendus poisons‖ (Goudet 2002, p.
63-64).56 The form also protected the most troubling erotic image of the film from the ugly
criticism of the bigots who were easily shocked by the other love scenes, whose frankness was a
55 ―Michèle would often evoke this crossing of the demarcation line. She grasped her identity as
a Jew in the daily experience of the war, too young to understand the few rituals that were still practiced
at home.‖
56 ―I think that the style itself of Hiroshima—the effort that it imposes to the audience—
constitutes an antidote to its supposed poisons.‖
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novelty for French cinema. In fact, nobody commented on the scandalous character of the total—
physical and moral—confusion that Elle expresses touching her body on her bed with her freshly
shaven head and madness in her eyes. According to Thirard, nobody can fail to understand that
Hiroshima mon amour is the story of an impossible love.
Firk responds that Hiroshima mon amour is a film that is admirable in its understanding
of suffering. Elle reflects on her suffering and this reflection changes her. She realizes that she
has never overcome the pain for her love story of Nevers because she has never tried to
transcend it in a larger aim. Her apparent peace and reasonable behavior in the eyes of the others
were only a superficial and limited form of resignation. The monologue-dialogue with Lui is the
catalyst that forces her to face again her suffering and to find another path out of it. ―Maintenant
elle ‗tient compte du malheur des autres,‘ maintenant elle comprend et elle place tout
naturellement son drame personnel à l‘intérieur et non plus en dehors du reste du monde‖ (p. 6465).57 Elle can finally forget her past, because she has succeeded to integrate it into the
―mémoire collective‖ [collective memory]:
Et pour en revenir à l‘aspect politique, je trouve admirable la
transformation de cette femme qui a acquis une conscience sociale, non
pas parce qu‘elle a joué un rôle d‘infermière dans une quelconque
production cinématographique à Hiroshima, aussi émouvante que vaine,
avec présence du monument commémoratif et petites filles lâchant les
colombes-de-la-paix-internationale, mais parce qu‘elle y a reconstitué son
drame personnel et que c‘est cela qui est important, fondamental: à la fin
Okada ne lui dirait plus, ne lui dit plus: ―Non, tu n‘as rien vu à
Hiroshima‖…(p. 65)58
André Breton considered knowledge an important component of ―mad love.‖ However,
the sophisticated poet gratefully captured what the beloved woman unconsciously revealed
57 ―Now she ‗takes into account the misfortune of the others,‘ now she understands and very
naturally she situates her persona tragedy inside and no more outside the rest of the world.‖
58 ―And to return to the political aspect, I find admirable the transformation of this woman who
has acquired a social conscience, not because she has played the role of a nurse in no matter what
cinematographic production in Hiroshima—as moving as vain—with the presence of the commemorative
monument and little girls who let fly the doves-of-international-peace. But rather because she has
reconstructed her personal tragedy and because this is what is important, fundamental: at the end Okada
would not tell her, does not tell her anymore: ‗No, you have seen nothing in Hiroshima‘…‖
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through her deeper connections with the secrets of nature. The reverse was not true. Ado Kyrou
had adapted Breton‘s ―mad love‖ to cinema, but he had also increased the arrogance of the
heterosexual male, perhaps also as a form of defense against weakening sexual borders. His
encyclopedic history of cinema objectifies and deifies erotic women throughout the world. But
the critic refuses to even attempt to think what a gay man or a woman could think in the presence
of a beautiful male actor. By contrast, in Firk‘s reading of Hiroshima mon amour the knowledge
of ―mad love‖ does not increase the arrogance of the self, but rather relativizes it and opens it to
the world. The knowledge of suffering does not objectify the Other, in this case Lui. The
dialogue with the other helps Elle to face her own pain and to work through it refusing the easy
solutions that society proposes, but also her own egoism.
Only after this working through can she face Lui and perhaps begin to understand what
Hiroshima has meant for him. At the end of her journey, she has seen something in Hiroshima
that she could not see before. In the same way, nobody can perhaps understand Hiroshima mon
amour. And nobody can master the whole ―collective memory‖ conserved in the French National
Library in Toute la mémoire du monde (1956). However, the last sequence of Resnais‘
documentary shows the scholars in the reading room each bringing his or her own piece of
difficultly earned knowledge to the dream of a communal happiness that transcends them in
scope and in time. The knowledge of suffering is made of frailty but also of the faith that a
translation is possible and that if successful it will enrich the self with the possibility of
forgetting her own paralyzing self-centeredness.
From the Politics of Aimance to the Politics of the Peut-être
Firk herself translated her responsibility as a little Jewish girl who understood the
powerlessness of her parents into the attempt to fight against the oppression of other groups of
people. In other words, the core of her private suffering became political and motivated her to
envision another kind of politics. Derrida would perhaps call her case an example of the politics
of aimance. In fact, she inhabited the space that neo-Surrealism prepared for her. She inherited a
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certain discourse and practice of ―mad love‖ that had been created for male poets and critics and
revolutionized it though a feminine voice that assumed responsibility for her own statements. But
she also radically opened ―mad love‖ through articulations that had their basis in her private life
and in her listening closely to the heartbeat of the others. Firk‘s last words in the debate are
against some Stalinist critics (in the journal France Nouvelle) who considered Resnais politically
conservative or at least well behind them in political conscience. Firk, instead, thought that
Resnais was much more advanced that they were. Hence the incomprehension that surrounded
his work among certain critics of the Left (Goudet 2002, p. 59).
In the next chapter, I will analyze Resnais‘ reading of Hiroshima mon amour for the
Brussels seminar and for Esprit and I will attempt to understand what Firk meant in praising the
advanced character of Resnais‘ conception of politics. I will particularly attempt to draw a
connection between Resnais‘ politics of the peut-être and the paradoxical communities at the
turn of the Sixties. This chapter discussed the politics of aimance in preparation to Resnais‘
politics of peut-être. In fact, Firk substituted to the stable concepts ―enemy‖ and ―war‖ a net of
rhetorical articulations. The next chapter, in turn, will retrospectively illuminate Firk‘s aimance
through the discourses of technology that circulated at the turn of the Sixties. Sociology studied
the new ways of private and daily life that modernization created. Philosophy addressed the fact
that nuclear fallouts annihilated the distinction between public and private life. In fact, in
Derrida‘s thought the two politics of aimance and of the peut-être can hardly be separated.
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CHAPTER THREE
RESNAIS' POLITICS OF THE PEUT-ÊTRE
Surrealism and the Sociology of Private Life
In the previous chapter, I discussed the conditions of possibility for Michèle Firk‘s
authoritative voice as a woman in her contribution to the debate on the representation of ―mad
love‖ in Hiroshima mon amour. I showed that the Neo-Surrealists of Positif embraced a
Bretonian view of amour fou that opposed Georges Sadoul‘s ―National Communism.‖ In Les
Lettres Françaises, in fact, Sadoul read Lui‘s slap in Elle‘s face mainly as the expression of his
disgust for a love with an ―enemy in uniform.‖ By contrast, Ado Kyrou considered GeorgesHenri Clouzot‘s Manon as one of the very few films on amour fou ever shot in France, precisely
because it depicted the uncontainable passion born between a partisan and a girl threatened with
shaving for her dealing with German soldiers (1957, p. 399). This primacy of love over
ideological commitment was an important resource for Firk. Her deeper understanding of the
sufferings of private life became a tool in tracing and articulating the oppressions that our
polarized conception of the political fails to see.
Moreover, Robert Benayoun‘s participation with Breton in the paradoxical community of
Le 14 juillet allowed the Algerian-born critic of Positif to read Hiroshima mon amour as the
articulation of the nuclear problem and the equally burning issue of decolonization. Firk
developed Benayoun‘s articulations in order to include also the question of anti-Semitism. As a
Jewish kid, Michèle had spent one night in a ditch listening to the heartbeat of her frightened
mother. Also her reading of Hiroshima mon amour developed a politics of aimance suspended to
the heartbeat of the other. Lui helps Elle to face her repressed memories and to overcome her
egotist closure to the world. Thanks to him, she grasps the existence of a ―communal memory‖
of suffering and oppression that the official view of politics is unable and unwilling to chart. This
politics of aimance as a call to responsibility toward the Other was also the premise of Firk‘s
personal involvement in the network of support to the Algerian underground. In this sense, Firk
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found in Resnais‘ view of politics a resource to conceive a form of Leftist commitment that the
orthodox Stalinism of her own party could not support.
In this chapter, I second Firk in arguing that through Hiroshima mon amour Resnais was
pursuing a conception of the political that was far in advance of the traditional parties of the Left.
In order to prove this point, I discuss two more interviews in which Resnais addressed Sadoul‘s
concerns regarding the love story of Nevers, after his early interview with Firk in Les Lettres
Françaises. In January 1960, the director visited Brussels and answered the questions of the
students of the semester-long seminar on Hiroshima mon amour. This audience was well aware
of the controversy on ―mad love,‖ thanks to André Gérard-Libois‘ literature review of the early
criticism on Resnais‘ film. Sadoul did not participate in this event, but he belonged to the
filmological movement to which the Brussels seminar was directly connected. In June of 1960,
then, another interview with Resnais opened a special issue on the situation of French Cinema in
the Personalist journal Esprit that aimed to evaluate the phenomenon of the Nouvelle Vague as a
whole. In this case, Sadoul also contributed an essay that brought an historical perspective to the
discussion and that focused particularly on Hiroshima mon amour.
Despite the different rhetorical situations of the two interviews, their similarity in terms
of style and content was clear also to their audiences. Not surprisingly, Raymond Ravar (p. 217,
n. 1) included an excerpt of the Esprit‘s interview in the proceedings of the Brussels seminar that
he published in 1962. Resnais provided there additional examples to illustrate the influence of
Brechtian ―estrangement‖ (Verfremdung) on his conception of cinema as ―distancing‖
(distanciation), such as he had developed in Brussels. In both cases, Resnais refused to use his
prerogative as one of the authors who could offer a definitive reading of Hiroshima mon amour.
By contrast, he stressed that Hiroshima mon amour was constructed so as to force the viewers to
make their own decision when faced with ambiguous situations.
Also the larger framework of the two events had some points in common. They both
adopted the multidisciplinary approach of academic filmology in organizing the materials.
However, their underlying motives did not coincide. The Brussels seminar was intended to
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launch Film Studies as an academic discipline in Belgium on the model of the Institute of
Filmology at the Sorbonne. Therefore, the questions to Resnais were mostly questions of ―good
students‖ who wanted to show their scientific understanding of the language of cinema and of
the particular technical choices of Hiroshima mon amour. They knew well the earlier interview
of Resnais for Les Lettres Françaises and asked for clarifications on points that he touched there,
such as the connection with Brecht. But they steered away from touchy questions such as the
Algerian war that Resnais had addressed there, and that was still so important for Benayoun and
Firk.
By contrast, Esprit—under the direction of Jean-Marie Domenach—aimed to rewrite its
traditional Leftist commitment in popular education, anti-colonialism, and antinuclear activism
in terms of the new paradigm of modernization that had led some of its central members to grant
a provisional and qualified support to de Gaulle‘s technocracy (Boudic 2005, p. 249). The
questions that Esprit addressed to Resnais, therefore, also touched issues such as the Algerian
War and the accusation of political pessimism in relation to the lovers‘ failure to participate in
the antinuclear demonstration in Hiroshima. Overall, Esprit attempted to present Resnais as a
committed Leftist director and to separate him and his friends of the Jeune Cinema (Marker,
Varda, etc.) from the politically conservative or anarchic sympathies of the auteurs of the
Nouvelle Vague who were also the critics of the Cahiers. In fact, the term ―Nouvelle Vague‖
was a contrasted terrain. In its most inclusive meaning it included all expressions of the new
French cinema at the turn of the Sixties. However, it tended to be associated more closely with
the directors who had started their careers as critics of the yellow journal. The question was
further complicated by the fact that the new directors also claimed their own independence and
originality, refusing to accept in toto this label that the press had created.
Both for Esprit and the Brussels seminar, the multidisciplinary approach of filmology
was also an important tool in crafting alliances. The Brussels seminar, in fact, was interested in
building a local and international academic network. The key role of Duras‘ close friend Edgar
Morin in the seminar depended on his profession as a sociological researcher for the French
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CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research), as well as on his anthropology of cinema that
updated the original concerns of Gilbert Cohn-Séat‘s filmology. By contrast, Esprit was
interested in alliances that could help Personalism to negotiate its difficult position as a
movement that was adopting a mostly reformist stance on modernization, but did not want to
lose its original Leftist identity. In this sense, the invitation to Georges Sadoul consolidated
Esprit‘s lasting interest in popular education as a communal venture of the Left. The
participation of Edgar Morin, instead, was an example of the risky convergence of the
Personalist journal with the neo-Marxist group of Arguments, which shared an interest in the
sociology of modernization in an anti-Stalinist function. In Goulven Boudic‘s words, ―Le projet
théorique initial des rédacteurs d‘Arguments s‘inscrit dans le cadre d‘une référence à un
marxisme rénové, révisé, et ressourcé, alors que les rédacteurs d‘Esprit remettent parfois en
cause la possibilité même de cette révision. Mais il existe entre ces deux milieux des échanges et
des collaborations‖ (2005, p. 216).1
Also the Brussels seminar attributed great importance to sociological inquiries for
institutional reasons. In fact, the newborn Seminar of Film and Cinema of the Free University of
Brussels was part of the Institute of Sociology. However, sociology was a double-edged sword at
the turn of the Sixties. It could aspire to the scientific neutrality that filmology cherished. But it
could also easily cross the safe grounds of academia and become a politically charged discipline
with a primary role in the redefinition of the Left. The empirical study of leisure time and of the
new developments of the working class threatened basic tenets of classical Marxism such as the
necessary pauperization of the proletariat in capitalist societies. Even Morin‘s apparently
harmless anthropology of cinema that postulated a bidirectional connection between the real and
the imaginary undermined the vulgar economic determinism of dialectical materialism.
1 ―The initial theoretical project of the editorial board of Arguments inscribes itself in the frame
of a reference to a renewed, revised, and enriched Marxism, while the editorial board of Esprit questions
sometimes the very possibility of this revision. But there are exchanges and collaborations between these
two environments.‖
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Therefore, even in the context of the Brussels seminar, Morin‘s persona signaled a troubling link
between strictly academic sociological concerns and the broader political implications that they
had for Marxists who attempted to think a viable alternative to Stalinism. Morin‘s participation
with Duras and Breton in the ―Friendship of the No‖ of Le 14 juillet reinforces this political
radiation that Resnais‘ answers could not fail to address.
A strange phenomenon happens. Both in Esprit‘s writings on Hiroshima mon amour and
in the Brussels seminar, direct references to Surrealism disappear. With a paradoxical reversal,
the only person openly speaking about ―mad love‖ in Esprit in relation to Hiroshima mon amour
is now the formerly critical Georges Sadoul: ―Dans le thème dramatique, cet amour fou
saisissant deux amants que la vie sépare n‘est pas très éloigné de la tragédie cinématographique
type Quai des brumes. Sans doute la forme est-elle différente, antithétique même‖ (1979, p.
207).2 In his 1960 essay for Esprit, Sadoul does not only continue the praise of the love between
Elle and Lui that he started in Les Lettres Françaises. He also drops all his accusations against
Duras‘ conception of amour fou. His reference to Marcel Carné‘s Quai des brumes (1938) would
almost seem to indicate a reevaluation of the love story between Elle and the German soldier. In
fact, Quai des brumes was one of the few French films that dealt in a positive way with a
deserter. Ado Kyrou (1957, p. 86-7) praises the screenplay of Jacques Prévert in terms of
Bretonian ―mad love,‖ stressing his close relation with Surrealism. In other words Sadoul seems
to make a very indirect move toward Resnais‘ explanation of the German soldier as a possible
conscientious objector. I will examine in the next chapter how Sadoul‘s more relaxed tones
concerning mad love coincided with his reevaluation of the Surrealist tradition as a tool that
could help orthodox Stalinism in dealing with the problematic issue of technological
modernization.
2 ―In terms of the dramatic theme, this mad love that seizes two lovers that life separates is not so
far from the cinematographic tragedy of the kind of Quai des brumes. Of course, the form is different, and
even antithetical.‖
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However, here it is important to understand why Surrealism tended to disappear in the
discussion about Hiroshima mon amour in Esprit and in the Brussels seminar. I argue that the
answer depends on their evaluation of sociology. In fact, the sociology of private life and of
leisure time—like Morin‘s anthropology of cinema—needed to undermine the hold that
Surrealism had on these areas in order to better absorb its legacy and establish itself on the
French cultural scene. As a result, Surrealism is seldom mentioned but everywhere to be seen in
the interviews on Hiroshima mon amour. The questions addressed to Resnais deal with key
Surrealist themes such as automatic writing, the dialectical relation between the real and the
imaginary, the scandal of life, the unconscious, and the role of chance. A student of the Brussels
seminar even introduces ―love as a form of knowledge‖ as a particularly Japanese theme, without
mentioning that it was also one of the pillars of amour fou (Ravar 1962, p. 213).
This dissemination of Surrealist themes enables us to read Resnais‘ interviews in Esprit
and for the Brussels seminar as a direct continuation of the debate on ―mad love‖ that Resnais
started with Firk and Sadoul in Les Lettres Françaises—even beyond the clear correspondences
that link their critical acts at every level of their texts. The early tension between Aragon and
Breton‘s views of amour fou has completely disappeared in these later texts. But Surrealism
remains as a destabilizing force inside sociology that threatens its tight classifications, and
particularly the binary that opposes private life to the public space of the political. In fact, the
changes in conceptions and behaviors in private life according to Morin were empowering for
women, but they had no direct political meaning like the emergence of a different kind of
working class could have. Duras was for him a ―feminine‖ writer who explored an unknown
universe of real transformations. She was certainly not a ―feminist‖ writer who could address the
public sphere from her position in the endangered private sphere— like Firk did in her politics of
aimance. I argue that this opposition between private and publicly relevant is the specific point
of intervention of Resnais‘ answers that undermine this absolute demarcation and gestures
toward a different conception of the political. In order to prove this point, I will devote particular
care to tracing how the absorption and translation of Surrealist themes into the sociology of
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private life that took place in Edgar Morin‘s anthropology of cinema, in his theorization of love
for Arguments, and in his reading of Hiroshima mon amour for the Brussels seminar. The force
of Resnais‘ answers will be more apparent against this background.
Sociology was extremely important in tracing the changing patterns of private life in its
relation with modern technology. The almost exclusive focus on the unconscious in post-war
Surrealism tended to neglect this important area of inquiry. By contrast, Morin addressed the
technologization of our imaginary in his book Les Stars (1960), in which he traced how a large
industry fabricates the myths and figures that guide our conceptions and behaviors in the private
life for economic reasons. The question of modern technology is, therefore, a key element that
appears in the rhetorical situation of Resnais‘ interviews on Hiroshima mon amour and that
orients the priorities of his answers. However, what is lost in Morin‘s sociological fragmentation
of Surrealist ―mad love‖ is precisely the possibility to cross over from the field of private life to
politics at large as did Michèle Firk in her reading of Hiroshima mon amour. Edgar Morin‘s
reading of Hiroshima mon amour for the Brussels seminar reflects this contradiction. In fact, the
sociologist pays great attention to how Resnais‘ film addresses real social changes in the
conception of love and in the role of women, which justifies the success that it had with the
female audience.
But Morin still considers Hiroshima mon amour fundamentally nihilistic on the political
level. In terms of the elaboration of Heidegger‘s thought concerning technology that Kostas
Axelos was developing in Arguments, we could read this ―nihilism‖ as the negative part under
which a new epochal orientation prepares itself and which eventually will give birth also to new
conceptions of the political. My argument is that, instead, Resnais‘ answers in the interviews for
Esprit and the Brussels seminar refuse this charge of pessimism—even in the sense of a
pessimism limited to the present and bound to a future revision. By contrast, he attempts to orient
the discussion directly toward a new conception of the political for the present.
Resnais‘ rhetorical style as an interviewee is crucial in this attempt. The filmmaker has
often been described as a Sphinx or a Cheshire cat not only for the questions without answer that
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he inscribed in some of his films, but also for the evasive explanations concerning his own
works.3 A closer analysis shows him to be extremely accurate in the technical reconstruction of
his filmic choices. The background preparation of the students of the Brussels seminar who went
through the gigantic feat of completing a shot by shot transcription of Hiroshima mon amour
certainly helped Resnais in this regard. However, he constantly evades direct questions on the
―morals‖ or ―intentions‖ of the film, evokes the possibility that Duras might have different ideas
in regard to these, and presents his own speculations on the plot as strictly personal and not
binding for the audience. His stance is that the film escapes from its authors‘ control, even during
its shooting. Most importantly, Resnais‘ conception of Brechtian ―distancing‖ requires the
members of the audience to exert their judgment in an ambiguous situation. Hiroshima mon
amour—as Paul Louis Thirard said in Positif—has the demand for this effort inscribed in its very
structure. In the same way, Resnais‘ examples in his interviews do not offer clear solutions.
Sometimes they present images of the film as riddles without commentary, as ways to further
stimulate the imagination of the audience.
I argue, however, that if we accept the challenge of defamiliarization and we attempt to
reconstruct the body of the Cheshire cat from its floating grin, we find ourselves in the presence
of a politics of the peut-être. In other words, in the very ambiguity of Resnais‘ answers we can
feel the influence of the paradoxical communities that attempted to develop a new conception of
the political at the turn of the Sixties. I showed that Robert Benayoun adopted Resnais as the
cineaste of reference of Le 14 juillet, in which also Edgar Morin participated. In the late Sixties,
Resnais also signed the Manifesto of the 121. Both of these events were accompanied by a
reflection on the meaning of the political that qualifies them as examples of Derrida‘s politics of
3 See Liandrat-Guigues and Jean-Louis Leutrat (2006, p. 9): ―Le chat du Cheshire, imaginé par
Lewis Carroll, tantôt présent, tantôt absent, s‘efface pour ne laisser ‗flotter‘ que son sourire, ou se
reconstituer à partir de ce sourire. Tel est Alain Resnais et agissons à son égard comme Alice à l‘égard du
chat dont ‗elle estima qu‘il valait mieux le traiter avec respect.‘‖ [The Cheshire cat, imagined by Lewis
Carroll, sometimes present and sometimes absent, effaces itself to let ‗float‘ only his grin, or reconstitute
itself from this grin. Such is Alain Resnais and let‘s act toward him as Alice did with the cat of which
―she felt that it ought to be treated with respect.‖]
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the peut-êre. They challenged the teleology of Stalinism and interrupted the stability of the
consensus concerning de Gaulle‘s return to power as a viable solution to the Algerian crisis.
In this sense, they can help us to understand what Firk meant when she claimed that
Resnais was at the avant-garde of Leftist thought. The risky choice of Derrida‘s peut-être, in fact,
requires facing a situation of crisis with no easy solutions and stating a responsible decision that
is based on a passive listening to those who cannot be heard. This decision consciously
recognizes that future developments can retrospectively prove it to be mistaken and can offer
compensatory solutions that undermine its original stance. But—for this very reason—the friends
that it gathers feel it even more as a necessary testimony. Their declaration—risky and always
one-sided like a declaration of love—becomes a call to people with different ideological and
territorial belongings that only the act of this decision can bring together.
In this sense, Resnais‘ interviews help us also to understand how Firk could develop her
politics of aimance only in a situation that the risky choice of the peut-être had already
transformed. In fact, Derrida explains that aimance does not strictly correspond to figures that
are already culturally available, such as Aristotelian philía. ―Mais une aimance à traverse ces
figures. Et c‘est à la condition de s‘ouvrir en tremblant au ‗peut-être‘‖ (Derrida 1994, p. 88).4 In
Firk‘s case, we saw that Surrealist ―mad love‖ such as Breton and Kyrou intended it only
constituted the cultural background for her reading of Hiroshima mon amour. In the roundtable
of Positif, Firk‘s voice as a woman profoundly transformed the objectifying thrust of Bretonian
amour fou and enabled her to speak directly about the public from her deeper wisdom of the
private sphere. The ambiguity of Resnais‘ answers empowers the audience to blur the border that
separates the public sphere as political from the private sphere to which women are culturally
assigned. I will show how his examples evoke the question of modern technology and force the
audience to interrogate constitutive moments of the ―communal memory‖ (such as the Resistance
4 ―But an aimance that runs through these figures. And it is at the condition of opening ourselves
trembling to the peut-être.‖
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or the bombing of Hiroshima) in a way that questions the binary oppositions friend/enemy,
peace/war, civilian/military. In this sense, the ambiguity that Resnais affects targets the very
values that orient the traditional Western understanding of the political. Like Derrida‘s politics of
the peut-être, therefore, also Resnais appears to stress that the de-territorializing thrust of modern
technology uncovers the rhetorical decision through which these categories have been articulated
since the beginning to a familial and autochthonous view of the political that tends to exclude
women‘s voices.
In the next section, I discuss more in depth the relation of Resnais‘ ambiguity with the
paradoxical communities of Le 14 juillet and the Manifesto of the 121. I argue that the director‘s
stress on a ―distancing‖ that forces the audience to exert its judgment is not simply an exaltation
of the irreducible polysemy of the authentic work of art. Resnais attempts to question the
relevance of the binary oppositions that determine the Western conception of the political. This
thrust also differentiates his praise of ambiguity from André Bazin‘s studies of the technique of
depth of field in Orson Welles and in William Wyler. Bazin, in fact, aimed to form conscious
and active citizens by training the audience to read the simultaneous presence on screen of
ambiguous data. But he went not so far as to lead the audience to question the very form in
which the political makes sense for us. Only Resnais‘ proximity to the paradoxical communities
of Le 14 juillet and the Manifesto of the 121 and his elaboration of a consequent discourse of
technology could allow this further step. In the following sections, I then examine the rhetorical
situation of Resnais‘ interviews for the Brussels seminar and Esprit. I pay particular attention to
Edgar Morin and to how his sociology of private life absorbed and transformed Surrealist
themes. I also discuss the links between Morin‘s sociology of private life and Kostas Axelos‘
interpretation of Heidegger‘s post-Kehre thought on modern technology. I finally close this
chapter with a close reading of Resnais‘ interview that focuses on the topos of the ―permeable
house.‖
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The Politics of the Peut-être and Resnais‘ Ambiguity of
Technology
I have already explained in the last chapter that in 1958 Duras and her friends started Le
14 juillet, a journal de combat to protest against the return to power of Charles de Gaulle and the
de-politicization of modern technocracy. In this section, I focus on the points of contact between
Resnais‘ discussion of Hiroshima mon amour and this paradoxical community for which
Maurice Blanchot coined the term ―l‘amitié du Non‖ (the friendship of the No). In particular, I
deal with the question of a different view of the Resistance that was important for Le 14 juillet‘s
attempt to articulate a new identity for the Left from a ―tragic‖ reading of the WWII underground
that contrasted with the Gaullist and Stalinist view of the united national fight against the foreign
enemy. The risky choice that faced individually each member of the underground beyond the
mythical call against the invader illuminates the choice that Resnais asks the viewers to make
independently in relation to the episode of Nevers in Hiroshima mon amour. In this sense,
Resnais‘ conception of ambiguity recalls the risky evaluation of an ambiguous situation through
which the ―friendship of the No‖ and the Manifesto of the 121 constituted themselves.
The ―Existentialist of Communism‖ Dionys Mascolo and the neo-Surrealist Jean Schuster
(1958, p. 1) entitled the first editorial of Le 14 juillet ―Résistance.‖ Its aim was to bring the grassroots, democratic spirit of WWII Resistance to bear against the image of the General and against
the Fascist tendencies that they saw emerging behind his figure. It equally challenged the
technocratic hold on the French Republic that had dampened the French critical spirit, as well as
the Stalinist leadership that was responsible for silencing every viable opposition.
In his preface to the re-printing of the journal in the review Lignes in 1990, however,
Mascolo described particularly how the editors had attempted to rescue the ―tragic‖ image of an
anonymous and divided interior Resistance that the ―epic‖ focus on the open feats of the Free
France against the German invaders concealed in the collective imaginary. Mascolo had taken
part in the interior Resistance, as had Antelme, Duras, Morin and several contributors of the
journal. He saw the underground as a complex movement with contrasting long-range political
147
intentions that the Liberation had only partly satisfied and that in several cases had aimed also to
continue a ―civil war‖ against the supporters of Fascism in France. ―Du fait de ces divisions, à un
moment ou à un autre, chacun avait dû affronter les risques d‘un choix de second degré
l‘amenant à se faire le défenseur d‘une cause supplémentaire, de portée plus lointaine et de
nature plus complexe que le seul souci patriotique, d‘où l‘aspect fâcheusement secondaire que
celui-ci pouvait prendre en regard‖ (Mascolo 1990, p. 13).5 The ―respect to the specter‖ of the
Resistance was the condition of possibility for a friendship to come. In Derrida‘s words in his
book on friendship, ―Une distance spectrale assignerait ainsi sa condition à la mémoire aussi bien
qu‘à l‘avenir comme tels‖ (1994, p. 320).6 Mascolo‘s alternative view of the underground, in
fact, was not just a mere challenge to a powerful postwar myth. Rather it was the spur for the
daring articulation of the multifaceted Left with no party membership that recognized itself in the
paradoxical community of Le 14 juillet. In this sense, Resnais‘ refusal to offer a definitive
reading of the character of the German soldier in the episode of Nevers in Hiroshima mon amour
places the audience in the condition to have to face their own past in order to make a political
choice in the present.
The risky choice is also the defining character of Maurice Blanchot‘s ―friendship of the
No.‖ The famous novelist and philosopher joined the struggle of Le 14 juillet with an influential
article published in the second issue of the journal in October 1958. His essay ―Le refus‖ (The
Refusal) reflexively defined this paradoxical community in which friends without personal or
ideological ties were joined together only by their decision to firmly reject what appeared to
most people as an acceptable and welcome solution. ―Les hommes qui refusent et qui sont liés
par la force du refus, savent qu‘ils ne sont pas encore ensemble. Le temps de l‘affirmation
5 ―For the existence of these divisions, sooner or later, everybody had to face the risk of a choice
of a second degree that brought them to become the defenders of a supplementary cause, of a farther
reach and of a more complex nature than mere patriotic concern; hence the fastidiously secondary
character that the latter could take in comparison.‖
6 ―A spectral distance would thus assign its conditions to memory as well as to the coming of the
future as such.‖
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commune leur a précisément été enlevé. Ce qui leur reste, c‘est l‘irréductible refus, l‘amitié de ce
Non certain, inébranlable, rigoureux, qui les tient unis et solidaires‖ (Blanchot 1971 p. 130).7
This ―friendship of the No‖ united Surrealists, ―Existentialists of Communism,‖ and other
Leftists who did not have a communal ideological base or program. Only the event of their
performative decision kept them together and could motivate other people to join. They were a
paradoxical community of those who do not have a community.
The risk that their refusal entailed was that they did not rise against an immediately
recognizable external enemy. Rather, they rejected a reasonable solution that the silent majority
of the French people considered as a satisfactory answer to the crisis that the Fascist supporters
of ―French Algeria‖ had initiated. They interrupted the complicity with the prospect of national
reconciliation that the return to power of General de Gaulle guaranteed. In the same way, during
WWII the difficult decision had not been to fight against the German invaders but rather against
the heroic and fatherly figure of Marshal Pétain and the good intentions that led him to
collaborate with the Nazis. Blanchot wrote that this decision to reject should not be conceived as
an active and heroic stance, but as an anonymous and rigorous commitment that found its
authority in listening to those who cannot speak, in primis the oppressed colonial populations.
―Quand nous refusons, nous refusons par un mouvement sans mépris, sans exaltation, et
anonyme, autant qu‘il se peut, car le pouvoir de refuser ne s‘accomplit pas à partir de nousmêmes, ni en notre seul nom, mais à partir d‘un commencement très pauvre qui appartient
d‘abord à ceux qui ne peuvent pas parler‖ (p. 131).8
7 ―The men who reject and who are joined by the force of this refusal know that they are not yet
together. They have been denied precisely the time for a communal affirmation. What remains to them is
the irreducible refusal, the friendship of this certain, rigorous, indestructible No, which keeps them united
in solidarity.‖
8 ―When we reject, we reject through a movement without scorn, without exaltation, and
anonymously, as much as possible, because the power to reject is not achieved from us, or just in our
name, but rather from a very poor beginning that belongs in the first place to those who cannot speak.‖
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The ―friendship of the No‖ is not made of heroic individualities that look for personal
affirmation. The risk of the friends of Le 14 juillet consists in the drastic character of their
decision face to an ambiguous situation without easy answers, but it is required more originally
by the voice of the Other who cannot be heard. It is a risky decision that starts from a passive
listening to the other. There is definitely an echo from this politics of friendship to the politics of
aimance that Firk developed in her reading of Hiroshima mon amour. Resnais‘ rhetoric of
ambiguity also asks the audience to pay a closer attention and to follow the contradictory
feelings of the characters. Only in this way the viewers can capture the reality of oppression that
engrained conceptions of politics fail to grasp.
In November 1960, Blanchot was also the main writer of the Manifesto of the 121
together with the historian of Surrealism Maurice Nadeau. For long years their role was kept
anonymous not only for security reasons. In fact, the signatories all shared in the responsibility
as a part of the risk of their decision. Both Duras and Resnais signed this manifesto that had its
first germ in Le 14 juillet. In 1960, the Italian poet and director Pier Paolo Pasolini praised the
Manifesto not as a beau geste but as a form of intellectual courage, because the difficult situation
necessarily entailed doubts and contradictions. ―È uno fra gli episodi più belli e esaltanti degli
ultimi anni. Appunto perché implica dubbi e contraddizioni: non è un bel gesto, pericoloso ma
semplice, coraggioso ma ovvio. È, anzi, estremamente complicato. Il coraggio, questa volta, non
è solo eroico, ma anche intellettuale‖ (Pasolini 1999, p. 738).9
In fact, the Manifesto challenged the reasonable solution of the Algerian war that de
Gaulle had formulated in September 1959 through the principle of ―self-determination‖ for the
Algerian people. The General‘s speech promised that four years after the end of the pacification
process Algerians could vote for their future. But the General also forecast poverty and a
9 ―It is one of the most beautiful and exciting episodes in recent years. Precisely because it entails
doubts and contradictions: it is not a beau geste, dangerous yet simple, courageous yet obvious. Rather, it
is extremely complicated. Courage, this time, it is not only heroic, but also intellectual.‖ Pasolini joined
Blanchot, Duras, Mascolo and other signatories of the Manifesto in the international community that led
to the creation of the journal Gulliver in the mid-Sixties.
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bellicose Communist dictatorship if they would chose to be independent, and he strongly stressed
that the French exploitation of the Sahara oil would continue in any case (de Gaulle 1970, p.
120-121). Also in this case, therefore, the focus was on judging a difficult situation beyond the
apparent binary oppositions of war/peace or enemy/friend. Derrida places these paradoxical
communities under the sign of Nietzsche‘s aesthetic undermining of the traditional oppositions
that structure our political values in terms of lasting stability and ultimately of territorial
belonging. There is no doubt that Resnais‘ reading of Hiroshima mon amour guides the viewers
in a similar direction when he asks the audience to exert its judgment in difficult situations.
In his interview with Firk for Les Lettres Françaises, Resnais had stressed how he and
Duras asked from each viewer an enormous effort of participation that was comparable to what a
writer would ask from his readers. ―Le théâtre est une manifestation collective, mais les
conditions du cinéma font que l‘on peut essayer de s‘adresser à chacun en particulier, en lui
faisant confiance, en lui laissant volontairement un marge d‘imagination et le soin de compléter
ce qui peut n‘être qu‘ébauché‖ (Firk and Resnais 1959, p. 7).10 This statement is close to Bazin‘s
appreciation for filmmakers who developed a more active attitude on the part of the audience
confronting them with complex situations without the explanatory guidance that the linear
development of the plot provided in classical montage. ―L‘importance de la profondeur de
champ et du plan fixe chez Orson Welles ou William Wyler procède précisément de ce refus du
morcellement arbitraire auquel ils substituent une image uniformément lisible qui contraint le
spectateur à faire lui-même un choix‖ (Bazin 1959, p. 86).11 Welles, Wyler, and Renoir puzzled
the audience with a not immediately decipherable mise-en-scène that reflected a more complex
relation with the ambiguity of reality. In Bazin‘s words, ―la profondeur de champ réintroduit
10 ―Theater is a collective manifestation, but in the conditions of cinema one can attempt to
address everybody individually, trusting them, willingly leaving to them a margin of imagination and the
cure to complete what is perhaps only sketched.‖
11 ―The importance of the depth of field and of the static shot comes precisely from this refusal of
the arbitrary subdivision to which they substitute a uniformly readable image that forces the viewers to
make a choice themselves.‖
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l‘ambiguïté dans la structure de l‘image‖ (Bazin 1958, p. 144).12 Bazin‘s Personalist ideals as a
popular education activist placed a high value in the development of the audience‘s ability to
judge, which was intended to form not only good cinema audiences but also responsible citizens.
However, Bazin‘s examples of depth of field, like the attempted suicide of Susan
Alexander in Welles‘ Citizen Kane (1941), would seem to ask mostly for the ability to rearrange
the elements of the sequence into a coherent plot, which is supposed to be already formed in the
mind of the director. By contrast, Resnais renounces his prerogatives as an omniscient auteur
and offers his take on the film as a mere personal opinion, leaving more freedom to the audience.
Moreover, the examples that he gives to support his conception particularly in his interviews to
the Brussels seminar and Esprit ask the audience to judge politically charged situations and to
reflect on the pertinence of the political categories that guide their view of the world but that
might not allow them to grasp the complexity of the events or the situations of the film. In this
sense, his reading of Hiroshima mon amour is not a training for grass roots activists of popular
education in Esprit style. Rather, it is a preparation for the event of a peut-être.
Derrida stresses particularly the importance of modern technology as the source of the
politics of the peut-être. In fact, modern technology collapses time and space and undermines the
strict binary oppositions friend/enemy, peace/war, and civilian/military. In this way, it challenges
the autochthonous, stable character of Aristotle‘s friendship and of Karl Schmitt‘s enmity as
sources of the political. Heidegger‘s conception of the essence of modern technology as Gestell
[Enframing] in his 1954 lecture ―The Question Concerning Technology‖ (―Die Frage nach der
Technik‖), for example, shows the frailty of these binary oppositions when the philosopher
stresses how the same challenging ―setting in order‖ governs the extraction of uranium from the
ore for peaceful use and for destruction. ― Die Luft wird auf die Abgabe von Stickstoff hin
gestellt, der Boden auf Erze, das Erz z. B. auf Uran, dieses auf Atomenergie, die von Zerstörung
12 ―The depth of field reintroduces ambiguity into the structure of the image.‖
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oder friedlichen Nutzung entbunden werden kann‖ (Heidegger 1954, p. 23).13 Also human
beings have become mere means in world wars and the Cold War does not distinguish between
war and peace. How would the Bikini test be classified when—as Günther Anders (2007, p. 243244) shows in Die Antiquierheit des Menschen (1956)—science has left its safe microcosm to be
unleashed onto the macrocosm in the form of lethal nuclear radiations?
We can think, therefore, that the chance that let Resnais be the first to visit Heidegger in
his house in Zähringer in 1945 when nobody knew if he was still alive did somehow leave its
germs to grow several years later in Hiroshima mon amour. The body of the Cheshire cat, behind
its floating grin, can perhaps be reconstructed as a discourse of technology, without losing too
much respect. From this point of view, we can read Resnais‘ elaborations on the theme of
ambiguity in his interviews on Hiroshima mon amour for the Brussels seminar and Esprit as an
attempt to articulate the troubling love story of the film with an existentialist discourse of
technology. His examples blur the distinctions between war and peace and undermine Stalinist
teleology. This ambiguity requires the risk of a peut-être. In other words, it asks for the invention
of a different, a-territorial and non-familiar way to conceive politics. Only this new conception
can allow thinking the nuclear problem as well as the Algerian question, which blur given
classifications.
The Rhetorical Situation of the Brussels Seminar: The Troubled
Neutrality of Filmology
The mark of academic filmology—I wrote earlier—is evident in the way in which both
the Brussels seminar and Esprit‘s special issue on French cinema organize their materials to
cover a broad range of questions. The initiator of filmology, Gilbert Cohen-Séat, thought that the
study of the ―cinematic fact‖ should always supplement the analysis of the ―filmic fact.‖ In other
13 Willian Lovitt (Heidegger 1977, p. 15) translates: ―Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the
earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium, for example; uranium is set upon to yield atomic energy, which
can be released either for destruction or for peaceful use.‖
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words, filmologists study the specificity of film in terms of language and aesthetic responses. But
they also argue that we cannot grasp the total phenomenon of cinema without paying an equal
attention to its institutional aspects. Disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, and economics
are equally important in charting its global reach and broad impact as an industrial medium.
Cohen-Séat‘s book Essai sur les principes d’une philosophie du cinéma (1946) proposed a crossdisciplinary model in which more established disciplines could bring their contributions and lend
their authority to the study of film, the latecomer in the academic world.
The Brussels seminar on Hiroshima mon amour intended to develop the academic trend
of filmology and openly claimed this origin.14 His main organizer, the Belgian scholar Raymond
Ravar, had personal ties with French filmologists. His aim was to launch film studies as an
independent discipline in the Department of Sociology at the Free University of Brussels on the
model of Cohen-Séat‘s Institut de Filmologie in the Department of Letters at the Sorbonne.
Accordingly, the semester-long seminar on Hiroshima mon amour put into place a net of crossdisciplinary and international academic alliances. Bernard Pingaud and Edgar Morin led a
contingent of young French academics who shared their expertise with their Belgian colleagues.
The international reach of the filmological movement guaranteed a broad publicity for this
Belgian experiment. In exchange, the discussion tended to steer away from heated controversies
and politically charged themes (such as the issue of decolonization that could have raised the
topical specter of the riots in the uranium-rich Belgian Congo). The seminar maintained a
neutral, scientific tone that was very different from the harsh battle that the political and cinema
journals waged and more fitting to a university environment. Ravar‘s attentive agenda setting in
editing the proceedings did the rest in preserving this well-guarded atmosphere.
The (productive) contradiction of the Brussels seminar stems from the fact that the
filmological method was not designed for the study of a specific film. In fact, Cohen-Séat‘s book
14 Raymond Ravar (1962, p. 15) clearly states: ―La filmologie, puisque c‘est d‘elle qui il s‘agit,
nous paraît au cœur même de tout problème qui met en jeu le film […].‖[Filmology—because it is this we
are talking about here—seems to us at the core itself of all the issues that film mobilizes […].]
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discusses most eloquently the specificity of film in highly general terms, but it does not mention
one single title. The filmological tradition followed in his footsteps. Its ―scientific‖ outlook
privileged general conclusions over striking and unclassifiable singularities. From the midFifties, moreover, the second generation of filmologists privileged quantitative methods of
analysis to the detriment of qualitative disciplines.15 The Brussels seminar went partly in the
opposite direction as it aimed to reconcile the general trend of filmology with Bazin‘s careful
scrutiny of particular works that had certainly dethroned Cohen-Séat in the hearth of young
people. The model of the Cahiers had won.
Therefore, the semester–long seminar was devoted only to the careful scrutiny of every
aspect of the language, the production, and the reception of Hiroshima mon amour. In particular,
the students of the seminar applied the scientific attitude of filmology to the painstaking
reconstruction of the découpage, or shot by shot transcription of the whole film. This laborious
feat was an unprecedented exploit at the time, due to the lack of sophisticated technical means.
However, a film like Hiroshima mon amour was not only formally complex but also politically
charged. Therefore, its choice destabilized the neutrality of filmology with interesting
consequences.
In Chapter Five, I discuss the way in which the Brussels‘ seminar began the decontextualizing trend that still dominates a large part of the reception of Hiroshima mon amour
in film studies. Here, however, I want to point out that the Brussels seminar also contained
several paradoxical germs that have unfortunately been ignored in later studies. In fact, at least
part of the contributors of the Brussels seminar shared a similar horizon and a similar desire to
envision alternative ways of intending the political. The range of their activities went much
15 Edward Lowry (1985, p. 158) writes: ―It is perhaps not surprising then that, by the time of the
Second International Congress of Filmology in 1955, the empirical studies mounted in the fields of
sociology and experimental psychology formed the core of the movement, while aesthetics,
phenomenology, history and psychoanalysis seemed more and more irrelevant.‖ Lowry, however, follows
only the shift of the center of the international filmological movement from Paris to Italy at the turn of the
Sixties. He ignores the Brussels‘ seminar on Hiroshima mon amour and does not pay attention to the
alliances between the filmological method and more politically committed groups such Esprit.
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beyond an interest in academic filmology. Bernard Pingaud had been invited as a novelist and a
university professor. But he was also a committed writer for the most important journal of
engagement, Sartre‘s Les Temps Modernes. Other contributors were personal friends of Duras.
They were involved with her in developing Leftist alliances that could productively fill the void
that the crisis of Stalinism had created.
Clara Malraux, for example, was one of the rare women among the militant friends who
used to gather in Rue Saint-Benoît for Duras‘ dinners of Vietnamese rice. The mother of
Resnais‘ future wife Florence was also one of the very few women whom Duras admired and to
whom she listened.16 She was the former wife of the famous writer André Malraux, whose
courageous deeds in the Spanish war were covered with revolutionary glory. But she had
remained close to her Trotskyist ideals, while he had become the Minister of Culture under de
Gaulle to the disappointment of his former admirers. Raymond Ravar duly notes that Clara
Malraux participated in the Brussels seminar, during which she delivered a moving analysis of
love in Hiroshima mon amour.17 Unfortunately, Ravar did not publish her work in the
proceedings of the seminar that he conceived mostly as a tool to consolidate academic alliances
and as a showcase for students‘ accomplishments.
16 Laura Adler (1998, p. 253-4) writes in her biography of Duras: ―Le militants, tout le monde le
sait, ont le porte-monnaie percé. Alors Marguerite invite quand les sacs de riz de sa mère arrivent
d‘Indochine. Elle fait la cuisine aux copains […].
La plupart de ces hommes, ils le confesseront au crépuscule de leur vie, en pinçaient pour elle: JacquesFrancis Rolland, Claude Roy, Edgar Morin. […] Peu de femmes dans cet univers. Clara Malraux,
Marguerite l‘admire et la laisse parler, Violette Morin est à peine tolérée, qui observe sans piper mot.‖
[Militants—everybody knows it—are always broke. So Marguerite sends out invitations when her
mother‘s rice sacks come from Indochina. She cooks for her friends […].
Most of these men—they confessed in their old age—were smitten with her: Jacques-Francis Rolland,
Claude Roy, Edgar Morin. […] There are few women in this universe. Clara Malraux, Marguerite
admires her and lets her speak; she hardly tolerates Violette Morin, who just watches with her mouth well
shut.]
17 Ravar (1962, p. 20) describes his agenda setting: ― Nombre de communications, et non des
moindres—nous songeons particulièrement à l‘émouvante analyse de l‘amour conduite par Mme Clara
Malraux […]—nombre de ces communications n‘ont pu trouver place dance cet ouvrage. ‖ [Several
papers, and not the least—we think in particular of the moving analysis of love that Mrs. Clara Malraux
has carried out […]—several of these papers could not find a place in this work.]
156
Ravar did, however, include multiple papers by Edgar Morin and profusely talked about
the sociologist‘s important role in his own essays. Morin was one of Duras‘ closest friends and
her neighbor in Rue Saint-Benoît. Significantly, also his major contribution focuses on the theme
of love in Hiroshima mon amour. In other words, love appears as the door through which the
friends of Duras interrupted the neutrality of filmology and could introduce their own political
concerns into the world of academia. Morin‘s dual ethos as a leading academic filmologist of the
second generation and as a committed friend of Duras illuminates his reading of Hiroshima mon
amour. He was undoubtedly the major figure of the Brussels seminar and his presence helped to
frame the horizon of expectation for Resnais‘ interview. On the one hand, his proximity to Duras
enabled him to explain to the audience of the seminar what had been the conditions of production
of the film and to stress Duras‘ contribution to its success.
On the other hand, his professional figure as a sociologist was highly fitting for Ravar‘s
plan to launch filmology as an independent discipline in the Department of Sociology at the Free
University of Brussels. He was well known for his writings on the anthropology of death and on
the sociology of mass communication, as well as for his study on cinema, Le Cinéma ou
l’homme imaginaire (1956). Ravar‘s introduction to the seminar situates Morin‘s anthropological
approach in the main line of the filmological tradition and turns it into a resource to rewrite this
tradition from its roots. The editor stresses in particular how Morin‘s attention to the processes of
projection and identification recalls Cohen-Séat‘s focus on audience participation. Both authors
study the mutual exchanges between the real and the imaginary that film illustrates in the clearest
way (Ravar 1962, p. 15). And they both considered cinema as being both art and industry.
In fact, Morin‘s scholarly interest in film and his participation to the Revue internationale
de filmologie in the Fifties were based on a technological discourse of ―leisure time.‖ In fact,
Morin was a researcher in the Sociology section of the CNRS [National Center for Scientific
Research]. He owed his job to Georges Friedmann, the proponent of a new humanism of labor.
Friedmann (1965, p. 252) thought that modern technology permeates every sector of life and
constitutes a new milieu that profoundly changes human personality. The machine affects also
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leisure time and can promote negative forms of escapism. But the thirst for popular education
among increasingly specialized workers and a positive use of the mass media by the State can
also promote a renewed humanism that may overcome its elitist limitations. In turn, this fruitful
use of leisure time has the potential to challenge the dehumanizing aspects of the excessive
division of labor in modern technology. It is not surprising that Friedmann—not welcome to the
Stalinists— started also a fruitful collaboration with Esprit, which was extremely interested in
popular education. Morin gratefully dedicated Le Cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire to Friedmann
whose fundamentally optimistic interest in technology had guided his choice of a subject at the
margins of mainstream sociology. ―Friedmann voyait et pensait ‗machine.‘ […] Je choisis le
cinéma. Bien sûr, le cinéma est une machine, un art de machine, un art-industrie‖ (Morin 1995,
p. viii).18
However, the study of film was also for Morin an indirect way to deal with the subject of
Communism that obsessed him. At the turn of the Fifties the PCF had excluded him and his
friends, Duras, Antelme, and Mascolo. Some Party comrades abandoned him.19 But, most
importantly, he had lost a family to which to belong and the brotherly network of a state inside
the State.20 He wanted to understand how Stalinism had turned dialectics from a heuristic
method that grasped the unsolvable contradictions of reality into the simplifying distortions of
dialectical materialism. He attempted to envision a more responsible form of Communism that
maintained the idea of international brotherhood, but refused the totalitarian Leviathan. His
18 ―Friedmann saw and thought ‗machine.‘ […] I chose the cinema. Of course, the cinema is a
machine, an art of machine, an art-industry.‖
19 Morin (1959, p. 175) recalls: ―Je perdis de faux camarades et n‘eus pas à changer d‘amis. En
fait je fréquentais peu les officiels et de plus en plus les en-marge et les en-dehors. Finalement je ne me
sens bien qu‘avec les défroqués, les heimatlos, les cosmopolites, les exclus.‖ [I lost some false comrades
and did not have to change my friends. In fact, I seldom associated with the orthodox, and more and more
with the marginal and the outsiders. Finally I feel well only with the unfrocked, the heimatlos, the
cosmopolitan, and the excluded.]
20 Morin (1959, p.160) adds: ―Le parti était ma patrie. Le parti était ma famille.‖ [The Party was
my Fatherland. The Party was my family.]
158
participation in Le 14 juillet sprang from these concerns. However, at the beginning of the Fifties
his weak position as a young researcher did not allow him to address this dangerous subject in an
open way:
De fait, en 1950-51, au moment d‘entrer au C.N.R.S. comme
chercheur dans la section Sociologie, aucune nécessité intérieure ne me
poussait à choisir le cinéma comme thème d‘études. Au contraire, j‘aurais
voulu travailler sur les thèmes qui m‘obsédaient, ceux du communisme.
Mais j‘étais alors au fond des poubelles de l‘histoire (j‘y suis encore, mais
en surface); je m‘étais doublement exclu, et doublement fait exclure par
conséquent, et du monde ‗bourgeois,‘ et du monde stalinien. (Morin 1995,
p. vii)21
At the turn of the Sixties, when he was well established as the editor of Arguments, Morin
was less cautious in directing sociological inquiries onto more hazardous terrains like work,
revolution, and private life that challenged the Stalinist credo. His figure is, therefore, the electric
socket through which a destabilizing political current invested the neutrality of academic
filmology. The rhetorical situation of Resnais‘ interview on Hiroshima mon amour for the
Brussels seminar is born from the troubled combination of the scientific ideal of academic
filmology and the political tensions that Duras‘ friends introduced into even the neutral terrain of
sociology. The audience that results from this internal strain is uncommonly familiar with the
form and the content of the film. Probably for the first time it is clear that the audience knows
that the first fifteen minutes of the film do not concern only Hiroshima but also the Bikini
explosion. This audience is also ready to cautiously engage some of the political discussions that
surrounded Hiroshima mon amour as a film with a Leftist content. But it is also strangely
reticent on certain points, such as the colonial question that both Firk and Resnais raised in other
contexts. The only mention of the French atomic test in Algeria is a short line from a Belgian
paper quoted in Gérard-Libois‘ literature review. There is also no reference to the Algerian war
21 ―In fact, in 1951-2, when I entered the C.N.R.S. as a researcher in the section Sociology, no
internal necessity pushed me to choose cinema as a subject of study. On the contrary, I would have rather
worked on the themes that obsessed me, those of Communism. But I was then at the very bottom of the
dustbin of history (I am still there, but on the surface); I had excluded myself both from the ‗bourgeois‘
world and from the Stalinist world, and, therefore, I had made both of them exclude me.‖
159
despite the fact that the leadership of the FLN had to escape from France and had relocated their
headquarters in Belgium at the time.
In the next section I argue that this reticence is partly due also to the disintegration and
absorption of Surrealist ―mad love‖ into Morin‘s anthropology of cinema and into his sociology
of private life. In fact, this dislocation involuntarily resulted in a loss of ability to cross the
boundary between public and private. Morin was greatly interested in the more active role of
women in the new conceptions and conducts of love. However, he was not able to develop a
politics of aimance that spoke to the oppressions of the public from the colonization of the
private. His sociology empowered several women students and teachers to speak about
Hiroshima mon amour in the Brussels seminar. But nobody could draw the broad and powerful
articulations that Michèle Firk developed from her take on ―mad love.‖ In the next section, I
examine the way in which Morin‘s anthropology and sociology combined with Kostas Axelos‘
interpretation of Heidegger‘s discourse of technology to accomplish this domestication of ―mad
love.‖ In turn, I show that this trend guides Morin‘s multiple essays on Hiroshima mon amour
for the Brussels seminar. In this sense, it also constituted the horizon of expectations against
which Resnais‘ had to develop his ―ambiguity as a reflective questioning of political categories.‖
Morin‘s Absorption of ―Mad Love‖ into Sociology
The influence of Surrealism silently permeates Edgar Morin‘s anthropology of cinema.
His fascination with cinema comes from the fact that this machine that thrives at the confluence
of the real and the imaginary illuminates the mechanism of the human brain. Morin agrees with
Dionys Mascolo that the relation with the imaginary is a basic need of human beings as much as
the satisfaction of the physical and economic needs that Stalinism stressed.22 However,
Mascolo‘s Le Communisme had derived this point much more openly from its Surrealist roots,
22 Morin (1995, p. 211) underlines this link with Mascolo: ―L‘homme imaginaire et l‘homme
pratique (homo faber), sont les deux faces d‘un même ‗être de besoin‘ selon l‘expression de D. Mascolo.‖
[The imagining man and the practical man (homo faber) are the two faces of a same ―being of needs‖
according to the expression of D. Mascolo.]
160
receiving the full approval of André Breton. Morin (1995, p. ix-x) continues to silently translate
the Surrealist position in his attack against economic determinism through cinema. Homo is not
only faber but also demens. Human beings are not only rational producer of tools. They also
construct phantasms, myths, ideology, and magic. Hence, a Marxist approach that privileges only
the economic and technological structure does not do justice to the real importance of the
imaginary that organizes our political, cultural, and social life. The creative obsessions of the
cinema pioneers are a proof that imagination has a transforming hold on the technological base
itself.23
Morin translates Surrealist ―mad love‖ into the terms of the anthropology of magic that
takes in charge the whole of our emotional life. ―Toute la vie affective, l‘émotion, l‘amour, la
haine, la colère suscitaient des efflorescences et des cristallisations de magie, sans pouvoir
pourtant se définir exactement par la magie. Les projections-identifications du totémisme se
retrouvaient sous une forme abstraite dans la nation, la patrie, le parti‖ (1959, p. 239).24 Cinema
shows that magic is not just an ideological lie that can be eliminated once and forever as it
constitutes the very tissue of human life. In Morin‘s words (p. 250), ―dans mes études sur la
mort, puis sur le cinéma, je découvrais que l‘homme contemporain est imprégné de magie.‖25
23 Morin (1959, p. 239) writes in his Autocritique: ―Certes Marx avait raison de subordonner les
idées aux processus réels. Mais il avait sous-estimé, non pas la force des idées (puisqu‘il reconnaissait un
rôle effectif aux superstructures) mais la réalité de l‘imaginaire. La technique, qui révolutionne les forces
productives et par là même la société tout entière, est aussi fille de l‘invention, du rêve et de
l‘imagination. Les besoins humains sont à la fois réels et imaginaires. Il y a des rapports réciproques
d‘infrastructures et de superstructures entre le réel et l‘imaginaire.‖ [Marx was certainly right in
subordinating ideas to real processes. But he had undervalued not the force of ideas (because he
recognized the effective role of the superstructures) but rather the reality of the imaginary. Technology,
which revolutionizes the productive forces and therefore society as a whole, is also the daughter of
invention, of dreams, and of imagination. Human needs are at the same time both real and imaginary.
There are reciprocal relations of infrastructure and superstructure between the real and the imaginary.]
24 ―The whole affective life, emotions, love, hate, and anger provoked efflorescence and
crystallizations of magic, even if they could not exactly be defined in terms of magic. The projectionsidentifications of totemism found themselves in an abstract form in the Nation, the Fatherland, and the
Party.‖
25 ―In my studies on death, and then on cinema, I discovered that the human beings of our times
are imbued with magic.‖
161
Processes of projection make us attribute reality to our ghosts and envelop reality with our
imagination. Processes of identification make us assimilate objects and beings to our own
substance. They are both fundamental psychological processes through which modern societies
construct themselves like older societies did through magic. They created the distorted myth of
the Stalinist cult of personality. However, no public or private life would be possible without a
certain extent of magical processes, which an American rhetorician would not hesitate to call
―rhetorical.‖
Morin (1959, p. 240) also follows in the footsteps of Surrealism when he argues that
Freud‘s attention to the problematic areas of the human psyche and to the psychological
mechanisms of collective participation should supplement Marx‘s emphasis on economic
liberation. In Morin‘s anthropology of cinema alienation and projection coincide. ―Au cours de
cet ouvrage, nous emploierons presque indifféremment la notion d‘aliénation, d‘ascendance
hegelo-marxiste, et celle de projection, d‘origine psychanalytique‖ (1995, p. 32).26 In his 1958‘s
Autocritique, Morin argues that Marx and Lukács‘ categories of alienation and reification are not
simply intrinsic harms of capitalism. Alienation as projection is also a fundamental form of
participation. Without it there would be neither love nor communities, only monsters of egoism.
Also reification corresponds to practical exigencies of the human psyche and of technology that
need a stable world of things for their operations (1959, p. 251).27 Morin concludes that private
and public life cannot function without myths and temporary concretion. The trouble begins
when these myths lose connection with the dialectical contradictions of the world that originated
them. Then they are no more source of practical knowledge and the critical mind should
challenge them.
26 ―Throughout this work, we will employ almost indifferently the notion of alienation, of
Hegelian-Marxist derivation, and that of projection, of psychoanalytical origin.‖
27 Also Hannah Arendt has a positive reading of reification, as human beings need a stable world
of things in which to begin the unforeseeable fragility of political action and to be remembered.
162
Morin thinks that magical processes of projection and identification are the foundation of
cinema, in which a face can become the world and vice versa. The power proper to films as an
art of movement is to show the fluid relation that exists between the micro and the macrocosm,
between a single human being and the universe. However, the major trend in the development of
cinema has perverted this relation into empty subjectivity. Morin attempts to restore a dialectical
communication between the modern subject and the macrocosm. Magic proper always searched
for practical relations with the world. But the magic mentality belongs to an older, pre-subjective
and pre-objective stage of human civilization. In modern societies it still partly survives only in
the taboos of sex, death, and social power that organize private and public life.
By contrast, cinema belongs to the civilization of modern technology. It has become
―âme‖ [soul]. Its self-absorbed sentimentality has lost any relations with material reality. ―Le
stade de l‘âme, l‘épanouissement affectif succèdent au stade magique. L‘anthropocosmomorphisme qui n‘arrive plus à s‘accrocher dans le réel, bat des ailes dans l‘imaginaire‖
(Morin 1995, p. 94).28 The romantic hypertrophy of the soul in the Western bourgeoisie
endangers the productive dialectics between the real and the imaginary, privileging the latter to
the detriment of the former and making both sterile. In this way, it severs the communication
between the microcosm and the macrocosm that could nourish it. In this romantic hypertrophy of
the soul we can perhaps also see an attack against the privileging of the unconscious among postwar Surrealists and against the growing conservative appropriation of Surrealist ―mad love.‖
Morin argues that this loss of the infinite possibility of dialectical interchanges between the real
and the imaginary is particularly severe for cinema, because its essence is dialectical movement.
―Ces transmutations et ces tourbillons où se brassent rêve et réalité, l‘un renaissant de l‘autre,
28 ―The stage of the soul, the affective blossoming follows the magic stage. The anthropocosmomorphism that has lost its ties with reality flutters its wings in the imaginary.‖
163
voilà la spécificité du cinéma dont on cherche si ardemment l‘essence exquise alors que son
essence est la non-essence, c‘est-à-dire le mouvement dialectique‖ (1995, p. 173-174).29
Cinema was born as a technology of reality that presented the Surrealist double of
everyday things and united dynamically the micro and the macrocosm through surprising
metamorphoses. But it has turned into a technology of mere affective satisfaction. Fictions
predominate over documentaries. The darkness of the cinema hall promotes the dreamy mass
isolation of the spectator. It heightens affective participation rather than leading to practical
commitment. Projection and identification have lost touch with life and they have forfeited their
ability to influence it. Aesthetics has triumphed as a limited and atrophied form of magic in
which subjectivity has conquered the objectivity of the photographic machine. The aesthetics of
feelings has become aesthetics of vague feelings. ―Amour, passion, émotion, cœur: le cinéma
comme notre monde en est tout visqueux et lacrymal. Que d‘âme! Que d‘âme! On comprend la
réaction qui s‘est dessinée contre la projection-identification grossière, l‘âme dégoulinante, dans
le théâtre avec Berthold Brecht, dans le film, sous des formes diverses, avec Eisenstein, Wyler,
Welles, Bresson, etc‖ (p. 117).30 The reaction of these directors of cinema and theater does not
target emotions per se. Rather they attempt to restore their constitutive force as a cure against the
self-absorption that refuses to open dialectically to a broader and dynamic commerce with the
world.
Morin particularly admired Eisenstein for reactivating the communication between micro
and macrocosm and showing that feelings are not separate from logos. ―Eisenstein définit le
cinéma comme le seul art concret et dynamique qui permette de déclencher les opérations de la
29 ―These transmutations and these whirlwinds in which dream and reality mix, the one reborn
from the other, here is the specificity of cinema whose exquisite essence is so passionately sought after
even if its essence is the non-essence, i.e. dialectical movement.‖
30 ―Love, passion, emotion, hearth: the cinema is all viscous and tearful for them as our world is.
How much soul! How much soul! We understand the reaction that has begun against the projectionidentification of the vulgar kind, the overflowing soul, in the theater with Bertolt Brecht, in the film—in
different forms—with Eisenstein, Wyler, Welles, Bresson, etc. ‖
164
pensée, le seul capable de restituer à l‘intelligence ses sources vitales concrètes et émotionnelles,
il démontre expérimentalement que le sentiment n‘est pas fantaisie irrationnelle, mais moment de
la connaissance‖ (p. 188).31 In Eisenstein‘s films ideas are not presented as abstract
representations of Marxist tenets or mere propaganda, but rather spring from the attraction of
contradictory images. They are born from an emotional participation that opens to the world and
does not fall into self-satisfied egotism. The ensuing logos is richer and can effectively help the
homo faber in his creation of the world. A later Morin (1959, p. 234)—as an admirer of the
Hungarian workers councils— would have perhaps argued that the resulting logos would also
have helped crossing the gap between the planetary age of modern technology and the Iron Age
of our conceptions of politics.
Morin praises Bertolt Brecht for having developed Eisenstein‘s pedagogical method. His
epic theater, in fact, hinders immediate affective identification with individual heroes in order to
foster a more general and freer participation that reaches the idea in a spontaneous way. This
reference to Brecht is important also in the debate on ―mad love‖ in Hiroshima mon amour. In
fact, Resnais discussed his similarity of intent with the epic theater in his interviews for the
Brussels seminar and Esprit. But he seems to give a more primary role to an immediate affective
participation that comes before ―distancing‖ and makes it possible. We might wonder if this
nuance in Resnais does not also indicate a greater role for ―love‖ that is not simply and
anonymously absorbed into the crowd of other more important ―emotions‖ like in Morin
discussion of Brecht. Consequently also the private life that is connected with love and whose
political charge Morin underestimates recuperates the possibility to bridge between the
microcosm of the individual and the macrocosm of wider political articulations. In this sense,
31 ―Eisenstein defines cinema as the only concrete and dynamic art that enables setting in motion
the operations of thought, the only able to bring intelligence back to its concrete and emotional vital
sources; it demonstrates experimentally that feelings are not irrational fantasies, but rather moments of
knowledge.‖
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Resnais allows for the development of a politics of aimance that Morin‘s conception of cinema
represses.
In fact, Morin‘s anthropology of cinema develops a contradictory view of love that is
partially empowering, but only inside the private life. On the one hand, the cinema of the soul
presents ―le mythe de l‘amour‖ [the mythe of love] as the culmination of a regressive movement
that does not create new knowledge for the transformation of the world. Abstract ideas provoke
feelings that engender only a limited set of stereotyped scenes, such as a kiss that inevitably
leads to quarrels and an elopement. However, Morin does not react to this simplification like the
neo-Surrealist Ado Kyrou who hoped for a ―real woman‖ to bring back the authentically erotic
charge that this impoverished representation of love denied and to embrace the revolutionary
force of ―mad love.‖ Instead, Morin asks ―emotions‖—and not ―love‖—to bring back a
revolutionary enthusiasm, but also to express the contradictions of a complex situation. Morin is
thinking how to fight against the oversimplification of a personality cult that led to the
degeneration of Stalinism. But the ―woman‖ who dominates Kyrou‘s work as a savior is
nowhere to be seen in the theoretical argument of Morin‘s first book on cinema.
On the other hand, Morin is extremely interested in the historically situated and changing
myths of love in terms of his profession as a sociologist. In fact, ―l‘amour, projectionidentification suprême‖ helps us to understand the necessary role that alienation, reification, and
fetishism play in our life (1959, p. 95).32 ―La projection-identification (participation affective)
joue sans discontinuer dans notre vie quotidienne, privée et sociale. Si l‘on suit Mead, Cooley,
Stern, on confondrait même la participation imaginaire et la participation sociale, le spectacle et
la vie‖ (p. 97).33 We constantly enact ready-made personae and take on roles in our relations
with the others. In this sense, cinema is an archive that shows us the power of affective
32 ―Love, the supreme projection-identification.‖
33 ―The projection-identification (affective participation) plays a continuous role in our daily life.
If we follow Mead, Cooley, and Stern, we would even confuse imaginary participation and social
participation, performance and life.‖
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participation in the clearest way. In this sense, Morin appears almost as a precursor of Pasolini‘s
―unwritten language of reality.‖ In both cases, in fact, cinema teaches us how to read our social
life as a performance and as a rhetorical construction. However, Pasolini‘s view of cinema as
metonymy enchained the private life with other phenomena such as decolonization struggles. For
Pasolini as a gay man sex is a privileged point of observation where to see oppressions that have
political relevance. For Morin, instead, there seems to be some disconnect between the
sociological attention to the drastic transformations of the private sphere and the claims of
politics.
Morin‘s sociological interest in linking cinema to changing perceptions of love in
everyday life appears also in the special issue that the journal Arguments dedicated to ―L‘Amourproblème‖ in the first trimester of 1961. Significantly, this link was made through Hiroshima
mon amour. But in order to understand it, it is important to grasp the theoretical direction in
which Arguments was venturing. Morin had been the editor of this neo-Marxist journal since its
foundation in 1956. Kostas Axelos joined him as the chief sub-editor and Roland Barthes in the
editorial board. The journal also counted Henri Lefebvre and Dionys Mascolo among its
contributors. Arguments adopted Existentialist thought as a lever to challenge the teleology of
dialectical materialism that justified the oppressions of Stalinism in the name of the future
liberation of humanity. Existentialism enabled counteracting the devaluation of the present and
restituted a meaningful concreteness to its insuperable contradictions. In Morin‘s words (1959, p.
144), ―Comme tout dialecticien, j‘étais toujours porté à dévaluer le présent, qui n‘est qu‘un
moment de la totalité en devenir. […] Le présent qui pour l‘existentialiste est le concret même,
parce qu‘il est vécu, est pour le dialecticien la pire abstraction si on le détache du passé et du
futur.‖34
34 ―As all dialecticians, I have always tended to undervalue the present, which is just a moment
of the totality in becoming. […] The present is the concrete itself for the existentialist, because it is lived;
for the dialectician it is the worst abstraction if it is severed from the past and the future.‖
167
Morin‘s sociology of private life had the closest ally in the theorization that Kostas
Axelos was developing in Arguments at the confluence between a Heideggerian discourse of
technology and a Marxist conception of alienation. Axelos assigned a key role to private life as a
central terrain where to see how the planetary play of modern technology enabled and
endangered new conceptions and practices of human existence. The key term of his philosophy
is ―errance‖ (errancy) from Heidegger‘s ―The Anaximander Fragment‖ (―Der Spruch des
Anaximander‖) written in 1946 and published as the last essay of Holzwege in1950. Hannah
Arendt reminds us that this writing of the reversal dates from the time when Heidegger was
silenced in Germany. We can add that those were also the years when young scholars like
Axelos began to make the trip from France to the house of the philosopher in the Black Forest,
after Resnais and de Towarnicki had shown to the French public that he was still alive.
Arendt (1981, p. 188-194) explains that in Heidegger‘s reading of Anaximander,
―errancy‖ is not simply inauthenticity. Rather, it is the way in which beings are connected and
make sense in a certain historical epoch. In fact, Being in its withdrawal has no history. By
contrast, the beings that Being ―sets adrift‖ through its disclosure constitute the sphere of
common human history. In every epoch factual destinies are connected in a coherent shape
through errancy. Thinking can respond to the epochal claim of Being as Truth in the moments of
transition between epochs when the truth of the next era of errancy becomes manifest. Acting is
limited to the world of errancy, while thinking reaches to Being in its withdrawal. Arendt
underlines also that in this writing the Will appears as a destroyer that challenges the order for its
desire to persist beyond its time. She repeatedly stresses the difficulty of interpreting this essay
of her former lover. But she concludes that it would seem to be a mere variation of Heidegger‘s
basic teaching and that the reference to the epochs of history is a reminder of the growing
importance of death in her teacher‘s later thought.
For Kostas Axelos, Heidegger‘s conception of ―errancy‖ was so important that he called
his own theorization the search for a ―planetary thought.‖ This expression did not only indicate
the global reach of modern technology, but it was also a word-play on the Greek etymology of
168
―planet‖ as the ―errant‖ or the ―wanderer.‖ ―La pensée planétaire n‘opposerait pas la vérité et
l‘erreur comme deux contraires (ou deux contradictoires), elle ne viserait même pas à les
synthétiser dialectiquement. Sa dimension serait celle de la vérité de l‘errance‖ (Axelos 1964, p.
186).35 Axelos aspired to question the historical becoming of the world without constructing a
system. His ―pensée fragmentaire de la totalité‖ was to be a global interrogation that restituted
fluidity to the categories of dialectics through a recuperation of the Heraclitean coexistence of
the opposites (p. 186).36 In contrast to Arendt, the Greek philosopher believed that Heidegger‘s
post-Kehre thought could be particularly beneficial in the development of a neo-Marxism. In
fact, errancy enabled Axelos not to oppose Marx‘s writings as a mistake, despite the evident
failure of some of their predictions. Rather, it allowed him to refuse the hypostasis of dialectical
materialism and of a Stalinism that willfully justified its bureaucratic totalitarianism through the
prospect of a future utopia. ―Le marxisme s‘est empêtré dans une sécheresse compliquée. Il est
devenu comme le bois prêt à tomber de l‘arbre autrefois vert‖ (p. 187-188).37 Marxism had to
explode in order to liberate the vital germs that it still possessed. It had to recuperate the ability
to grasp the historical configuration of beings and things as becoming without fixing them in an
ill-fitted and pre-conceived grid.
Axelos‘ fragmentary thought justified the importance of Morin‘s sociology in
interrogating the new forms of work in their relations with technology. In the same way,
Arguments studied love through the transformations of sexuality and of the family, with the
introduction of birth control and the scare of cloning. Axelos‘ faith was that even through the
total reification and the will to power of modern technology a new orientation prepared itself that
35 ―Planetary thought would not oppose truth and error as two opposites (or as two
contradictories), and it would even not attempt their dialectical synthesis. Its dimension would be the truth
of errancy.‖Also the philosopher Leopold Flam, who took part in the Brussels seminar on Hiroshima mon
amour, participated in one of the conferences of 1959 from which Axelos developed this essay.
36 ―Fragmentary thought of totality.‖
37 ―Marxism got entangled in a complicated dryness. It has become like the wood ready to fall
from the tree hitherto green.‖
169
would finally be visible when a new historical epoch begun. The nihilism of technology brought
in itself its salvation. ―Au bout du déferlement total de la volonté de puissance, de la réification
totale, nous attend, nous autres terriens, ce qui était déjà présent dès le début: le secret du
nihilisme, le jeu de l‘énigme. Alors pourra éclater l‘énigme qui poursuit depuis longtemps son
travail de taupe‖ (p. 196).38 Only a questioning thought will then be able to grasp this
fragmentary reality without fixing it with absolute answers that deny its contradictions.
Axelos considered Marx the philosopher of technological alienation and of the future
disalienated deployment of the powers of modern technology.39 He represented the latest
development of Nietzsche‘s ―will to power‖ that Heidegger read as the modern realization of
metaphysics. In this sense, the full realization of Communism did not guarantee that a
technological thought would stop to dominate also areas such as sex that Marx connected with
the division of labor. In fact, ―l‘on se demande que signifiera effectivement le plein
épanouissement de l‘amour après le dépassement de la division du travail social‖ (Axelos 1961b,
p. 114).40 The full development of Marx‘s total man did not offer certain solutions to the
problematic of love. It only posed in a different way the question of the relation of love with a
fundamentally technological thought that aimed to dominate nature. Therefore, Axelos argues
that Communism could not postpone the problem of love to a far-away future. It is important to
38 ―At the end of the total unfurling of the will to power, of total reification, attends us, us
earthlings, what was already present since the beginning—the secret of nihilism, the play of the enigma.
Then will finally burst out the enigma that has been carrying on for a long time its work as a mole.‖
39 Axelos (1961b, p. 23) writes: ―Marx est avant tout un technicien de l‘analyse de l‘aliénation
accompagnant l‘essor de la technique; il se veut également technicien de la désaliénation et de la
transformation de l‘histoire mondiale. La technique, constituant le secret de l‘époque moderne et prenant
des aspects divers, et aussi à l‘œuvre dans l‘œuvre de Marx, et l‘effort marxien ne vise qu‘un déploiement
désaliéné et total de la puissance de la technique.‖ [Marx is above all a technician who analyzes the
alienation that accompanies the progress of technology; he wants also to be a technician of the
disalienation and of the transformation in World History. Technology constitutes the secret of the modern
age and assumes different shapes. It is also at work in Marx‘s work, and the Marxian effort aims only to
reach a disalienated and total deployment of the powers of technology.]
40 ―We asks ourselves what will effectively mean the free development of love after the
overcoming of the division of social labor.‖
170
chart the new and changing forms of errancy through which the great game of love (and of
technology behind it) make us play, even before we attempt to act upon it. ―Actuellement, il
s‘agirait de faire surgir toute la problématique de l‘amour. Il serait temps de parvenir à porter la
multidimensionnelle dimension érotique jusqu‘au langage? Pour tout dire? Pour dire en tout cas
ce que d‘habitude on tait‖ (Axelos 1961a, p. 19).41 This desire to bring to language the new
forms of love certainly recalls the fight of Surrealism against bourgeois and Communist thought,
even if Axelos mercilessly brands Breton‘s movement as hypocritical (p. 21).
Morin‘s professional interest in sociology could not find a better invitation to study the
contradictions of love in the present. In the technocratic France at the turn of the Sixties
technological modernization and increased leisure time played a major influence on the
conception of love. ―Plus la vie individuelle s‘affirme par rapport aux nécessités matérielles
(extension des loisirs et du bien-être) et par rapport aux structures collectives, plus l‘amour
devient la grande affaire, le vrai centre de la vie‖ (Morin 1961, p. 8).42 Love takes the place of
religion and of the great systems of values such as the family or the Nation. It becomes the
sublime irrational of the rationalization of bureaucratic and technocratic society. Therefore,
happiness in love has become the myth par excellence in modern civilization. However, the
expectations that the myth raises only exacerbate the real contradictions and make it unstable. In
fact, ―nous exigeons de l‘amour la vérité de nos propres vies individuelles bien que nous soyons
incapables de vivre un amour permanent et total‖ (p. 8).43
In Morin‘s contribution for the special issue of Arguments on love, the example of
Hiroshima mon amour has the merit of challenging the modern myth of love and to bring this
41 ―Now, the whole problematic of love should arise. Shouldn‘t we finally bring the multifaceted
erotic dimension to language? In order to say everything? To say at least what is usually kept silent.‖
42 ―The more individual life becomes important in relation to material necessities (extension of
leisure time and welfare) and in relation to collective structures, the more love becomes the great thing,
the real center of life.‖
43 ―We demand from love the truth of our own individual lives even if we are incapable of living
a permanent and total love.‖
171
unavoidable tension to the fore. ―A considérer toutes ces contradictions, dont du reste la
littérature et le cinéma nous donnent des images de plus en plus déchirées (la tétralogie de
Lawrence Durrel, Hiroshima mon amour, l’Avventura), on en vient à se demander si l‘amour
n‘est pas à réinventer, du moins à reformuler et s‘il ne faut pas chercher une solution au
problème de l‘amour…‖ (p. 8).44 With this question in mind, Arguments devotes also a short
study to the Surrealist interpretation of love. ―Le surréalisme est le seul courant révolutionnaire
moderne qui ait conçu l‘homme à la fois comme être pratique et être imaginaire, comme être
affectif et comme être politique, et qui ait essayé de concevoir la révolution comme une exigence
multidimensionnelle concernant tous les niveaux de l‘existence humaine.‖ (Aragon, Breton,
Buñuel, and Eluard 1961, p. 47).45
The neo-Marxist journal does not directly embrace Surrealism, and in certain cases even
violently reject its influence. But it is certain that the ―Existentialists of Communism‖ could
found a predecessor in Breton‘s battle to rescue emotions from the bureaucratic control of
Stalinism and to stress the revolutionary role that private and everyday life can assume. The new
tensions of modernization and increased leisure time in the Sixties showed a prophetic
application for Breton‘s fights in the Thirties. The authors of Arguments close the special issue
on love with a translation from Herbert Marcuse‘s ―Eros and Civilization.‖ Marcuse was another
student of Heidegger and one of the Frankfurt School authors whom Arguments first introduced
to the French audience. His essay also thrusts the liberating power of Eros against social
alienation. In the next section, I show how this discussion of Arguments influenced Morin‘s
interpretation of Hiroshima mon amour for the Brussels seminar.
44 ―If we consider all these contradictions, of which after all literature and cinema offer us
images that are more and more tormented (the tetralogy of Lawrence Durrel, Hiroshima mon amour,
[Michelangelo Antonioni‘s] l‘Avventura), we might ask whether love should not be reinvented—or at
least reformulated—and whether we shouldn‘t find a solution to the problem of love...‖
45 ―Surrealism is the only revolutionary current of modernity that conceived humans as both
practical and imaginary beings, as both affective and political beings, and that has attempted to conceive
the revolution as a multidimensional exigency that concerns every level of human existence.‖
172
Morin‘s reading of Hiroshima mon amour for the Brussels seminar
Morin‘s reading of Hiroshima mon amour for the Brussels seminar in 1960 already
traced the points where Duras and Resnais had tapped into the unexpressed social
transformations of love. The sociologist thought that the film revealed the popularization of
intellectual conceptions and practices of love. But its greatest strength was to show how these
deep sociological changes invested particularly the role of women. The enthusiastic response of a
great part of the women‘s audience was due to the fact that Hiroshima mon amour was, in effect,
―un film de l‘univers de la féminité, et de la féminité moderne‖ (Ravar 1962, p. 83).46 Morin is
very careful to point out that it was not a feminist film, but rather a film that presented women
with their complex and changing image. ―Une partie du succès du film […] vient d‘une sorte de
coïncidence entre la révélation de certaines choses qui n‘avaient pas encore été révélées par le
cinéma sur la femme, et le besoin qu‘avaient les femmes de cette révélation‖ (p. 83).47 If
Breton‘s ―mad love‖ brought a poetic revelation from the unaware woman to the man poet, here
women can see their own reflection and try to make sense of it. As Raymond Ravar wrote in an
essay in which he profusely quotes from Morin, ―le film nous offre l‘image d‘un univers de la
féminité moderne où la femme est dépouillée du caractère d‘objet que l‘homme, la civilisation et
la nature des choses lui imposaient jusqu‘alors, pour assumer les choix et les responsabilités du
sujet‖ (1962, p. 59).48
The sociological study of the audience shows that women tended to embrace Hiroshima
mon amour. The proceedings of the Brussels seminar leave ample space to female students and
teachers in a percentage that was certainly not common at the time in the study of film.
46 ―A film on the universe of femininity, and on modern femininity.‖
47 ―Part of the success of the film […] comes from a sort of coincidence between the revelation
of certain things that cinema had not yet revealed about the woman, and from the need that women had
for this revelation.‖
48 ―The film offers us the image of a universe of modern femininity in which the woman is
divested of her character as an object that man, civilization, and the nature of things hitherto imposed to
her, in order to assume the choices and the responsibilities of the subject.‖
173
Jacqueline Mayer argues that female characters in cinema have always been created for men and
considers Hiroshima mon amour, in her words, ―l‘aboutissement provisoire d‘une évolution qui
va de la marionnette à la femme moderne‖ (Ravar 1962, p. 124).49 Francine Vos echoes
enthusiastically that objectivity is not possible in this case. ―Je n‘arriverais pas à dissimuler
sérieusement, je le crains, que cette femme-là, je l‘aime. Par chacune de ses démarches, je la sens
de ma race. Qu‘on me pardonne, sur cet aveu, ce que mon enthousiasme peut avoir ôté de stricte
objectivité à ce bref exposé. Il m‘a semblé que la seule chose importante que je pouvais
finalement apporter, c‘était mon avis de femme sur cette femme‖ (p. 128-129).50 Francine
Robaye stresses instead the narcissism and the masochism of Elle as the source of the coherence
of the plot (p. 133).
However, we should also notice that these women‘s contributions are all limited to the
discussion of Elle. The other contributors in the over three hundred page volume that presents the
proceedings of the seminar are all men. The three female authors were also completely or
relatively unknown. Ravar chose not to include the essay of Clara Malraux that would have
carried much more authority and would have been able to address other issues besides a
discussion of modern femininity. Moreover, these essays come after the contribution of the most
illustrious male colleague on the same topic. They pay their tribute to Morin‘s claim that the
woman of Hiroshima mon amour is indeed a new feminine type. They appear to justify his
intuition that Elle revealed contradictory aspects of modern womanhood that women had been
waiting to see represented. None of these articles articulates a discussion of private life with
broader claims on the public as did Firk in Positif. On the surface, therefore, Morin‘s sociology
of private life innovates beyond Breton‘s ―mad love‖ because it empowers women to speak
49 ―The provisional realization of an evolution that goes from the marionette to the modern
woman.‖
50 ―I could not seriously hide it—I am afraid— that woman, I love her. In all her bearings, I feel
her as one of my race. Forgive me, in this confession, if my enthusiasm has taken away from the strict
objectivity of this short essay. It seems to me that the only important thing that I could finally bring was
my opinion as a woman of this woman.‖
174
about themselves as subjects. However, their voice can only offer a more emotional testimony to
what the male sociologist already said in a more rational and objective way. The male is the
voice of science that tells us how the lancet of the film surgically penetrated into the
transformations of private life that had generated a new type of woman. Also the article that
Violette Morin (1961, p. 51)—Edgar‘s wife—wrote for the special issue of Arguments on love
and in which she quotes Hiroshima mon amour shares these general characteristics. In this sense,
Morin‘s sociologist is a ventriloquist as was Breton‘s poet. But he loses the ability that was a
germ in Surrealist ―mad love‖ to speak from the understanding of the private about broader
political issues.
Morin also points out how the more central role of the woman in Hiroshima mon amour
could create uneasiness in part of the audience about the more passive role of the man. We could
recall, in this regard, the extremely negative response of the Belgian philosopher Léopold Flam
that Ravar had indicated as an example of older men‘s reaction to Elle‘s sexual freedom. But
Morin‘s concerns about masculinity in the Brussels seminar were not fundamentally different
from several discussions on love in Arguments that have for today‘s reader a somehow outdated
and slightly boring flavor:
Dans cette apparition nouvelle, il est bien certain que la femme,
l‘héroïne, écrase l‘homme. Il y a évidemment inégalité dans la
présentation de l‘homme et de la femme, puisqu‘elle a un passé, qu‘on
nous le montre, et que lui on ne nous le montre que dans son présent. Elle
a la volonté de la rencontre, mais surtout la volonté de la rupture, et lui est
passif. Autrement dit, le problème de l‘homme est totalement dévalué ou
plutôt passé au second plan par rapport à la femme. Les thèmes de l‘amour
vont donc se cristalliser autour de la femme. (Ravar 1962, p. 114)51
The key to Morin‘s contribution to the Brussels seminar appears when Duras‘ friend
argues that Hiroshima mon amour is politically a nihilist film, despite its sociological
51 ―In this new apparition, it is well certain that the woman, the heroine, crushes the man. There
is an evident inequality in the representation of the man and of the woman, because she has a past,
because the film shows it to us, while it shows us the man only in his present. She has the will to meet,
but especially the will to break up, while he is passive. In other words, the problem of the man is totally
undervalued or rather it loses importance in comparison to the woman. The themes of love crystallize
around the woman.‖
175
contribution to our understanding of how love empowers modern women. This passage is so
important to grasp Morin‘s conflicted position that it is worth quoting it in full, even if I have
already discussed parts of it separately in the pages above:
Autrement dit, c‘est un film où effectivement un certain type de
femme peut se sentir directement et profondément concernée, parce que
son problème y est traité dès le départ et d‘une façon quasi chirurgicale
comme par une lame qui s‘enfonce dans son problème et ne le lâche pas.
De ce point de vue donc, le film a été correctement senti. Il a même réalisé
ce qui n‘était pas son intention consciente, mais qui était probablement son
intention profonde : c‘est un film—ne disons pas féministe parce que le
mot a un sens complètement dévalué et faux—mais un film de l‘univers de
la féminité, et de la féminité moderne. Mais au niveau de l‘idéologie, à
mon sens, il a été incorrectement apprécié, parce que des phénomènes de
camouflage ont joué. On a tenté d‘éviter d‘aborder le sujet profondément
nihiliste du film pour pouvoir oser l‘apprécier. (Ravar 1962 p. 83-83)52
So, the problem is: What does Morin mean with ―nihilist subject‖? Morin stresses how
the plot of Hiroshima mon amour recalls one of the defining myths of Western love—the story
of Tristan and Iseult—for its tragic union of love and death. Denis de Rougemont had examined
it in his L’Amour et l’Occident (1939, 1954). However, Hiroshima mon amour does not consider
death as a victory over adverse circumstances or as a sacrifice that leads to social renewal. Its
opening images connect sexual love with the taboo of putrefying and decomposing bodies
without proposing any theme of resurrection or any justification in terms of higher principles.
The death of the German soldier does not rescue Elle from being punished. And the victims of
Hiroshima do not prevent the threat of another atomic massacre in the future. ―Il semble donc
que chaque fois qu‘on tente de nous montrer le moment de pointe extrême de l‘amour, de
l‘amour des corps, on y associe un symbole de mort dans ce que la mort peut signifier d‘extrême
52 ―In other words, it is a film in which a certain type of woman can effectively feel directly and
profoundly concerned, because her problem is treated there since the beginning and in an almost surgical
way as if a blade sinks into her problem and does not leave it. From this point of view then, the film has
been correctly felt. It has even realized what was not its conscious intention, but was probably its deeper
intention: it is a film—let‘s not say feminist because the word has a completely devaluated and false
sense—but rather a film on the universe of femininity, and on modern femininity. But at the level of
ideology—in my opinion—it has been incorrectly evaluated, because some phenomena of camouflage
have intervened. People have tried to avoid addressing the profoundly nihilist subject of the film in order
to attempt to appreciate it.‖
176
dans l‘horreur, dans ce qu‘il y a de plus profond peut-être dans le thème de la mort: la
décomposition‖ (p. 78).53
Morin considers the theme of decomposition central in Hiroshima mon amour as it
lucidly indicates the decay of traditional values. It shows the existence of a world without social
and cultural values to guide it. In this nihilist universe there is no attempt to develop a new
transcendence. In Morin‘s words, ―cet amour entre la femme française et l‘amant japonais se
situe dans un univers où il n‘y a absolument pas de transcendance, pas de valeur, et cette absence
de transcendance, de valeur est remplie par une présence qui est celle de l‘horreur, de la
décomposition‖ (p. 78). 54 Problems of race, family, nationality, and politics are not presented
and discussed as such. There are no bitter germs of revolt against society as in the American film
noir. The evidence of destruction submerges even the message of protest against the bomb that
for the authors was the conscious aim of the film (p. 78). Love itself is not presented as a value,
but only as intensity and as existence. In fact, ―l‘horizon de ce film est tellement nihiliste qu‘il
n‘en vient même pas à l‘affirmation de l‘amour comme l‘ont fait les surréalistes. Il se trouve à un
niveau de pré-valorisation de l‘amour, de justification quasi existentielle‖ (p. 82).55
This reference to Surrealism is interesting because it allows us to draw a comparison
between Morin‘s reading of Hiroshima mon amour and the controversy of ―mad love‖ that saw a
former Surrealist like Sadoul opposed to a neo-Surrealist like Firk. In that case—we saw— the
problem was only the love between Elle and the German soldier. Sadoul criticized it in terms of
―National Communism,‖ while Firk attempted to understand the lovers as ―victims‖ and praised
53 ―It seems therefore that every time that the film attempts to show to us the extreme moment of
love, of carnal love, it associates to it a symbol of death in what death can mean in terms of extreme
horror, in what is perhaps the deepest aspect of the theme of death: decomposition.‖
54 ―This love between the French woman and the Japanese lover has as situation a universe in
which there is absolutely no transcendence, no value; and this absence of transcendence, of values, is
filled up with a presence that is that of horror, of decomposition.‖
55 ―The horizon of this film is so nihilistic that it does not even propose the affirmation of love as
the Surrealists did. It remains at a level of pre-valorization of love, of almost existential justification.‖
177
them for living an amour fou beyond race and nation. By contrast, Morin does not refer to this
debate concerning the ―communal memory‖ of the Resistance. He considers that the two loves of
Elle share the characteristic of being ―exogamic.‖ ―Cette tendance exogamique nous montre que
l‘amour ne connaît pas les barrières, ni les frontières, ni les classifications sociologiques‖ (p.
82).56
It is precisely this exogamic tendency that Morin connects with Surrealism, even if he
stresses that Hiroshima mon amour is mercifully free from the themes of destiny and mysticism
that the avant-garde movement had inherited from the Romantic tradition. Paradoxically, this
focus on exogamy seems almost to make the love between Lui and Elle more problematic for
Morin, because the fact that both of them are married undermines the great sociological
classification ―family.‖ In fact, we can remember that Breton‘s amour fou was cast against
family, nation, and religion—i.e. all the values whose putrefaction Hiroshima mon amour
nihilistically shows according to Morin.
Therefore, the question remains whether Morin is only rejecting the mystical aspect of
Surrealism or rather something that cannot translate into his sociological classifications. The
hidden sociological tendency of boundary-polishing seems to be particularly active in the case of
the major boundary between public and private that the episode of Nevers and its controversy
exposed, but that Morin appears to ignore. We will see that Resnais reintroduces the
controversial aspect of the episode of Nevers in his interviews for the Brussels seminar and for
Esprit. In this sense, his politics of the peut-être will precisely ask the audience to question the
firm grid of demarcations that sociology requires in order to carve its own domain of inquiry.
According to Morin, the transformations in the private sphere do not count politically.
Hiroshima mon amour is not a revolutionary film and it is not even a film of revolt. It is a film
that shows to what extent nihilism pervades the very texture of society and saturates its horizon.
56 ―This exogamic tendency shows us that love does not know barriers, nor borders, nor
sociological classifications.‖
178
Morin recognizes the accuracy of the sociological description of France at the turn of the Sixties,
but he cannot completely embrace the film for its lack of direct revolt:
Pas de révolte dans Hiroshima, rien que des êtres qui, à un moment
donné, accomplissent d‘une façon quasi rituelle les actes individuels qui
leur permettent de ressentir ce qu‘ils pensent être les significations mêmes
de la vie. C‘est dans ce sens qu‘on peut dire qu‘il s‘agit d‘un film postrévolutionnaire ou pré-révolutionnaire. Post-révolutionnaire en ce sens
que—venant après la grande série des films révolutionnaires russes ou
même les films de révolte américains—il présente en fait des idées
révolutionnaires complètement atrophiées ou asséchées; c‘est un film qui
vient après la décomposition d‘idées révolutionnaires. Film prérévolutionnaire aussi, dans la mesure où sans doute de nouveaux ferments
révolutionnaires germeront à partir de ce nihilisme même. (p. 83)57
We saw that Kostas Axelos considered nihilism from the point of view of his adaptation
of Heidegger‘s question concerning technology. The pessimism for the technological invasion of
every domain of life brought to a nihilistic undermining of values. But necessarily there will be a
time—when the current epoch of errancy is close to its end—when the epochal destiny of Being
will become apparent again in a new orientation that makes sense, even if only in a fragmentary
way. But even if Edgar Morin adopted this term of ―nihilism‖ from Axelos, his approach to the
world was less prone to embrace the abysmal endlessness of ―thinking.‖ Franco Fortini was close
to Morin from the Fifties and had proposed to him the title Arguments for his journal as the
―enema‖ to purge the Leftist culture of the Cold War. Fortini (2003, p. 265) fondly recalls in an
interview the genial and delirious personality of his friend that had lost faith in active Sartrean
engagement as many intellectuals of the Sixties, but still tried to develop a genial and almost
delirious coexistence between ―vitalism‖ and ―revolutionarism‖: ―On fait l’amour et puis on
descend dans la rue contre les flics.‖58
57 ―There is no revolt in Hiroshima, just beings who, at a given moment, accomplish in an almost
ritual fashion individual acts that enable them to feel what they consider the very significations of life. It
is in this sense that we can say that it is a post-revolutionary or pre-revolutionary film. Post-revolutionary
in the sense that—coming after the great series of Russian revolutionary films or even after the American
films of revolt—it shows in fact revolutionary ideas that are completely atrophied and drained; it is a film
that comes after the decomposition of revolutionary ideas. It is also a pre-revolutionary film, to the extent
that doubtlessly new revolutionary ferments will sprout from this nihilism itself. ‖
58 ―One makes love and then goes down into the streets against the cops.‖
179
Morin states that new revolutionary germs will perhaps be born in the future even from
the society that the ―nihilisme cendré‖ of Hiroshima mon amour depicts, and that differs from
the ―pink nihilism‖ of the Nouvelle Vague (Ravar 1962, p. 83).59 His words open a discussion
that involves other male personalities of the Brussels seminar on the political meaning of the
film. In that moment, a political falling star crosses the neutral horizon of filmology. But no
woman takes part in this debate. In Arendt‘s terms (1998, p. 11), the women of the Brussels
seminar are there as representatives of a social group, of a ―what‖ that sociology sees from an
Archimedean standpoint far enough from the Earth to dominate large masses through imposing
classifications. It is true that sociology helped Morin to see the material contradictions of society
that did not fit the mold of the Stalinist view of the world. His view of emotions enabled him to
make a tabula rasa of preconceived ideas in order to empirically understand the transformations
of society and, in turn, dialectically reconstruct the tenets of Communism also through the force
of the imaginary. However, Morin‘s sociological outlook did not enable a woman‘s voice to
cross the boundary between the public and the private, to engage in the plurality of political
debate, and to become a ―who‖ that can be remembered. By contrast, Firk‘s attention to the face
of the other in Hiroshima mon amour and in real life enabled her to present herself as a ―who‖
that courageously opened a new way and that her colleagues in Positif publicly and repeatedly
mourned.
I will return on the Brussels seminar in Chapter Five in order to show how it also
deployed a strictly academic face that had a lasting impact in the following criticism of
Hiroshima mon amour. In fact, I will discuss its important role in fashioning a reading of
Hiroshima mon amour that was conducive to the establishment of Film Studies as an
independent discipline and that undervalued the role of the context that the film addressed. In the
next section, I describe the rhetorical situation of Resnais‘ interview for Esprit. I stress
particularly its points of contact and its differences with the Brussels seminar that are reflected in
59 ―Ash gray nihilism.‖
180
the questions addressed to Resnais and in his answers. Finally, I will close the chapter with a
reading of Resnais‘ interviews that focuses on how his Sphinx-like rhetoric asks the audience to
reflect on the binary oppositions enemy/friend, war/peace, civilian/military and to put the
concept itself of the political under scrutiny.
The Rhetorical Situation of Resnais‘ Interview for Esprit: Between
Leftism and Modernization
Resnais‘ interview for Esprit opened the special issue ―Situation du cinéma Français‖ in
June 1960. The Personalist journal published this multifaceted examination of the situation of
French cinema with the specific aim to evaluate in its complexity the phenomenon of the
Nouvelle Vague that had started to show signs of crisis after its first enthusiastic explosion. The
presence among the contributors of a representative of the old filmological movement like
Georges Sadoul and of the younger filmologist Edgar Morin underlines how Esprit looked for
resources in this direction. However, Raymond Ravar intended to conciliate the model of the
Cahiers with the academic tradition of filmology in order to create a palatable mixture of
scientific authority and trendiness for Belgian film students. By contrast, Esprit was interested in
developing alliances with other committed journals. It adopted a multidisciplinary way of
organizing the materials that recalled the approach of filmology in order to react against the
formalistic critical model of the Cahiers and to stress the lasting Personalist commitment to
popular education.
In fact, after the death of André Bazin, the yellow journal had tended to privilege the
formal analysis of specific films and the decontextualized cult of particular auteurs. It no longer
paid attention to the question of the moral and political education of the audience that still
constituted an important component of Bazinian Personalism. This formalistic and
dehistoricizing critical model had become hegemonic at the turn of the Sixties. The successes of
the directors of the Nouvelle Vague who were closely associated with the Cahiers were a crucial
component of its widespread adoption, both in France and internationally.
181
Esprit claimed the moral and political heritage of Bazin in fighting against a reading
practice that underestimated the role of the audience. Michel Mesnil was the Personalist cinema
critic who had attempted in the clearest way to further this part of the Bazinian heritage in Esprit.
Therefore, it is not surprising that he and Jean Carta opened the issue on the situation of French
cinema with a clear statement that cinema was nothing per se, but rather was a language that
existed first of all for the audience. It was—in a core expression for Esprit— ―un moyen de
communication‖ (Carta and Mesnil 1960, p. 932).60 In fact, for Esprit the audience that had been
formed through the cine-clubs and the movement of popular education could demand the
production of films of better aesthetic quality that would also correctly inform the viewers and
rightly motivate them in moral and political terms. Therefore, the tools of filmology—such as the
sociological contribution of Edgar Morin on the myth of private life—had to be mustered in
order to concretely understand this new audience and the new conditions of production of films
that could form responsible citizens.
In the same way, Esprit wanted to evaluate the new phenomenon of French cinema in
terms not simply of its ―adult‖ way of representing in its complexity the modern trends of the
French society, but also in terms of the creation of a new ―humanisme cinématographique‖ (p.
933).61 Therefore, Esprit refused to use the term ―Nouvelle Vague‖ and chose instead the
expression ―Jeune Cinéma‖ [Young Cinema]. In fact, the New Wave was too much connected
with the critics of the Cahiers in the mind of the audience. This rhetorical move enabled the
Personalist journal to draw a clear line of separation between the Cahiers and what they
considered the most interesting part in the heterogeneous developments of French cinema.
The choice of interviewing Resnais on Hiroshima mon amour is an opening statement
that aligns Esprit with the more engaged tendencies of directors who came from the documentary
school, which also included Resnais‘ friends Varda and Marker. Their formal sophistication, in
60 ―A means of communication.‖
61 ―A cinematographic humanism.‖
182
fact, did not prevent them from touching topics that were central in the history of Esprit, such as
decolonization struggles and the anti-nuclear movement.
Also the extremely elegant essay by Marie-Claire Wuilleumier clearly marks this
distinction. The woman critic—who was a regular contributor to Esprit—argues that we should
not base our judgment of new French films only on their formal characters. The sophisticated
technical nuances of Alexandre Astruc‘s caméra stylo [fountain-pen camera] had become the
communal grammar of the new generation. However, authors like Resnais had been able to form
a ―language‖ out of this shared grammar and to communicate to the audience a whole world. ―De
l‘écriture au langage, le passage est celui d‘une technique à une esthétique, d‘un instrument à une
signification. Et, dans la mesure où le langage de Resnais, de Rouch ou d‘Agnès Varda remet en
question les cadres classiques du récit, il engage par là même une vision nouvelle des hommes
dans le monde‖ (Wuilleumier 1960, p. 960).62 The incantatory lyricism of the woman of
Hiroshima mon amour contrasted with the images of the city and it expressed an anguish that
permeated also the most advanced searches of the contemporary novel. The voice of Duras is far
from being a defect in the diamond of Hiroshima. It is rather what opens the film to the vision of
deracinated and lucid human beings:
C‘est pourquoi le cinéma, en assumant l‘ambiguïté de la parole en
même temps que l‘exactitude de l‘image, semble plus proche de la vérité,
et ce n‘est pas par hasard que des romanciers comme Cayrol ou
Marguerite Duras cherchent au cinéma un nouveau moyen d‘expression
qui leur permette d‘ajouter à la présence concrète du monde la vision d‘un
homme déraciné en face de ce monde et pour qui le seul salut est dans la
lucidité. (p. 966)63
62 ―From writing to language, there is a passage from technique to esthetics, from tool to
signification. And, to the extent that the language of Resnais, Rouch, or Agnès Varda questions the
classical framework of narration, it introduces for this very reason a new vision of the human beings in
the world.‖
63 ―This is why cinema, assuming the freedom of the word as well as the exactitude of the image,
seems closer to the truth, and it is not by chance if novelists like [Jean] Cayrol and Marguerite Duras
search in cinema for a new means of expression that allows them to add to the concrete presence of the
world the vision of a deracinated human being in the face of this world and for whom the only salvation is
in lucidity.‖
183
Esprit could certainly recognize itself in this formula. In fact, the Personalist journal had
already developed Karl Jaspers‘ Existentialist concern with the anguish of a world in which
modern technology had achieved a global reach. For Jaspers, salvation laid in a ―loving
communication‖ that could unite human beings in the face of extreme situations, such as the
threat that the atomic bomb posed to the very existence of the world. The thought of the
charismatic founder of Esprit—Emmanuel Mounier—also stressed the importance of
communication that allowed a more positive use of technology and refused to treat human beings
as mere means. Hence his famous debate with the extremely pessimist indictment of machines in
the work of Georges Bernanos. Mounier thought that it was important to embrace technology
and to envision and practice a positive form of collectivism opposed to the mere ―mass‖ that the
modern media and forms of organization tend to create. As Mounier wrote in 1947, ―Devant
l‘homme-instrument, il n‘est plus de limite à l‘inhumanité. Notre collectivisme est au contraire
un collectivisme de personnes responsables et libres‖ (1962, p. 224).64 Dialogue and the
cultivation of judgment were the sources of this freedom and committed responsibility.
Esprit was born before WWII as a mainly Christian movement that strived toward a
spiritual renovation of the Catholic Church. The group practiced communal living as a form of
community building and had a decentralized structure in the provinces. The wartime was the
occasion for Esprit to form underground ties with the Communist Party and to launch its
program in popular education. After the war, the charismatic leader of the group—the Catholic
Mounier—seriously examined the positions of the Communists and not without sympathy. Some
central members of the new Esprit went as far as to link class revolution to the core need of
spiritual revolution. Only later the repression of the freedom of cult in Socialist countries and the
realization of the disturbing tendencies of Stalinism convinced Mounier of the vanity of this
rapprochement. In any case, the Personalist involvement in popular education and in the anti-
64 ―Before the man-instrument, there is no limit to inhumanity. Our collectivism is instead a
collectivism of responsible and free people.‖
184
nuclear movement was the sign of their determination to collaborate with the Communists on
particular issues, while maintaining their composed character as an independent group. This
commitment had become a staple of Esprit as a ―revue-mouvement‖ (Boudic 2005, p. 70).65
In the first postwar period, in fact, this militant and even revolutionary disposition
prevailed over the more reformist and pro-technocratic tendencies. However, the development of
modern technology at the turn of the Sixties presented a new challenge. Jean-Marie Domenach,
the new editor of Esprit, had long been involved in the antinuclear movement. But he was also
sensitive to the new political role of sociology. He opposed de Gaulle‘s return to power, but he
also admired the man. Domenach hoped to be able to influence de Gaulle‘s government in a
sense that was close to Esprit‘s core values, particularly in the cultural domain. For the first time,
the center of Esprit was closer to the reformist tendencies than to the militants. The new
paradigm of the journal was ―modernization.‖
This paradigm shift characterizes the complex rhetorical situation that Esprit attempted to
negotiate through Hiroshima mon amour. In fact, Esprit‘s choice of a film with a progressive
theme was important in order to maintain and reaffirm the journal‘s identity as a Leftist group,
despite its new reformist program. The repeated harsh attacks against the uncommitted, anarchic,
or even conservative tendencies of the Cahiers perform the same function. In this sense, the
special issue on French cinema and particularly Hiroshima mon amour could help Esprit in a
massive operation of translation. Anti-colonialism, anti-nuclear activism, popular education, and
the other central issues that had guided the journal‘s Leftist engagement had to be translated into
the new paradigm of modernization. An example of this translation was Domenach‘s conception
that colonialism was a major economic, cultural, and political obstacle to the adoption of a
politics that would encourage the modernization of France (Boudic 2005, p. 227).
Morin‘s contribution to the issue on the situation of French cinema can also be read in
these terms. In fact, his reading of the myths of cinema as ideology was intended also as a
65 ―Review-mouvement.‖
185
contribution to the formation of the new leaders of popular education who have to be aware of
the developments and stakes of modern technology. Sociology was important for Esprit in
understanding the new forms of a working class that should learn how to profit from its newly
won leisure time through a useful and enriching use of the media. The journal challenged the
Stalinist credo in the necessary pauperization of the capitalist proletariat and attempted to chart
new areas of interventions that the concrete situation had opened.
Morin here does not have the central role that he had during the Brussels seminar, but his
presence signals a risky political alliance between the thematic of modernization in Esprit and
the similar sociological and philosophical concerns in Arguments. The crowning of this alliance
was achieved when Morin and Roland Barthes from Arguments did not sign the Manifesto of the
121 with Duras and Resnais. Instead, they joined Jean-Marie Domenach and Paul Ricœur from
Esprit in a more moderate petition that asked for a negotiated peace in Algeria in October 1960.
This petition did not ask for the right of conscientious objection in the Algerian war. It simply
absolved the individual act of defecting in terms that recalled the ―ethics of distress‖ of the
Protestant philosopher Paul Ricœur. In other words, the act of defection should be seen as an
individual testimony in intolerable circumstances (Boudic 2005, p. 220). This petition was
probably more popular with the public at large than the Manifesto of the 121 (Sirinelli 1990, p.
220). But there is no doubt that some voices in the Left—among which the Situationists—
considered it as less courageous than the Manifesto, whose signatories were subjected to
repressive measures by the State.
In conclusion, the rhetorical situation of Resnais‘ interview for Esprit differs from the
Brussels seminar in its more openly political thrust. The Algerian War was not a taboo issue as it
was in the academic world of the seminar. However, Resnais‘ form of Brechtian ―distancing‖
was equally important for Esprit as a tool to address the troubling issue of modernization. I will
show in the next chapter how this question of modernization is also the major concern of two
important contributors to the special issue of Esprit. In fact, in different ways, Georges Sadoul
and Michel Mesnil both attempted to think of cinema as a language that in Resnais‘ hands
186
becomes particularly adept at dealing with the question of modern technology. I close this
chapter with an analysis of Resnais‘ interviews for Esprit and the Brussels seminar that focuses
particularly on how the director‘s Sphinx-like approach addressed the question of modern
technology that these groups proposed. I will show, however, that he went beyond the
sociological thrust of these two groups and gestured toward a politics of the peut-être that was
close to Firk‘s politics of aimance.
The Permeable House: Resnais‘ Interview for the Brussels Seminar
In the interview with the Brussels seminar, Resnais knows that the audience has a
detailed knowledge of the text of the film. Therefore, he is extremely prodigal with information
concerning his technical choices. He has an amused and relaxed style in relating funny anecdotes
connected with the production of the film. For example, when he asked people who had been to
Japan whether there would be coffeehouses, they would only answer that Japanese people had a
very deep conception of death. So he was worried before leaving Paris. But when he arrived in
Tokyo he saw that there were coffeehouses everywhere and it was a Japanese national habit to
spend long hours there. In contrast with this chatty tone, the Cheshire cat is extremely cautious
about questions of morals. ―Je ne sais pas si l‘on peut tirer une morale, si les auteurs ont eu envie
de mettre une morale d‘avance dans le film‖ (Ravar 1962 p. 212).66 He gives his personal
opinion that the lovers would eventually separate after some days or some months, but not for
the thought of the spouse or the children. He immediately adds, however, that it is not certain
that it would happen and that Duras might have another idea on their reasons. ―Cela me plaît
assez que ce soit un peu ambigu‖ (p. 213).67
However, he stresses that the film is actually optimist in its representation of love. ―Ce
qui est important, et c‘est en cela que le film est assez optimiste, c‘est que cet amour a existé—
66 ―I don‘t know if one can get a moral from that, if the authors wanted to put a moral in advance
inside the film.‖
67 ―I quite like that it is a little ambiguous.‖
187
cela, c‘est positif—et qu‘elle va se trouver transformée par cette rencontre, et que ce n‘est plus la
même femme qui rentrera en France‖ (p. 213).68 His reading does, therefore, not align itself with
Morin‘s concerns with nihilism, but rather with the Surrealist conception of ―mad love‖ as
knowledge. In Resnais‘ words, ―ce qui me paraît intéressant dans l‘amour, c‘est cette faculté de
connaissance, d‘approfondissement de la connaissance‖ (p. 214).69 Even if he never mentions
―mad love‖ directly, he is bringing back into the picture the Surrealist conception of love that
Morin had attempted to limit and appropriate into the ―emotions‖ of his anthropology of cinema
and in the close barriers between public and private of his sociology of private life. Resnais also
repeatedly showed surprise that several members of the Brussels seminar had considered
memory the most important theme of Hiroshima mon amour, on the Proustian model of Bernard
Pingaud‘s learned study. Love and the bombing of Hiroshima were the most important themes
for him. ―Maintenant qu‘Hiroshima est complètement oublié, il n‘est pas mauvais qu‘on pense
de temps à autre à ces choses. L‘autre—c‘est peut-être idiot à dire—mais j‘attache beaucoup
d‘importance à l‘amour‖ (p. 215-216).70
Resnais then elaborates themes that already appeared in his interview to Firk, stating that
his film does not uphold a thesis, but is rather ―un film de sentiment‖ (p. 214).71 Feelings are
like musical themes and through them a character can be composed both of positive and negative
elements. If Hiroshima mon amour is a progressive film, it is certainly not propaganda. In a
fictional story even the authors cannot put in the mouth of the characters words that the
characters themselves don‘t want to say just to fit a thesis. ―Dans un film de fiction, on est de
68 ―What is important, and it is in this that the film is quite optimist, is that this love has
existed—this, is positive—and that she will find herself transformed by this encounter, and that it is no
more the same woman who will return to France.‖
69 ―What seemed to me interesting in love is this faculty of knowledge, of deepening of
knowledge.‖
70 ―Now that Hiroshima is completely forgotten, it is not bad that we think sometimes about
these things. The other thing—it may be idiotic to say so—but I attach a lot of importance to love.‖
71 ―A film of feeling.‖
188
toute manière terriblement happé par les personnages‖ (p. 214).72 Resnais and Duras agreed that
the characters of the film should not be active heroes. ―Je lui ai un peu parlé de cette notion de
personnages qui ne seraient pas des héros, qui ne participeraient pas à l‘action, mais en seraient
des témoins, ce que nous sommes dans la majorité des cas devant les catastrophes ou les grands
problèmes: des spectateurs‖ (p. 215).73 Resnais wants to develop another dramatic principle
from this passivity. ―On arrive ainsi peut-être à créer davantage une sensation de gêne chez le
spectateur que quand on lui propose des films comme…par exemple Les Trois Lanciers du
Bengale, où le héros est justement le Monsieur qui fait sauter la poudrière‖ (p. 215).74
It is on this topic of ―a-heroes‖ (vs. active ―anti-heroes‖) who do not participate directly
to the great tragedy that surrounds them that Resnais raises the issue of the ―mad love‖ of
Nevers, without a direct question from the audience. Viewers would not have been challenged in
the same way if the French girl had been a heroine of the Resistance and a martyr for a higher
cause rather than falling in love with a German soldier:
Quelqu‘un m‘a dit: ―Quel beau film vous auriez fait si vous aviez
fait du Japonais un jeune homme très marqué par les brûlures d‘Hiroshima
et de la Française une jeune fille torturée par la Gestapo, etc.‖ Je crois que
dans ces conditions on ne crée pas plus d‘inquiétude chez les spectateurs
qu‘avec les Trois Lanciers du Bengale: le public se dit ―à condition de
faire bien attention, on s‘en tirera toujours.‖ (p. 216)75
72 ―In a fictional film, one is in any way terribly taken by the characters.‖
73 ―I talked with her a little of this notion of characters who are not heroes, who do not take part
in action, but are its witnesses, that is what we are in most cases before the catastrophes and the great
problems: witnesses.‖
74 ―In this way one can perhaps create a greater sense of distress in the audience that when one
shows them films like…The Lives of a Bengal Lancer [Henry Hataway; 1935], where the hero is
precisely the gentleman who makes the powder magazine explode.‖
75 ―Somebody told me: ‗What a beautiful film you would have made it you had turned the
Japanese into a young man very scarred by the burnings of Hiroshima and the French woman into a girl
tortured by the Gestapo, etc.‘ I think that in these conditions one does not create in the viewers more
inquietude than with The Lives of a Bengal Lancer: the viewers say to themselves, ‗if we just pay
attention, we will always make it.‖
189
Hiroshima mon amour aims to disturb the audience and confront them with an
ambiguous situation in which to make their choices. This is the only contradictory morality that
the film allows. In this refusal of easy solutions we can perhaps feel an echo of the difficult
decision in the face of unsolvable situations that the paradoxical communities of the peut-être
required. Resnais is, however, particularly attentive to point out that his film did not intend to
show members of the Resistance as the punishers of Elle. With these words, he addresses
Sadoul‘s major concern regarding the representation of ―mad love‖ in Hiroshima mon amour as
a possible criticism of the interior Resistance. ―Il y a une chose cependant sur laquelle j‘ai des
remords de ne pas avoir été assez clair. Je pensais par exemple que dans l‘image où l‘on voit
tondre Emmanuelle Riva il était très évident que ce n‘étaient pas des gens de la résistance, mais
des boutiquiers, comme cela s‘est passé dans la majorité des cas‖ (p. 216).76
Even if the critic did not take part in the seminar, as a filmologist he was bound to know
the content of this interview. After this statement, Sadoul no longer raised his objection
concerning the episode of Nevers. However, we know from Resnais‘ previous interview for Les
Lettres Françaises that it is typical of the director to provide ―appeasing‖ answers, while shifting
the discussion onto another level. At that time he referred to the issue of conscientious objection
in the Algerian War. Also in this case, therefore, we can safely assume that the debate on ―mad
love‖ was not over.
Resnais compares, then, his style of filmmaking with the writing style of the avant-garde
novels in which the novelist asks the audience not to be passive and to fill the lines with their
imagination. ―J‘aurais eu envie de faire un film dans lequel le spectateur, lui aussi, se sente la
tête libre et du coup travaille à son tour, et essaye de remplir le film par son travail
d‘imagination‖ (p. 217).77 The viewer should not just be sitting there in a hypnotized state. In
76 ―There is one thing, however, about which I regret not to have been clear enough. I thought for
example that in the image in which one sees that they shave Emmanuelle Riva it was very evident that
they were not people of the Resistance, but some shopkeepers, just as that happened in most cases.‖
77 ―I would like to shoot a film in which the viewer, he too, feels his head free and suddenly
works for himself, and attempts to fill up the film through the work of his imagination.‖
190
this sense, Hiroshima mon amour is constructed as an empty film in which the viewers have to
bring something of themselves. Like Alain Robbe-Grillet—and Abe Kōbō in Japan—Resnais
writes with the eraser. ―Pour le reste, j‘ai tendance à enlever les accessoires, à gommer
énormément de choses dans le cadre, à supprimer‖ (p. 218).78 However, Resnais states that he
could obtain the Brechtian ―distanciation‖ [distancing] that he wanted only in one minute of
Hiroshima mon amour. The Cheshire cat—typically— does not explain the reason why only this
minute in the whole film satisfied his concept of distancing. ―C‘est au milieu de la grande scène
dans le café du fleuve. Okada dit: ‗Parfois il pleut?,‘ elle répond ‗Oui, le long des murs.‘ Il me
semble qu‘il y a une minute du film qui répond à ce que je souhaitais. Je ne sais pas pourquoi‖
(p. 218).79
According to the Surrealist view, moments that are inexplicable but have a hold on us
contain a powerful truth. Therefore, Resnais‘ avowal of his ignorance of why this minute was
successful signals a key to his interpretation of the film. In order to solve the riddle of the
Sphinx, I will conjure some help. But, first, I offer an analysis. The scene happens in the
coffeehouse along the river in Hiroshima. The images and the sounds of Nevers and Hiroshima
mix in this part of the film. In Nevers, Elle is in the cellar. A black cat is looking at her. A French
waltz plays on a juke box in Hiroshima that continues throughout the sequence. We see Lui and
Elle sitting at the table from the waist up. She drinks and he fills up her glass with his own. A
tracking shot forward and a pan shot to the right mark her feelings. She painfully continues to tell
the story of how her family shut her in her room and then in the cellar to hide her shame. Her
mother brought her out every night to check if her hair had grown without getting close to her.
The minute that Resnais references starts with a close-up. We see Lui‘s back. He asks,
78 ―Apart from that, I have the tendency to remove the accessories, to erase an enormous amount
of things in the frame, to suppress.‖
79 ―It is at the middle of the grand scene at the coffeehouse on the river. Okada says: ‗Sometimes
it rains?‘ She answers: ‗Yes, all along the walls. I think that there is one minute in the film that responds
to what I wished. I don‘t know why.‘
191
―Sometimes it rains?‖ Elle‘s voice off, ―…along the walls.‖ Elle enters into the frame and Lui
takes her face inside his hands. ―Je pense à toi. Mais je ne le dis plus.‖80 Lui answers, ―Folle.‖
Elle, ―Je suis folle d‘amour pour toi.‖81 A pan shot to the left shows the intermittent neon lights
of the city reflected on their faces. She caresses her hair. It was growing in Nevers and she felt it
everyday. But it did not matter. The next shot shows her in her room in Nevers lying on her bed.
The slap in the face that Sadoul considered the turning point in the tragic love story
between Elle and Lui also happens in the coffeehouse along the river, only a few minutes after
this. Elle has just told Lui how her lover had been shot and she had spent hours on his dead body.
He had been her first love. The slap in the face comes here and takes her out of her stupor.
Apparently, Resnais had closed the polemics on ―mad love‖ with Sadoul with his statement that
it had not been members of the Resistance who shaved Elle. However, he chooses a moment in
which Elle declares her ―mad love‖ to Lui, but as if he was the dead German soldier. The two
male characters become one. In other words, Resnais appears to oppose his distancing to
Sadoul‘s ―National Communism.‖ Sadoul had read Lui‘s gesture as a form of disgust of the
Leftist man who hears of a love for an ―enemy in uniform.‖ By contrast, Resnais chooses as key
a minute of the film in which Lui caresses her and helps her to tell a story that is so painful by
taking the place of the dead.
If we focus only on the exchange that Resnais reports—―Sometimes does it rain?‖
―…along the walls.‖—we feel the wetness and dampness of the rain. But we don‘t see it. Where
does it fall? Is it outside along the external walls? Or is it inside the house? Does it enter into the
cellar where Elle is? In any case, its dampness is felt in the cellar, so cold for its proximity to the
Loire. Where did the rain appear before this in the film? We have to go back to the end of the
first fifteen minutes, which show the consequences of the nuclear bomb. A long shot shows the
explosion of the H bomb. Japanese people are in the streets with umbrellas under the rain. Elle‘s
80 ―I think about you. But I don‘t say it any more.‖
81 ―Mad‖; ―I am mad with love for you.‖
192
incantatory voice recalls that women are afraid to give birth to monsters, and men may become
sterile. ―Mais ça continue. La pluie fait peur. Des pluies de cendres sur les eaux du Pacifique.
Les eaux du Pacifique tuent. Des pêcheurs du Pacifique sont morts. La nourriture fait peur. On
jette la nourriture d‘une ville entière. On enterre la nourriture de villes entières. Une ville entière
se met en colère.‖82
The visuals show the close-ups of a Geiger counter, an irradiated fisherman, rows and
rows of fishes on the ground, and loads of fishes thrown away. A manifestation follows that
carries paper images of the fish. The sequence finishes with the words about the enraged people
that rise against the inequality posed in principle by certain people against other people, by
certain races against other races, and certain classes against other classes. In other words, the
montage that starts from the theme of the rain brings us back to the sentences that were the most
important for Firk‘s articulation of her politics of aimance. Edgar Morin‘s sociology of private
life and Kostas Axelos‘ reading of the late Heidegger stressed that modern technology had
colonized and profoundly transformed private life and everyday life. However, they could not
conceive that a voice could rise from private life with a political meaning that addressed the
concerns of the public. Morin‘s sociology needed to preserve the boundary between the public
and the private, as his interpretation of Hiroshima mon amour for the Brussels‘ seminar well
shows.
By contrast, Resnais consciously uses the knowledge of his audience to hint at the
political permeability of the relation between the private and the public. In fact, the Brussels
seminar provided the first consistent group of viewers—apart perhaps from the members of Le
14 juillet who were closest to Duras—who knew how the opening fifteen minutes of Hiroshima
mon amour did not address only Hiroshima. The shot by shot transcription of the film that they
realized under the direction of Raymond Ravar clearly identifies that the explosion that appears
82 ―But this continues. The rain scares. Rains of ashes over the water of the Pacific. The water of
the Pacific kills. Some fishermen of the Pacific have died. Food scares. People throw away the food of
entire cities. People bury the food of entire cities. An entire city becomes enraged.‖
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in this sequence is of the H bomb.83 We might add that it most likely belongs to the Bikini
nuclear test of 1954. In fact, the visual of the Japanese fisherman is a document of how the
fallout of the Bikini explosion irradiated the crew of the Japanese vessel Daigo Fukuryū maru
[Lucky Dragon Five]. Aikichi Kuboyama died and the tuna he carried was contaminated. The
philosopher Günther Anders (2007, p. 244) cites this example in Die Antiquiertheit des
Menschen in order to show how scientific experiments are no longer hermetically isolated.
Rather, they erupt into the dimension of historical reality and have actual consequences for us
and for the future generations, impacting our biologic heritage. Kuboyama‘s wife started an
antinuclear movement in Tokyo that spread across Japan and in which women had a crucial role,
because of women‘s cultural and social proximity with the vital issues of food and reproduction.
The Brussels seminar wanted to avoid the burning political question of colonialism that
was not fitting to its academic neutrality. Therefore, it did not develop its knowledge of the
content of the film into a critique of the French nuclear test in the Algerian Sahara, as did
Benayoun. It also did not draw the politically charged articulations through which Firk indicted
colonialism and racism from her position as a woman in an endangered private life. However,
Resnais addresses their knowledge in order to ask them to think of the pertinence of the
boundaries that their sociological outlook constructed and their academic neutrality reinforced.
The minute of the film that he describes as the only successful moment of distancing presents
Surrealist ―mad love‖ as connected to the theme of the ―permeable house.‖
The nuclear black rain overdetermines the rain that falls into it or dampens it. Hiroshima
and Nevers are united in a destiny of technology that does not recognize national boundaries or a
neat distinction between war and peace. The electric light that illuminates Elle and Lui‘s face in
the coffeehouse along the river Ōta in Hiroshima might be the product of nuclear technologies.
But the superimposition of peace-time Japan and WWII in France undermines the distinction
between peaceful and military use. In Heidegger‘s conception of the essence of modern
83 Raymond Ravar, Cit., p. 257.
194
technology as Enframing these differences are secondary in comparison to the way in which
technology colonizes and transforms our approach toward nature and other human beings. The
Loire itself, which dampened the cellar of Nevers, had become a coolant for the plutonium
power plants in France, whose technocratic system of production of nuclear energy was geared
also toward the development of stable plutonium for the bomb.
The permeable house, however, is not only a sign of how modern technology led to the
colonization of private life. It is also the source of an understanding that can lead to political
responsibility. In fact, it is only by facing again her story of Nevers that Elle can begin to
understand something about the suffering of Hiroshima. At the end of the film Lui does not tell
her anymore that she had not seen anything there. Modern technology shows that the boundaries
that separate the private from the public and war from peace are porous and constructed post
factum. Resnais‘ ambiguity of distancing is close to Derrida‘s politics of the peut-être as it asks
to reflexively consider and deconstruct the binary oppositions that orient our conception of the
political, but that prove less and less useful in understanding and bringing to words the
underlying directions and the real oppressions of our globalized and fractured world. In this
sense, Resnais‘ politics of the peut-être becomes indeed the condition of possibility for Firk‘s
politics of aimance. The responsibility toward the face of the Other as a ―who‖ comes from the
ability to shatter any preconceived view of the political that does not allow this encounter to
happen. Resnais‘ ―permeable house‖ does not directly respond to Sadoul‘s ―National
Communism,‖ but instead shifts the discussion to a broader level, targeting the fundamental
conception of the political that enabled ―National Communism‖ to be constituted in the first
place.
In this way, the brief encounter that Resnais had with Heidegger in occupied Germany in
the fall of 1945—without being able to talk directly with him in a shared language—germinated
more than a decade later. The discourse of technology became the lever for a different
conception of the political. The ―permeable house‖ of modern technology became a topos that
returned in two films of authors who had admired Hiroshima mon amour and who were also
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interested in the discourse of technology of German Existentialism in the context of the crisis of
Stalinism.
In 1960, Cesare Zavattini wrote the screenplay for the pacifist Yugoslavian film Rat (The
Atomic War Bride). The director was his former disciple in the Experimental Center in Rome—
Veljko Bulajić—who would later become Tito‘s favorite for his heroic war epics. The veteran of
Italian Neorealism had liked Hiroshima mon amour when he saw it at Cannes for its moral and
political conscience in presenting the question of war and peace in relation with the stories of
individual human beings. He stated in 1960:
A Cannes, dissi: fate un festival tutto sulla guerra e sulla pace. Ma
non volevo mica vedere dei film con delle divise o delle bombe; proprio,
evidentemente, tutto il contrario: volevo semplicemente richiamare ad una
presenza morale e politica della cinematografia. Ecco l‘errore: di credere
che i film con coscienza storica, di guerra e di pace, siano film che
obbligano in una certa direzione. Hiroshima mon amour, ecco, è nel nostro
stesso generale ordine di idee, ma va per una sua strada e ce ne sono
centomila di strade, di spunti. (Zavattini 1979, p. 219) 84
At the turn of the Sixties, Zavattini praised Günther Anders for Die Antiquierheit des
Menschen. Hannah Arendt‘s former husband, in fact, had produced a work whose narrative force
contained such fight and provocation that it would scare producers away (Zavattini 1979, p.
221). Rat has a circular structure that well illustrates the discourse of modern technology. Its
opening scene shows the hero proudly showing to his neighbors that the house in which he will
live with his future wife has electricity. But an atomic war erupts for futile motives. The
newlyweds are badly hurt by the blast, but they finally succeed in crawling home. The walls have
collapsed and the wife silently dies on the bed. Only the electric light is still on. This tongue in
cheek ending examines the relation between the need for atomic progress that an underdeveloped
country like Yugoslavia considered vital and the impossibility of a complete separation between
84 ―At Cannes, I said: Let‘s have a festival entirely on war and peace. But I did not want to see
films with uniforms and bombs; evidently, it was all the opposite; I simply wanted draw attention toward
a moral and political presence of cinematography. Here is the mistake: To believe that films with an
historical conscience, of war and peace, are films that force us into a certain direction. Hiroshima mon
amour, for example, shares our general order of ideas, but it goes in its own way, and there are one
hundred thousand ways, and starting points.‖
196
the peaceful and military uses of nuclear technology. The ―permeable house‖ is the sign of this
conflict that invests the most intimate life and hopes of a couple.
The Japanese Marxists and former Surrealists Teshigahara Hiroshi and Abe Kōbō offer
another image of permeable house in Suna no onna (The Woman in the Dunes, 1964). The actor
Okada Eiji who plays Lui in Resnais‘ film is also the protagonist of The Woman in the Dunes.
Robert Benayoun (1980, p. 163) and Akira Mizuta Lippit (2005, p. 126) both stress the
intertextual relation between this Japanese film and Hiroshima mon amour. However, none of
them remarks on the importance of the topos of the ―permeable house‖ that is probably one of
the most important features of this relation. Teshigahara repeated on different occasions his
admiration for Resnais as an author who also came from documentary filmmaking. In fact,
Resnais always attempted to address important issues and to find new formal solutions for
cinema. Georges Sadoul reported Teshigahara‘s admiration of Resnais to the French audience in
his interview with the Japanese director in 1964 for the Cahiers du cinema.
As for Abe, he also connected the floating grin of the ―Cheshire cat‖ with the Brechtian
fantasy that mobilizes the critical faculty through defamiliarization (Schnellbächer 2004, 436).
The novelist was an avid reader of Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, continuing a tradition of interest
in German Existentialism that dated from the exchanges between the two countries before
WWII. At that time, Miki Kiyoshi had become the first Japanese student of Heidegger at
Marburg and his further theorizations on technology had a great impact on Japanese Marxists. It
is interesting that in his 1942‘s Gijutsu Tetsugaku (The Philosophy of Technology) the Japanese
philosopher uses the example of the ―room‖ (shitsu) in order to explain the concept of
Zugenhörigkeit of the technological tools that for him represented Heidegger‘s most important
contribution to the philosophy of technology (Miki 1967, p. 258). In fact, for Heidegger, the
tools are essentially ―etwas, um zu…‖ or ―a thing for something.‖ It is in the original nature of
tools to be in relation with other tools. A writing tool, for example, stands in relation with the
furniture and the room. The room comes first, not as a geometrical structure but as ―sumu tame
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no dōgu to shite no shitsu‖ (p. 259).85 Also at the level of society, the tools should never be
thought in isolation, because it is from their interconnection that they, first, receive the meaning
of tools.
The house of Suna no onna, however, is the permeable house of Enframing. The woman
and the man make love covered with sand with an intertextual connection with the opening scene
of Hiroshima mon amour that recalls the threat of the atomic bomb. The sand falls into the house
and everything rots for its dampness. The woman and the man have to repeat an endless and
meaningless labor of shoveling the sand that is a ―standing reserve‖ for building cheap houses
against safety regulations. The tools of the house have all been adapted as a system in this
extreme environment. The water is held in a gasoline can, which in Miki‘s classification would
belong to the system of the ―machines‖ for the source of energy that it was designed to hold, but
that here is subverted by a different use.
Abe and Teshigahara seem to indicate that the only person who can make sense of this
distorted Zugenhörigkeit of survival is the woman. With an almost Derridean word-play, the man
can find a meaning in this oppressive world and find a way of resistance that is also a guarantee
of freedom only if he learns how to listen (hören) to the woman. It is certainly important to
remember in this connection that Abe had been extremely sympathetic to the civil campaign that
the consequences of the Bikini explosion had started in Japan, stressing how the threat of the
atomic bomb to the everyday life of the people had brought about this heightening of
consciousness (Schnellbächer 2004, p. 187). After his exclusion from the Japanese Communist
Party this new way of imagining politics was undoubtedly a resource for him. These examples
illustrate how Resnais‘ ―permeable house‖ was effectively perceived by authors who were
familiar with the language of cinema and interested in the relation between the Existentialist
discourse of technology and the development of new forms of political commitment.
85 ―The room as a tool for dwelling.‖
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Toward the Language of the Modern World: Resnais‘ Interview
for Esprit
Resnais‘ interview for Esprit has several points in common with his interview for the
Brussels seminar. But here the questions attempt to gauge, first, his social and political
commitment. The readers of Esprit are interested in his formal innovations mostly from this
committed perspective. In this sense, the interview begins with an attempt to demarcate Resnais‘
work from the Nouvelle Vague as a homogeneous movement. The questions stress his relations
with the Nouveau Roman and ask him to further define his conception of ―distanciation.‖ It is
interesting to notice the intertwined role that ―feelings‖ and ―judgment‖ have in Resnais‘
response for Esprit. In fact, Resnais had spoken only of ―imagination‖ in the context of the
Brussels seminar:
C‘est au moins ce que je souhaiterais: que le spectateur ne
s‘identifie pas au héros, mais seulement, par moments, aux sentiments du
héros. Qu‘il ait des moments d‘identification, et aussi des moments de
retrait. Qu‘il se sente concerné à travers des moments d‘émotion qui lui
sont communs, avec tel personnage, mais qu‘il garde son jugement. Dans
A bout de souffle, ce qui me passionne, c‘est l‘échange de sentiments entre
Belmondo et Jean Seberg, mais je peux trouver leur personnage
antipathique, si ça me plaît. (Resnais 1960, p. 936-937)86
In contrast to Edgar Morin‘s anthropology of cinema, the individual feelings between the
characters also draw the identification. ―Love‖ is no longer the feeling to be exorcized among the
other emotions, even if it has become complicated and unstable. However, in the tradition of
Esprit of preparing conscious citizens there also need to be moments of withdrawal that enable
judgment to be exerted. This notion of withdrawal is probably what gives the title to the whole
interview that translates in English as ―A Stoic Cineaste.‖ Without this withdrawal and without
this ability to feel individually with the characters the identification follows only traditional
86 ―This is at least what I wish: that the viewer does not identify with the heroes, but only, at
times, with the feelings of the heroes; that there are moments of identification, and also moments of
withdrawal. That he feels concerned through moments of emotions that are communal—with a certain
character—but that he guards his judgment. In [Jean-Luc Godard‘s] Breathless, what moves me is the
exchange of feelings between Belmondo and Jean Seberg, but I can find their character antipathetic, if I
want.‖
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moral patterns. Hence, judgment suffers. The example of Jean-Luc Godard‘s Breathless
illustrates this point. ―Ceux qui ont sur ce film un jugement moral y voient un film fasciste: la
glorification du gangster, de la dénonciation, ceux-là s‘identifient ou veulent s‘identifier aux
héros du film‖ (p. 937).87
This conception of judgment is also what guides the response of Resnais to Sadoul‘s
attack against Duras‘ conception of amour fou. Sadoul, in fact, was also contributing to this
special issue of Esprit. For the Stalinist critic the slap in Elle‘s face indicated the irritation that
Lui felt for her love with an enemy soldier. Resnais replies that this oscillation between
sympathy and irritation is the characteristic of any love and any friendship. ―Vis-à-vis de
l‘héroïne d‘Hiroshima je crois aussi qu‘on doit ressentir de la sympathie, mais avec de la réserve,
de l‘agacement… (d‘ailleurs n‘est-ce pas ce qui se passe continuellement dans l‘amitié et dans
l‘amour ?)‖ (p. 937).88 Without fully understanding the complex nuances of these individual
feelings it is not possible to pass a judgment on characters such as Elle who escape even their
authors‘ control. ―C‘est aussi pour laisser sa liberté de jugement au public que nous n‘avons pas
indiqué que le soldat allemand était anti-nazi, c‘était pour nous implicite, mais nous avons refusé
de le dire pour ne pas dédouaner trop visiblement l‘héroïne, ne pas rendre la sympathie trop
facile, ne pas favoriser une identification que le public recherche trop‖ (p. 937).89 As in Firk‘s
politics of aimance, the correct judgment comes only from the ability to concretely understand
the nuances of the situation, which include the feelings of the characters. In this sense, the
ambiguity of the ―mad love‖ of Nevers is necessary precisely to avoid a sympathy that would be
87 ―Those who have a moral judgment of this film see in it a Fascist film: the glorification of the
gangster, of informing, those identify or want to identify with the heroes of the film.‖
88 ―Before the heroine of Hiroshima I also believe that one should feel some sympathy, but with
some reserve, some irritation… (After all isn‘t it what happens all the time with friendship and in love?)‖
89 ―It is also in order to leave their freedom of judgment to audience that we have not indicated
that the German soldier was anti-Nazi— it was implicit for us, but we have refused to say it in order not
to clear too visibly the heroine, making the sympathy too easy, and facilitating an identification that the
public desires too much.‖
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too absolute and too abstract in its foundations, and hence incapable of preparing the audience to
judge beyond their given categories even on politically charged issues.
Esprit was a committed journal with a religious and mainly Catholic inspiration.
Therefore, one of the questions concerns Resnais‘ being an agnostic director. Resnais confirms
that he does not believe in life after death, and therefore he attempts to be responsible toward life
and to address what can be changed. The aim of his work is to cause a change in the audience
even in relation to events that may seem completely foreign to the subject of his films. In
particular, Resnais rejects the accusation of pessimism for Hiroshima mon amour, even if it
shows people who suffer. The love of the story was worth living more than years of apparent but
empty happiness. The heroes, moreover, ―repartent chacun vers leurs responsabilités propres‖ (p.
943-944).90 In his interview with the Brussels seminar Resnais had stressed that this
responsibility was not primarily toward their familial obligation. The context of the interview of
Esprit shows that also in this case, Resnais is thinking more in terms of antinuclear and social
commitment. The other secret that the Cheshire cat and his partner in crime protected, in fact,
was the obsessive meaning of the word ―Nevers‖ that in English sounds like the ―Never‖ of the
international slogan ―No more Hiroshima.‖ Nevers, ―que, realmente, posee une pronunciation
más Hermosa como sonido.? Lo ve?, otra vez el sonido…‖ (Riambau 1988, p. 37).91 Also Duras
shares in this Surrealist obsession. In her proud and surprised words, ―je me suis aperçue il y a
deux ans peut-être que Nevers, Nevers en France, c‘était never, ‗jamais‘, en anglais. Je me joue
des tours comme ça souvent, c‘est bizarre‖ (Duras and Porte 1977, p. 185).92
90 ―Go each back to their own responsibility.‖
91 ―Which, to tell the truth, had a much more beautiful pronunciation in terms of sound. You see?
The sound again…‖
92 ―I have realized perhaps two years ago that Nevers, Nevers in France, was never, ‗never‘ in
English. I always trick myself like that, it‘s bizarre.‖
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This focus on responsibility dominates the last part of the interview of Esprit. Through it,
the Personalist journal attempts to stress its ongoing commitment in the Left, despite its new
paradigm of modernization that has complicated its identity. Accordingly, the interview closes
on three of the areas that had been key to Esprit as a ―review-mouvement‖: Anti-nuclear
activism, anti-colonialism with a particular emphasis on the Algerian question, and popular
education. In all the cases, Resnais shows a complete agreement with the position and the
concerns of the journal. He denies that the reaction of the lovers in relation to the antinuclear
manifestation was intended to signify an antagonism between the search for individual and social
happiness. He manifests his desire to shoot a film on the Algerian war, if he could find a good
script for it. And he closes his contribution with the condemnation of political censorship that
hinders the formation of responsible citizens.
In conclusion, Resnais‘ contribution to Esprit enabled the journal to negotiate its difficult
rhetorical situation in the Left. It is not insignificant in this regard that the documentary that
Resnais quotes more frequently in this interview is Toute la mémoire du monde, his film on the
French National Library to which some members of Esprit involved in popular education had
contributed. Among them, the most important for my argument is Joseph Rovan, the
underground friend of Jean Beaufret. Rovan, in fact, had been the first French translator of the
Letter on Humanism that Heidegger addressed to Beaufret in 1947. There, the German
philosopher criticized the philosophy that was at the basis of Sartre‘s engagement as a form of
Cartesianism that saw man as the master of creation. He also announced that there had been a
―turning‖ in his own thought that heralded his question concerning technology. However, Rovan
later became one of the members of the Club Jean-Moulin that was among the most assertive
groups in proposing an ideology of modernization that was perfectly integrated into Gaullist
technocracy. This group brought to the extreme consequences Esprit‘s usual tactic of infiltrating
central structures in order to change them from within. Resnais was a director whom chance had
made familiar with Heidegger‘s discourse of technology at an early time. In this sense, he was
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perhaps the best situated to help Esprit to negotiate this difficult transition toward the new
paradigm of modernization.
In the next chapter, I further elaborate on the question of modernization from the point of
view of the language of cinema. I will explain how different groups and authors found in
Hiroshima mon amour a source that enabled them to reflect on cinema as the language of a
modern world that was increasingly turning toward abstraction. Older conceptions of
commitment faltered and needed to be revised and translated. Also the theory of cinema was
subjected to revision. The uncontrollable modern world influenced the way in which the
Bazinian heritage was read. Until now the trajectory of this book has brought us from the
political quest of Surrealism to the Heideggerian question of technology. I have showed how
they influenced the critical reception of Hiroshima mon amour particularly on the level of
content. From the next chapter, however, the question of the form of cinema becomes
paramount, in the terms of language, spectacle, or image. As this attention to the form dominates
the further development of Film Studies as a discipline, it is important for us to chart its
contrasted ramifications at a moment in which also the interpretation of the cinematic form was
still directly influenced by the question of technology. In this way, we can better understand
what was lost in the further developments of the discipline.
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CHAPTER FOUR
THE LANGUAGE OF THE MODERN WORLD: FROM THE CAHIERS TO
THE SITUATIONISTS
Technology vs. Decontextualization
In the first three chapters, I have told the story of how the critical debate on ―mad love‖
in Hiroshima mon amour mobilized clashing conceptions of politics and different views of
technology. In particular, Resnais‘ interviews for Esprit and the Brussels seminar responded to
rhetorical situations in which the sociology of private life played a key role in grasping the
transformations due to modern technological developments. Also the director stressed the
question of technology. But he also showed how it potentially undermined the boundaries that
sociology tended to reinforce between the private and the political. This chapter continues to
analyze the theme of technology. But it shifts the attention to the level of its relation with
different conceptions of the cinematic language. I argue that the early criticism of Hiroshima
mon amour provides the ideal arena in which to study how the question of modern technology
articulated with contrasting views of cinematic language and pushed critics to elaborate
unprecedented solutions to the problem.
The question of modern technology that Resnais raised in Hiroshima mon amour often
undermined consolidated conceptions of the cinematic language. For example, it challenged Eric
Rohmer‘s standards of ―classicism‖ that stressed how the auteur who confronts phenomenal
reality through the camera has to be rationally in charge of its poetic interpretation and create
universal, timeless values out of it. The troubling aspect that the issue of modernization
represented for Sadoul‘s Communist convictions once more forced the Stalinist critic to revert to
his Surrealist past. In this sense, the representation of technological objects in Hiroshima mon
amour represented for him the ―mystery of the everyday‖ that enabled him to maintain the basic
tenets of his commitment, but to shift the focus toward the understanding of a more complex
reality. Michel Mesnil similarly negotiated through the Bazinian ontology of the photographic
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image the troubling question of how to maintain a critical Personalist engagement in a journal
like Esprit that did not look without sympathy to Gaullist technocracy. Finally, the Situationists
pushed the avant-garde idea that modern arts tended toward self-destruction to argue that
Hiroshima mon amour destroyed the traditional view of cinema in order to open to private life.
In all these cases, the situation in modernizing and technocratic France at the turn of the Sixties
forced the theory of cinema to face its context and inflect itself in order to grasp its upsetting
changes and opportunities.
There is no doubt that Les Cahiers du Cinéma under Rohmer‘s direction was the
hegemonic cinema journal in 1959. The link between the yellow review and the Nouvelle Vague
had skyrocketing effects on its sales, in France and abroad. On the theoretical level, the
publication of André Bazin‘s collected essays had proven the organic quality of the ontological
view of cinema of the founder of the Cahiers. It had also provided a strong backing for Rohmer
and the other Young Turks who adapted the views of this father figure to their own agenda. They
embraced his phenomenological conception of cinema as the ―veil of Veronica‖ of reality, but
they inflected his socially-oriented Personalist conviction into the decontextualized politique des
auteurs. At the beginning of the Fifties, a filmological multidisciplinary approach or a Stalinist
content-based conception could still have some hold. But at the turn of the Sixties, a discussion
on cinema could not fail to take into account the position of the Cahiers and to frame itself in
relation to it.
This priority is particular true in the case of Hiroshima mon amour. In fact, Resnais had
been a friend of Bazin since the war and was close to the young filmmakers of the Nouvelle
Vague who admired him as a master for his long experience and technical ability. The critics of
the Cahiers could not discuss their own careers as directors without facing the charge of
favoritism from their rivals of Positif and other cinema journals. Therefore, they eagerly
welcomed the chance to debate Hiroshima mon amour also as a way of examining and defining
their own position as the directors of the New Wave. The roundtable ―Hiroshima, notre amour‖
that they staged in July 1959 on Resnais‘ first long feature gathered voices that represented
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different orientations inside the Cahiers. It enabled young critics like Jacques Rivette and JeanLuc Godard to start elaborating their view of the mise-en-scène that contrasted with Rohmer‘s
hegemonic classicism and that would then orient the different direction of the journal in the
Sixties. The question of modern technology and the view of Resnais as the first director lucidly
at ease with the frightening contradictions of the modern world have a prominent role in their
reading.
However, Liz Heron‘s partial English translation of the roundtable in Jim Hillier‘s
anthology (1985) of the Cahiers clouds the importance of technology. It does not keep the titles
that marked the different sections of the roundtable and oriented its reading, such as ―La Sciencefiction est devenue realitè‖ (Domarchi, Doniol-Valcroze, Godard, Kast, Rivette, Rohmer 1959, p.
14).1 And it cuts an important part of the text that treats of politics and technology and is
relevant for my analysis. In this way, Heron ends up privileging the formalistic aspect of
Godard‘s famous saying that figures in the original text as ―Les travellings sont affaire de
morale‖ (p. 5).2 But she does not provide a full picture of how a reflection on modern technology
was starting to impact the very concepts that oriented the Cahiers‘ turn toward formalism.
Hiroshima mon amour faces the auteur with the fragmented and hyperspecialized reality of
modern technology that no classical claim to timeless values can master in its entirety. As for
cinéphilie, Resnais‘ works confronts the erudite love for the filmic form even in meaningless
subjects with the trauma of concentration camps and of the atomic bomb. Hiroshima mon amour
creates, therefore, the need to rethink the relation between the filmic form and the always
impending destructions that modern technology makes possible.
Heron‘s translational choices are—of course—not significant per se, but as examples of a
larger trend in American film studies. The need to construct the study of cinema as a discipline
apart from the other branches of communication often condemns it to a sterile isolation. In fact,
1 ―Science-Fiction has Become Reality.‖
2 ―Tracking shots are a matter of morality.‖
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this concept of ―cinema as a high art‖ is not able to examine its own presuppositions and the
terministic screen that it puts into place to polish its own boundaries. In this sense, also the
institutional agenda of Dudley Andrew in reading Bazin‘s work as the foundational stone of the
new discipline proved somehow conservative in the Seventies. For example, it did not take into
consideration the fruitful relations with television that the Cahiers‘ semiotic theorization on the
―direct‖ had developed in the Sixties from another reading of the Bazinian thought. The Catholic
Andrew came from an education in cine-clubs outside academic borders and compensated for his
focus on cinema as high art with his attention to Bazin‘s Personalist commitment. But this latter
aspect tends to fade away in the more snobbish tendencies of film studies as a cinephilic, auteurbased, and decontextualized discipline.
It is against this trend that my work started, with a long tracking shot into the clouds of
technology in order to arrive at discussing the contribution of the Cahiers with new eyes. I hope
that my four readers will now be able to see how the contextual political and social issue of
modernizing France was important in orienting the journal‘s discussion on Hiroshima mon
amour. The rhetorical attention to situated discourse helps us to illuminate not only how the
critics of the Cahiers read Resnais film, but also how they were reinterpreting their theoretical
stances concerning cinema in the face of modernization. In this sense, the terministic screens of
auteur and cinéphilie that are associated with the Cahiers appear blurred and contested from the
beginning. This first realization enables us also to interrogate anew the influence that they
wielded on the development of film studies as an academic discipline. In the next and last
chapter I continue this discussion, telling the story of the gradual fading away of the theme of
technology in the later criticism of Resnais‘ film. I particularly examine how his trajectory of
increasing de-contextualization intersects with some of the central moments in the self-definition
of film studies as a discipline. I also show how it traverses the paradigm shift of semiology,
through its first limitation as semiology of narration but also through its renewed search for
commitment.
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In the next section, I discuss the rhetorical situation of the Cahiers‘ roundtable on
Resnais‘ film and show the position of the critics who took part in it. As I have already
suggested, the journal stages two opposite movements through its reading of Hiroshima mon
amour. On the one hand, Rohmer and the other critics attempt to show how Bazin‘s ontological
view of cinema is able to account for the phenomenon of the Nouvelle Vague in all of its
manifestations, whether intimately connected with the Cahiers or not. The testamentary aspect of
this roundtable in relation to Bazin‘s death in 1958 is extremely pronounced. As the leader of the
Young Turks, however, Rohmer also defends the viability and the still hegemonic position of his
own view of ―classicism‖ despite the question of technology that Hiroshima mon amour so
disturbingly introduced. In doing so, he clearly inflected Bazin‘s ideas in a conservative
direction. On the other hand, Rivette prepares the upsetting of Rohmer‘s universal and timeless
poetics. He stresses that Resnais fully faces the auteur‘s inability to grasp the whole of the
ambiguous and fragmented reality of modern technology and inscribes this reflection into his
representation. Rivette‘s formulation is the first step that eventually leads to a rewriting of
Bazin‘s positions into the semiotics of the Sixties and to a renewed attention to the historical and
political context.
I then show how the Situationists and Georges Sadoul proposed—with different
meanings—a ―baroque‖ view to oppose to Rohmer‘s classicism and to account for the
opportunities and the troubling aspects of modern technology. Sadoul wanted to consider his
Stalinist commitment as the lasting and decisive part of a larger fresco that accounted also for the
modernization of everyday life. The Situationists, instead, started from the knowledge of the
technological structures that control everyday life to envision practical changes that would
transform and inflect them. Their aim was the creation of more fulfilling forms of personal and
political existence. The spectacular way in which the Situationists embraced the Resnais of
Hiroshima mon amour and rejected him after Last Year in Marienbad is particularly instructive
in this regard. It shows how the Situationists intended to rescue the Bretonian heritage of
Surrealism from the overvaluation of the unconscious. By contrast, they wanted to articulate it
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with a Marxist understanding of capitalist structures and with Henri Lefebvre‘s spontaneous
development of daily life as a response to the increasing alienation and isolation of the workers.
Hiroshima mon amour fulfilled this promise and this reflection on modern technology.
Marienbad did not. I close the chapter with a reminder of Esprit‘s reading of the Bazinian
phenomenology of cinema as a tool to further the committed agenda of the Personalist journal in
the creation of informed and aware citizens able to protest against the Algerian War and the
nuclear tests in Algeria. In fact, another testamentary legacy of Bazinian thought existed beside
the Cahiers, even if it did not have the influence that the yellow journal wielded.
The Cahiers and the Contested Legacy of André Bazin
The round-table ―Hiroshima, notre amour‖ in the July 1959 edition of the Cahiers du
Cinéma staged a discussion between Jean Donmarchi, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Jean-Luc
Godard, Pierre Kast, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer. Different tensions traversed the rhetorical
situation of this discussion, which gathered also authors who were no longer writing regularly for
the journal, due to the beginning of their career as the directors of the Nouvelle Vague. Kast and
Doniol-Valcroze were members of the ―old guard‖ of the Cahiers. They were Leftists with roots
in the WWII Resistance. Kast, in particular, had been close to Duras‘ friends and had been
writing in the journal Action. He also wrote occasionally in the Surrealist journal Positif and was
openly critical of the conservative ideas of Rohmer and the Young Turks. Doniol-Valcroze, in
contrast, was the born diplomat that held the various souls of the Cahiers together. Both Kast and
Doniol-Valcroze joined a later list of signatories of the Manifesto of the 121 for anti-colonialist
reasons in September 1960, even if the Cahiers generally ignored the question of Algeria (de
Baecque 1991, p. 175).
At the turn of the Sixties, the yellow journal was under the control of Eric Rohmer. The
critic was the recognized leader of the group of young critics known as the Young Turks who
had launched the politique des auteurs and who had a predominant position in the strategy of the
Cahiers since the mid-Fifties. Among the participants of the roundtable on Hiroshima mon
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amour, Domarchi was Rohmer‘s faithful follower. However, Rivette and Godard, who also had
been known as Young Turks, were now beginning to elaborate positions that were critical of
Rohmer‘s classical view of the auteur and of the certain aspects of cinéphilie that bordered on
empty erudition. In fact, the auteur was losing its radical meaning as an instrument to
revolutionize the panorama of French cinema. On the one hand, the rivals against which the
politique des auteurs had represented a critical tool had lost momentum. The ideological,
content-based analysis of Stalinism had faded, living a question mark concerning the forms that a
Leftist criticism could assume. The scientific model of filmology hardly attracted young people.
And the New Wave had submerged the old school of French cinema specialized in literary
adaptations but not adventurous enough with the camera that had dominated the early postwar.
On the other hand, Rivette and Godard‘s reaction was also due to the rise of a group
inside the Cahiers that had partly filled the void left by the young directors‘ dedication to their
new careers. Between1959 and 1962, in fact, the so-called group Mac-Mahon had brought to the
extreme consequences the risks of de-contextualization that were inherent in cinephilia and in
the politique des auteurs. These blatant excesses prepared a dialectical return of the political
repressed that led to the Cahiers‘ attention to the committed aspects of the New Cinema and to
Third-World instances in the Sixties. The auteur as a critical idea had won, but it had also
fossilized. Now it had to be deeply rethought and even openly undermined in order to recover
part of the controversial potential that it had at its inception in the mid-Fifties.
The roundtable ―Hiroshima, our love‖ was only the second roundtable in the history of
the yellow journal. The issue of May 1957, in fact, examined the situation of French cinema and
staged a debate among Bazin, Doniol-Valcroze, Kast, Leenhardt, Rivette and Rohmer (1957, p.
16-29). The roundtable entitled ―Six personnages en quête d’auteurs. Débat sur le cinéma
français‖ debated the question of the crisis of subjects in French cinema and of the relation
between cinema and literature. In fact, Bazin‘s theorization of ―impure cinema‖ reacted against
the avant-garde search for a cinema detached from the other arts and popular amusement forms.
It emphasized the desirability of a mutual enrichment between films and other cultural
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productions. However, the Cahiers were united in attacking the French cinematic tradition for its
propensity to adapt literary works as a pretentious mark of distinction, without duly reflecting on
the meaning of this translation. The resulting films were doubly disappointing. They betrayed the
complexity of the original literary text and they also did not work toward a deeper understanding
of the intrinsic possibilities of cinema. Needless to say, this criticism of the French cinema ―of
quality‖ was intended also to prepare a precise area of intervention for the young critics of the
journal that were about to start their directorial careers.
The roundtable on Hiroshima mon amour stresses its relation with this previous
conversation. ―Dans notre numéro 71, quelques rédacteurs des Cahiers du cinéma avaient tenu
une première table ronde sur la situation, alors critique, du cinéma français. Aujourd‘hui, la
sortie d‘Hiroshima, mon amour leur semble un événement suffisamment important pour justifier
une nouvelle conversation‖ (Domarchi, Doniol-Valcroze, Godard, Kast, Rivette, Rohmer 1959,
p. 1).3 The discussion on Hiroshima mon amour recalls the early roundtable in its emphasis on
the theme of literary adaptation. But it aims to present Resnais‘ film as the example of how the
critics and filmmakers of the Cahiers were overcoming the limitations of French cinema through
the invention of their personal poetics. In other words, the young directors were talking about
themselves and attempting to understand their own collective position through the work of
Resnais. The roundtable on Hiroshima mon amour enabled them to address and promote the
innovative thrust of the phenomenon of the Nouvelle Vague as a whole.
A shot representing the two protagonists of Hiroshima mon amour had also previously
appeared on the back cover of the issue 90 of the Cahiers in December 1958. Elle‘s anguished
face leans forward toward Lui‘s arm, while he gently holds her from the back. This picture
appears in a larger version inside the journal. It heads a long section on the young authors of the
French cinema that presents a collection of screenplays of films in the making. This editorial
3 ―In our issue 71, some members of the editorial board to the Cahiers du cinéma held a first
roundtable on the—then critical—situation of French cinema. Today, the release of Hiroshima mon
amour seems to them an event important enough to justify a new conversation.‖
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choice is a programmatic declaration of support to the young French directors of the Nouvelle
Vague, such as Kast, Rivette, and Truffaut. The practice of the politique des auteurs was based
on the development of an intimacy between the critics and the directors that they adopted,
particularly if they belonged to the same generation. It followed works in progress and
encouraged them. With the collective statement of December 1958, the critics of the Cahiers du
cinéma negotiated the beginning of their careers behind the camera as a new generation of
French filmmakers.
This issue of December 1958 is a pivotal moment in the history of the Cahiers because it
also announced the death of André Bazin, the founder of the journal and the most important
cinema critic in postwar France. His pain-stricken disciples organized a commemoratory issue
that helped them to pay homage to his figure as a saint in velvet hat, as an internationally
esteemed critic, and as a committed Personalist dedicated to popular education. However, the
most important contribution was from Eric Rohmer. His essay forcefully argued that the
publication in the near future of the four volumes of Bazin‘s collected works demonstrated the
unity of the critic‘s thought. Bazin‘s scattered and apparently unrelated essays actually provided
the framework for a complete and organic theory of cinema based on the phenomenology of the
mechanical reproduction of reality (Rohmer 1959, p. 37). Rohmer closes his essay with the hope
that Bazin‘s disciples in the Cahiers would be able to carry on the work of this father figure in
dealing with the surprises of the cinema of the future (p. 45).
In fact, Rohmer had already begun adapting and inflecting Bazin‘s thought in terms of
the exigencies of the Young Turks and their politique des auteurs. Dudley Andrew (1978, p.
136) underlines how this move was predicated on a forgetting of Bazin‘s Personalist ideals: ―Eric
Rohmer admits that, despite Bazin‘s extremely leftist views, the Cahiers did indeed become the
magazine of film fanatics, not of the masses. And, using Bazin‘s critical style, it did develop the
politique des auteurs, which at best pays tribute to individual genius over a mass culture and at
worst bathes itself in a preciosity which looks suspiciously aristocratic.‖ But also, theoretically,
Rohmer adopted Bazin‘s thought in order to better transform it in a conservative direction. In
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fact, Bazin‘s phenomenology of the cinematographic image was based on the idea that the
camera reproduces ―the things as they are.‖ But it was not a naive form of realism. In fact, Bazin
privileged those authors who through the use of the depth of field are able to empower the
audience in facing the irreducible ambiguity of reality. The viewer had to take over part of the
work of the creator in judging the meaning of a film like Citizen Kane, which ends with a
question mark on its central character. This education of the audience was functional to the
creation of responsible democratic citizens in postwar France.
Rohmer accepted Bazin‘s ontological premise in his 1955‘s writing ―Le Celluloïd et le
marbre.‖ But he inflected in the direction of the genial artist the relation between reality and the
creator that still remained paradoxical in Bazin. Rohmer figured himself as the Boileau of
cinema that as young art was still in its classical stage. The celluloid enabled sculpting classical
works in marble, while the other arts were already dying (de Baecque 1991, p. 224). Antoine de
Baeque explains how Rohmer envisioned this new ―classicism‖ of cinema of which he saw
himself as the critic:
Montrer les ‗choses-mêmes‘ rend le cinéma ‗art moderne‘ (lui seul
peut ainsi montrer les objets contemporains, les objets les plus quotidiens)
et fait également du cinéma l‘art classique: car l‘essence du classicisme
consiste à voire dans la nature (les ‗choses-mêmes‘ du XXe siècle
correspondent à la ‗nature‘ du XVIIe) le Beau idéal, ceci grâce à un
processus de transcendance que Rohmer nomme ‗métaphore.‘ (p. 226)4
Poetry has lost this metaphoric ability in the world of modern technology. Cinema has
inherited its legacy because it is wonderfully at ease in this new world of telephones, cars, and
planes. Hence directors like Jean Renoir could maintain a classical serenity before their
materials. Their mise en scène showed technological objects that fitted harmoniously into the
décor and were ordered extensions of human gestures. This beautiful representation of
4 ―The ability to show the ‗things-themselves‘ is what makes cinema a ‗modern art‘ (in fact, only
it can show today‘s objects, the most daily objects) and also makes cinema the classical art: because the
essence of classicism consists in seeing in nature (the ‗things-themselves‘ of the twentieth century
correspond to ‗nature‘ in the Seventeenth) the ideal Beauty; this is possible thanks to a transcending
process that Rohmer calls ‗metaphor.‘‖
213
technology as modern nature was a proof of human nobility and of a superior principle as its
source. However, de Baecque stresses also the pre-apocalyptic lucidity in Rohmer‘s thought, as
he is certain that the decadence of cinema is not far. Cinema reflects its age. But technology is a
pharmakon, both positive and negative. In the age of technology the distance between spirit and
appearance becomes so abysmal that art may become impotent to dominate it. ―Dans un monde
entièrement fabriqué, la distance est si grande entre l‘apparence extérieure et la raison interne,
que je ne vois pas par quel biais l‘art pourrait glisser son mot. Comment l‘écran si apte à peindre
les secrètes affinités de l‘esprit et de la chair, s‘accommodera-t-il de tous les robots qu‘on nous
promet?‖ (de Baecque 1991, p. 227-228).5
The Cahiers was under Rohmer‘s direction between 1958 and 1963. During this time,
―les Cahiers du cinéma trouvent sans doute leur plus grande cohérence, parfois au risque d‘un
certain engourdissement.‖ (p. 223-224).6 This classical mise en scène enabled conceiving a view
of auteurs who were rationally in charge of their creations and who developed parts of their
poetics in all their works. In this optic, even the least successful of Alfred Hitchcock‘s films
revealed the secret of the close relation between the corporeal and the spiritual that was typical of
this pupil of the Jesuits and recalled the Catholic dogma of incarnation. This focus on the
constant rational control of the creative genius led them to undervalue the context in which each
film was created. In fact, the consciousness of the auteur can work in the same way with any
kind of materials. In practical terms, moreover, Rohmer‘s classicist preferences and refusal of
―modernity‖ led him to privilege American cinema at the expense of a more aggressive
promotion of the Nouvelle Vague. Therefore, Rivette, Kast, Doniol-Valcroze were among those
who asked him to leave the directorship of the Cahiers in 1963. Rivette opened an era in which
5 ―In an entirely fabricated world, the distance is so huge between external appearance and
internal reason that I don‘t see in which indirect way art could still slip its word into it. How would the
screen, which is so apt to paint the secret affinities of the spirit and the body, be at ease with all the robots
that people promise to us?‖
6 ―the Cahiers du cinéma doubtlessly find their greatest coherence, sometimes at the risk of a
certain paralysis.‖
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the Cahiers gradually opened to a more politically committed view of cinema, embracing the
question of Third-World countries rather than American classics.
The roundtable on Hiroshima mon amour is of crucial importance in orienting this
situation as Rohmer‘s classicism was faced for the first time with the question of modernity.
Rivette and Godard responded with different views of the mise en scène that contained germs
that they elaborated in their later careers. Rivette had been one of the Young Turks who had
followed Rohmer as their leader. However, now he was opposed to Rohmer‘s classicism. He
praised a different return to Bazin, in the sense of a more paradoxical and insoluble relation
between the creator and the world. In Giorgio de Vincenti‘s words (1980, p. 109), ―All‘equilibrio
di Rohmer Rivette contrappone uno squilibrio fondamentale che è corrosione delle certezze: se la
coscienza interroga la realtà, quest‘ultima non risponde necessariamente in modo omogeneo
all‘interrogativo.‖7 Directors solicit reality with their conscious interrogation, but reality
undermines their questions and forces them to constantly rephrase them. Mise-en-scène means
here to address a reality that lives independently from us and that challenges us. The fragmentary
and hyper-specialized reality of modern technology leads Rivette to rethink the relation with the
avant-garde against Rohmer‘s classicism that was a conscious reaction to it. Resnais as the ―first
cubist director of talking pictures‖ appears to him as offering a more challenging and lucid
description of the undeniable ambiguity of the modern world. Eventually, Rivette‘s practice as a
director would lead him to a cinema that attempts to negate the very notion of auteur. He would
also question the self-sufficient erudition of cinéphilie as ―pure gaze‖ that had led Rohmer and
the Mac-Mahon group toward conservative positions, comparing them to cows so mesmerized
by a train that passes that they notice nothing else.
7 ―To Rohmer‘s balance Rivette counterpoises a fundamental imbalance that corrodes certainties:
If consciousness interrogates reality, the latter does not necessarily respond in a homogeneous way to the
question.‖
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Rohmer‘s classicism resolved the Bazinian antinomy in favor of the consciousness of the
auteur. Rivette underlined the irreconcilable coexistence of the opposite terms in Bazin‘s
paradoxical thought. By contrast, the enfant terrible Godard derives from Bazin‘s view of
―impure cinema‖ the idea that also man-made materials such as films are a reality that cinema
can reflexively present. Significantly, Hiroshima mon amour offered to Godard the chance to
address this issue that will become extremely important in his later films. In fact, in the
roundtable it is Godard who raises the question of the cinema-inside-cinema that Resnais had
created in presenting Elle as an actress and the anti-nuclear protest march as a part of the film on
Hiroshima in which she acts. In other words, the debate on Hiroshima mon amour offers the
occasion for a confrontation of different interpretations of the Bazinian legacy. Bazin‘s idea of
the ontology of the photographic image was so easy and powerful that it supported these clashing
readings and it effectively provided the Cahiers with a lasting thread that could be weaved into
different paradigms. At the turn of the Sixties, Rohmer‘s position was still hegemonic. But the
discourse of technology in Resnais‘ film presented a challenge to Rohmer‘s classicism that
called for a radical rethinking and enabled the germs of alternative views to emerge. In the next
section, I analyze the debate in order to show how Hiroshima mon amour allowed this
transformation to happen.
The Cahiers‘ Roundtable on Hiroshima mon amour
The tone of this roundtable is more impromptu than organized according to a fixed
agenda of themes. Oftentimes, a new unexpected comment throws light on something that has
been discussed before and that is taken up again. A lighthearted witticism guides the progression
rather than the more aggressive confrontation of Positif. Therefore, I will partly follow the linear
development of the debate and partly reconstruct its recurrent themes in order to show how the
main critical tensions emerge and how they can be understood in terms of different discourses of
technology. The roundtable opens with the question of literature. Rohmer attacks Hiroshima mon
amour for its language, which recalls Faulkner and Dos Passos. In fact, these writers who had
216
felt the influence of the European avant-garde were at the antipodes of his model of America as a
classical country. Kast—Duras‘ friend—echoes Rohmer with the standard critique of the Cahiers
against literary adaptations in the French cinema ―of quality.‖ However, he immediately adds
that the singularity of Hiroshima mon amour is that the encounter between Marguerite Duras and
Alain Resnais is an exception. Here the collaboration between cinema and literature is without
any scorn on the part of the writer and any sense of inferiority on the part of the cineaste
(Domarchi, Doniol-Valcroze, Godard, Kast, Rivette, Eric Rohmer 1959, p. 1-2).
Godard stresses how these literary references contrast with the fact that Hiroshima mon
amour does not have any cinematographic reference. It was impossible to foresee what Resnais
had accomplished from any previous knowledge on cinema. Rivette replies that a deep
connection can be found in his new application of Eisenstein‘s ideas. Doniol-Valcroze and Kast
stress that there is a central motif across all the films of Resnais. The union of the logical
opposites of intelligence and sensibility characterizes him as an auteur. Rivette answers that
Hiroshima mon amour retrospectively explains Resnais‘ documentaries not simply as a matter of
―style,‖ but rather as the work of ―un cinéaste qui réfléchit‖ (p. 2).8 Godard stresses particularly
the similarity between Hiroshima mon amour and Toute la mémoire du monde concerning the
theme of memory and forgetting.
This reference to Resnais‘ documentary on the French National Library is the spur for
Rivette‘s first discussion on the role of modern technology in the director‘s work. The critic
considers Toute la mémoire du monde the most mysterious of Resnais‘ shorts. ―De par le sujet, à
la fois très moderne et très angoissant, il rejoint ce que nous disait Renoir dans ses entretiens,
c‘est-à-dire que le grand drame de notre civilisation est qu‘elle est en train de devenir une
civilisation de spécialistes‖ (p. 3).9 The final image of the researchers perusing their manuscripts
8 ―A cineaste that reflects.‖
9 ―In terms of the subject—both very modern and very anguishing—it rejoins what Renoir was
telling us in his interviews, i.e. that the grand tragedy of our civilization is that it is becoming a
civilization of specialists.‖
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in the reading hall is the example of how hyper-specialization has taken the place of culture as
the communal treasure of humanity. ―Chacun est de plus en plus enfermé dans son petit
domaine, et incapable de sortir de celui-ci‖ (p. 3).10 However, Resnais increasingly higher shots
show the researchers working side by side. The individual specialists attempt to glue back
together the scattered fragments of the universal culture that is disappearing.
It is interesting that Rivette reads Toute la mémoire du monde in terms of Jean Renoir‘s
reflection on modern technology. In fact, Renoir was one of the few auteurs that all the critics of
the Cahiers unanimously admired. However, older critics such as Georges Sadoul and André
Bazin considered Renoir‘s American period inferior to his prewar Leftist commitment with the
Popular Front. Instead, Rohmer praised particularly his American films as an example of his own
view of the classicism of the modern world. In 1958 the Cahiers under the direction of Eric
Rohmer had interviewed Renoir on these themes. The critics of the yellow journal recognized
themselves in his words.
Pour Renoir, depuis la guerre, les hommes vivent le temps de
l‘internationalisme culturel, ce moment où le local, oubliant la nation,
s‘élance vers l‘universel. C‘est au cinéma que revient le rôle de vecteur de
cette nouvelle culture, car lui seul peut toucher à l‘universel en regardant
les choses au plus près, car lui seul peut réunir en un tout le monde
moderne et l‘unicité de la culture du moyen-âge. On reconnaît là des
thèmes très bazininens ou rohmeriens: la conception cyclique du temps
accolant modernité et classicisme, l‘axiome d‘objectivité du cinéma liant
la chose-même et l‘universel. Les Cahiers du cinéma, en écoutant Renoir,
s‘écoutent donc eux-mêmes. (de Baeque 1991, p. 251-252)11
of it.‖
10 ―Everybody is increasingly shut in their own little domain, and incapable of branching outside
11 ―According to Renoir, since the war, human beings live the age of cultural internationalism—
this moment when the local, forgetting the nation, reaches out toward the universal. Cinema fittingly
assumes the role of vector of this new culture, for its unique power of grasping the universal while
looking most closely at the things, because of reuniting in a whole the modern world ad the shared culture
of the Middle-Ages. We recognize here some very Bazinian and Rohmerian themes: the cyclical
conception of time that embraces modernity and classicism, the axiom of the objectivity of cinema that
connects the thing itself to the universal. The Cahiers du cinéma listen to Renoir, but they actually listen
to themselves.‖
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Rivette reads Renoir in Rohmerian terms. However, he shifts the stress onto the role of
the ―fragments éparpillés‖ in Resnais‘ film (Domarchi, Doniol-Valcroze, Godard, Kast, Rivette,
Rohmer 1959, p. 3-4).12 ―La grande obsession de Resnais […] c‘est le sentiment de la
fragmentation, de l‘unité première: le monde s‘est brisé, il s‘est fragmenté en une série de
minuscules morceaux, et il s‘agit de reconstituer le puzzle‖ (p. 4).13 The universal culture
becomes a question mark. ―J‘ai l‘impression que le cinéma, pour Alain Resnais, consiste à tenter
de faire un tout avec des fragments a priori dissemblables. Par exemple, dans un film de Resnais,
deux phénomènes concrets, sans rapport logique ou dramatique entre eux, sont liés uniquement
parce qu‘ils sont filmés en travelling à la même vitesse‖ (p. 4).14 Domarchi notices how this
point is valid also for Hiroshima mon amour and recalls Eisenstein‘s dialectical conception of
the reconciliation of the opposites. Also Godard takes up this relation between Hiroshima mon
amour and Einstein‘s montage. ―On comprend tout ce qu‘il a d‘eisensteinien dans Hiroshima,
car en fait c‘est l‘idée profonde du montage, et même sa définition‖ (p. 4).15
Rivette agrees. But his conception of Eisenstein‘s montage differs from Domarchi‘s. In
fact, the Cahiers had only marginally discussed Eisenstein‘s films and his conception of montage
would become important for the theorization of the yellow journal only in the late Sixties. André
Bazin had reacted against the idea of the ―sovereign montage‖ that forced the audience to follow
the linear concatenation of cause and effect that the director had already predisposed for them.
By contrast, he privileged the authors who made ample use of the depth of field. This formal
12 ―Scattered fragments.‖
13 ―The grand obsession of Resnais, […] is the feeling of the fragmentation, of the original unity:
the world has fallen apart, it has fragmented into a series of minuscule pieces, and the matter is how to
reconstruct the puzzle.‖
14 ―I have the impression that cinema, according to Alain Resnais, consists in attempting to make
a whole with fragments that are a priori dissimilar. For example, in a film by Resnais, two concrete
phenomena—without any logic or dramatic relations between them—are connected only because they are
filmed in tracking shot at the same speed.‖
15 ―We understand how much Hiroshima owes to Eisenstein, as in fact it is the deep idea of
montage, and even its definition.‖
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choice forced the audience to face the ambiguity of reality and to take an active role in
deciphering and judging the events. In the pages of the Cahiers, this reaction against the
overvaluation of montage had also translated by extension into a lack of interest in Eisenstein‘s
montage of attraction that—by contrast—was so important for Edgar Morin‘s dialectical
conception of cinema. Domarchi followed this central line of thought of the Cahiers when he
criticized the stiffness of Eisenstein‘s formal tools and counterpoised to him the directors of the
―mobile camera,‖ such as Nicholas Ray, Welles, and Resnais (de Vincenti 1980, p. 85).
However, in 1958 Rivette had written an enthusiastic article on the presentation at the
Cinémathèque of 8,000 meters out of the immense materials that Eisenstein had filmed for Que
viva Mexico! This material that Eisenstein had not assembled proved that the director did not
consider the single shot only a part of the narrative or descriptive analysis. Rather he developed
it as an absolutely independent moment before reaching the synthesis through montage (p. 83).
In other words—in Rivette‘s reading—Eisenstein appeared to unite the dialectical conception of
montage with Bazin‘s focus on the ambiguity of reality through depth of field. This view of
Eisenstein Rivette brings to the roundtable on Hiroshima mon amour and further stresses the idea
of fragmentation. ―Le montage, pour Eisenstein comme pour Resnais, consiste à retrouver l‘unité
à partir de la fragmentation, mais sans cacher pour autant la fragmentation, au contraire, en
l‘accentuant, en accentuant l‘indépendance du plan‖ (Domarchi, Doniol-Valcroze, Godard, Kast,
Rivette, Rohmer 1959, p. 4).16
The unity that ensues is a dialectical unity of opposites. Rohmer comments that this link
with Eisenstein shows that Alain Resnais was aligning himself with a modernist conception of
cinema, which clearly contrasted with the critic‘s ideal of cinema as the most classical art of the
modern world:
16 ―The montage, for Eisenstein as for Resnais, consists in finding again the unity out of
fragmentation, yet without hiding this fragmentation; rather stressing it, stressing the independence of the
shot.‖
220
En somme, Alain Resnais est un cubiste. Je veux dire qu‘il est le
première cinéaste moderne du cinéma parlant. Il y a beaucoup de cinéastes
modernes dans le cinéma muet, dont Eisenstein, dont les Expressionnistes,
dont Dreyer aussi. Mais je crois que le cinéma parlant était peut-être plus
classique que le cinéma muet. Il n‘y a pas encore eu de cinéma
profondément moderne qui essaye de faire ce qu‘a fait le cubisme dans la
peinture et le roman américain dans la littérature, c‘est-à-dire une sorte de
reconstitution de la réalité à partir d‘un certain morcellement qui a pu
paraître arbitraire au profane. (p. 4)17
Resnais‘ documentary on Picasso‘s Guernica was equally proof of this intention, together
with the modernist influences on Duras‘ prose. On this point, Kast stresses again that there was a
deep equivalence between Duras‘ text and Resnais‘ work. Their great and reckless ambition
showed in the way in which Resnais had not asked Duras to write ―for cinema‖ and Duras had
taken for granted that Resnais would be able to film whatever she wrote. Rohmer admits that this
deep equivalence between writing and filming meant perhaps that Hiroshima mon amour was a
completely new kind of film. ―Ce met alors en question un postulat, qui était jusqu‘ici le mien, je
l‘avoue, et que je peux d‘ailleurs fort bien abandonner (rires), et qui est le postulat du
classicisme du cinéma par rapport aux autres arts‖ (p. 5).18 Also cinema, in fact, could
eventually enter into the modern period like the other arts. Rivette is sure that this passage has
already happened when he links Resnais to Braque‘s cubism. This precise point became a serious
matter of contention in the following years, when Rivette and the other supporters of a more
―modern‖ conception of cinema asked Rohmer to leave his role as editor of the Cahiers.
In fact, Rohmer considers Hiroshima mon amour an admirable, but also an irritating,
film. Doniol-Valcroze asks whether the film annoys him morally or aesthetically. Here comes
Godard‘s famous statement: ― C‘est la même chose. Les travellings sont affaire de morale‖ (p.
17 ―In short, Alain Resnais is a cubist. I mean that he is the first modern cineaste of talking
cinema. There are a lot of modern cineastes in silent cinema, among whom Eisenstein, the Expressionists,
and also Dreyer. But I believe that talking cinema was perhaps more classical than silent cinema. There
has perhaps not yet been a profoundly modern cinema that attempts to do what Cubism has done in
painting and the American novel in literature, i.e. a sort of reconstruction of reality starting from a certain
fragmentation that might appear arbitrary to the layman.‖
18 ―This calls into question a postulate, which has been mine until now—I avow it—and that
after all I can very well abandon (laughter), and that is the postulate of the classicism of cinema in
comparison with the other arts.‖
221
6).19 Godard was adopting and reversing a motto that the Cahiers’ critic Luc Moullet had
created to praise the formal quality and the lack of political agenda of the American director
Samuel Fuller. Moullet‘s caustic style aimed to defend this auteur whom Leftist critics attacked
for his conservative content. However, Antoine de Baecque (1991b, p. 49) and Silvie Lindeperg
(2007, p. 237) stress that Godard‘s motto should not be read just as a form of empty formalism.
In fact, Godard‘s association of these words with a film on the atomic bomb and with the
memory of concentration camps in Night and Fog asked for a deeper reflection. The moral
position of the director in the face of massacres in recent history has to be felt also in the formal
choices through which these events are presented. Toward the end of the roundtable the critics of
the Cahiers discuss this theme in terms of Resnais‘ ―terrible tenderness.‖
Kast answers Rohmer‘s claim that Hiroshima mon amour was also irritating by recalling
that certain critics had admired the film but had attacked the literary character of Duras‘ text. We
saw that Georges Sadoul had been one of these critics. Kast stresses instead the complete alliance
of the film and of its screenplay. Godard reinforces Kast‘s meaning with a reference to the
Boulevard cinema of Sacha Guitry. The Cahiers had always defended Guitry—who had died in
1957—from the attacks of the Leftist press. In this case, however, Godard raises a point
concerning ―le fameux faux problème du texte et de l‘image‖ (Domarchi, Doniol-Valcroze,
Godard, Kast, Rivette, Rohmer 1959, p. 6).20 In fact, Godard stresses that Sacha Guitry‘s own
art as a director had proven that the images are not the most important part of the film. The main
characteristic of Boulevard cinema—and of the theater from which it derived—was the jocular
brilliance and overabundance of the screenplay. The Situationists will take up this point in order
to attack Rohmer‘s view of classicism with a praise of the baroque voice. The discrepancy
between the images and the voice will lead them to argue that cinema was finally heading toward
a modernist self-destruction, joining the other arts in this critical trend.
19 ―It is the same. Tracking shots are a matter of morality.‖
20 ―The famous false problem of the text and the image‖
222
Rohmer notices that it is interesting how the characters of Hiroshima mon amour have an
irritating side, but they are no less interesting nevertheless. This statement starts a discussion on
the character of Elle that we have seen developed in the sociology of private life of the Brussels
seminar. Doniol-Valcroze argues that Elle appeared as an ―adult‖ woman precisely because her
character did not respect the stereotyped description of what an adult woman should look like.
―Emmanuelle Riva est une femme adulte moderne parce qu‘elle n‘est pas une femme adulte. Elle
est au contraire très enfantine, uniquement guidée par ses impulsions et non par ses idées‖ (p.
6).21 Rivette elaborates that the character of Elle remains ambiguous and indistinct as in
existential psychology. ―Finalement, c‘est une femme qui se reprend à l‘origine, au début, qui
tente de se définir en termes existentiels devant le monde et devant son passé, comme si elle était
de nouveau matière molle en train de naître‖ (p. 7).22 Or as Godard jokes, ―On pourrait donc dire
d‘Hiroshima que c‘est du Simone de Beauvoir réussi‖ (p. 7).23 Rivette concludes that Elle well
illustrates his insight that the film is formed on an effort of recomposing fragments. Her
encounter with the horror of Hiroshima had reduced into fragments her social and psychological
personality that she attempts to reconstruct.
Kast returns to the relation with literature. He situates Hiroshima mon amour in the direct
line of the self-reflection of the modern novel for its attempt to reduce the importance of the
psychological plot and promote lyrical movements as a structuring principle. ―Le film d‘Alain
Resnais se trouve entièrement lié à cette modification des structures romanesques. La raison en
est simple. Il n‘y a pas d‘action, mais une sorte de double tentative pour comprendre ce que
21 ―Emmanuelle Riva is a modern adult woman because she is not an adult woman. She is on the
contrary very childlike, only guided by her impulses and not by her ideas.‖
22 ―At last, here is a woman who starts again from the origin, from the beginning, who attempts
to define herself in existential terms before the world and her own past, as if she were again soft matter
that is being born.‖
23 ―We could then say of Hiroshima that it is a successful Simone de Beauvoir.‖
223
signifie une histoire d‘amour‖ (p. 9).24 Beyond the intrigue of the plot, this story links directly
love with the horror of Hiroshima. Godard joins this discussion on the literary character of
Hiroshima mon amour in order to call attention to the meta-cinematic aspect of the film:
Ce côté profondément littéraire explique peut-être le fait que les
gens qui d‘habitude sont gênés par le cinéma à l‘intérieur du cinéma, alors
qu‘ils ne le sont pas par le théâtre à l‘intérieur du théâtre, ou le roman à
l‘intérieur du roman, dans Hiroshima ne sont pas gênés par le fait
qu‘Emmanuelle Riva joue le rôle d‘une actrice de cinéma en train
précisément de tourner un film. (p. 10)25
In the roundtable on Hiroshima mon amour Godard introduces, therefore, a theme that
will become a predominant feature in his later work as a director. Doniol-Valcroze comments
that this meta-cinema is an able move. In fact, Resnais was afraid that Hiroshima mon amour
could appear as a mere film of propaganda that could be used for precise political aims. ―C‘est
peut-être un tout petit peu pour cette raison qu‘il a neutralisé un éventuel aspect ‗combattant de
la paix‘ par la fille tondue après la Libération. En tout cas, il a donné ainsi au message politique
son sens profond au lieu de son sens superficiel‖ (p. 10).26 Domarchi agrees that the choice of an
actress as a protagonist enables the director to deal with the issue of anti-atomic protest only at
the second degree. Resnais does not need to show a real march of protest, but only a march
reconstructed for Elle‘s film. We should recall that the anti-nuclear movement in France at the
turn of the Sixties was still under the control of the Communist Party. Its ―National
Communism‖ had justified Sadoul‘s reaction against the representation of the Resistance in the
episode of Nevers. The implication of the meta-cinema is, therefore, the possibility to rescue the
24 ―Alain Resnais‘ film is entirely linked to this modification of the structures of the novel. The
reason is simple. There is no action, but rather a sort of double attempt to understand what a love story
is.‖
25 ―This profoundly literary side explains perhaps the fact that the same people who usually are
bothered by the cinema inside the cinema, while they are not bothered by the theater inside the theater or
the novel inside the novel, in Hiroshima are not bothered by the fact that Emmanuelle Riva plays the role
of a cinema actress who is precisely shooting a film.‖
26 ―It is perhaps a little for this reason that he has neutralized a possible aspect ‗fighter for peace‘
with the girl that is shaven after the Liberation. In any case, he has given to the political message its deep
sense rather than its superficial sense.‖
224
broader aspects of the anti-nuclear question from a too narrow interpretation along already given
ideological lines.
Rivette quotes the philosopher Pierre Klossowski in order to argue that Resnais‘ metacinema adopts a dialectical movement that presents the thing, but also enables it to maintain a
certain distance in order to negate and affirm it, i.e. in order to think about it in a critical way.
―Au lieu d‘être une invention de metteur en scène, le défilé, pour reprendre le même exemple,
devient un fait objectif que refilme une deuxième fois le metteur en scène‖ (p. 10).27 DoniolValcroze adds that the reflection on the documents was already the starting point in Resnais‘ Van
Gogh (1948) and Guernica. This remark provides a link between this conception of meta-cinema
and Bazin‘s reflection on ―impure cinema.‖ In fact, Bazin had similarly used the example of
Resnais‘ Van Gogh to illustrate the paradox of the films about painting as works at the second
degree. This kind of film illuminates the lines of force that exist in the painting and performs a
critical operation on it: ―Son paradoxe est d‘utiliser une œuvre déjà totalement constituée et qui
se suffit à elle-même. Mais c‘est justement parce qu‘il y subsiste une œuvre au second degré, à
partir d‘une matière déjà esthétiquement élaborée, qu‘il jette sur celle-ci une lumière nouvelle‖
(Bazin 1959, p. 132).28 According to Bazin, we would not know what would be Van Gogh
minus the color yellow without Resnais. In the same way, therefore, the cinema inside the
cinema is a way to draw lines of interpretation though the ―objective‖ material of the first degree.
Godard raises again the formal question that he had hinted at with the comment that
―tracking shot are a matter of morality.‖ In this case, the cinephilic appreciation of the form
irremediably clashes with the testimony of the massacres of the century. Godard confesses that
he had almost found disturbing a certain facility in showing horror scenes in Hiroshima mon
27 ―Rather than being an invention of the filmmaker, the march—just to take the same example—
becomes an objective fact that the filmmaker re-films a second time.‖
28 ―Its paradox is using a work that is already totally constituted and self-sufficient. But it is
precisely because there is also a work at the second degree, starting from a matter that is already
aesthetically elaborated, that it throws a new light onto it.‖
225
amour and Night and Fog, because they were necessarily beyond aesthetics. ―Je veux dire que
bien ou mal filmées, peu importe, de telles scènes font de toute façon une impression terrible sur
le spectateur‖ (Domarchi, Doniol-Valcroze, Godard, Kast, Rivette, Rohmer 1959, p.
11).29 Moreover, he considered that there was something amoral in Resnais‘ choice to open
Hiroshima mon amour with images of love that were in the same format of close-up as the
victims of the atomic bomb. Rivette, however, replies by drawing a definitive—if paradoxical—
link between the question of cinephilia and the reflection on historical horror. Resnais can
address difficult issues that other filmmakers do not dare to represent because he already
includes into the movements itself of his films the moral and aesthetic objections that the
audience may raise. ―Dans Hiroshima, le commentaire et les réactions d‘Emmanuelle Riva
jouent ce rôle de la réflexion sur le document‖ (p. 12).30
In other words, Rivette argues that Resnais delicately inscribes into the form of the
movie a sublime reticence toward representing the non-representable. The word that Resnais
himself used to define this effort of reflection was ―douceur terrible‖ (p. 12).31 Two years later,
Rivette further connected the need for a cinephilic reflection to the question of the Nazi
concentration camps in discussing Gillo Pontecorvo‘s Kapò (1959). The Italian director clearly
condemned Nazism and had an impressive record of active commitment for the Left. However, a
tracking shot lingering on the murdered corpse of Emmanuelle Riva in a concentration camp was
abject. Through this formal choice, in fact, the camera assumed the gaze of the perpetrator
(Lindeperg 2007, p. 239-240). This concern with representation of the historical horror through a
reflective form influences the future readings of Hiroshima mon amour. In particular, Julia
Kristeva‘s ―blank rhetoric‖ evokes this cinephilia that articulates with the non-representability of
29 ―I mean that well filmed or badly filmed—it doesn‘t really matter—those scene make in any
case a terrible impression on the viewer.‖
30 ―In Hiroshima, the commentary and the reactions of Emmanuelle Riva play this role of
reflection on the document.‖
31 ―Terrible tenderness.‖
226
the Shoah. However, Kristeva shifts the core of this reflection from Resnais‘ visual choices onto
the very pain that the language of Duras conveys.
The movement that characterized Resnais as an auteur was, in Rivette‘s words, ―une
tentative (ou une tentation) de résoudre la contradiction fondamentale qui est partout dans le
monde et qui fait que l‘univers est devenu lui-même une accumulation de contradictions‖
(Domarchi, Doniol-Valcroze, Godard, Kast, Rivette, Rohmer 1959, p. 12).32 Resnais attempts to
show that there is not just accumulation of contradictions, but that there is an organization, a
construction to them. The reflection that brings to this realization implies also a movement of
critical distancing from the documents that are its objects. But we can notice that there is no
reference to Brecht in the roundtable of the Cahiers. In fact, the yellow journal dedicated an
issue to Brecht in 1960 and adopted Brecht‘s thought (also through Roland Barthes) in the
Sixties. But the Cahiers had been silent on the issue while Leftist journals pioneered this turn in
the late Fifties. Similarly, there is no connection between the reflection on the part of the auteur
and the political ―judgment‖ that—we saw— played an important role in Resnais‘ interview for
Esprit. In this sense, Rivette‘s contribution to the roundtable on Hiroshima mon amour
anticipates Deleuze‘s choice to represent Resnais as a ―thinking‖ auteur in L’Image-Temps. Also
in this case, the faculty of judgment is left aside and even negated in its potential for a renewal of
politics.
Hiroshima mon amour provided to the authors of the Cahiers the possibility of discussing
indirectly their own work and of situating themselves in relation to the complex phenomenon of
the Nouvelle Vague. Therefore, they inscribe in this roundtable also their distance from Resnais.
Rohmer is perhaps the most explicit. ―Nous n‘avons pas envie d‘être dévorés. Heureusement
qu‘il reste sur la rive gauche de la Seine et nous sur la droite‖ (p. 14).33 However, his statement
32 ―An attempt (or a temptation) to solve the fundamental contradiction that is everywhere in the
world and for which the universe itself has become an accumulation of contradictions.‖
33 ―We don‘t want to be devoured. Luckily he stays on the Left Bank of the Seine and we stay on
the Right.‖
227
starts a new discussion about whether Hiroshima mon amour is a Leftist film or not. We know
that other groups on the Left such as Positif and Esprit harshly criticized the Cahiers for their
anarchic or conservative choices. For them, Resnais brought instead the guarantee of a
committed Leftist who attempted to rethink what engagement was. Significantly, this discussion
continues under the heading ―La Science-fiction est devenue realité.‖ Toward the end of the
roundtable, therefore, the political question becomes clearly articulated with the issue of modern
technology.
Rivette argues that there has always been an aesthetic Left and it does not bother him if
Hiroshima mon amour is actually a Leftist film. Rohmer stresses that from the aesthetic point of
view modern art has always been on the Left, but it is possible to envision a modernist art of the
Right that would overcome it. Rivette articulates this discussion with the question of the
representation of modern technology:
On a raison de parler du côté science-fiction de Resnais. Mais on a
tort également, parce qu‘il est le seul cinéaste à donner le sentiment qu‘il a
déjà rejoint un monde qui reste encore futuriste aux yeux des autres.
Autrement dit, qui sache que l‘on est déjà à l‘époque où la science fiction
est devenue réalité. Bref, Resnais est le seul d‘entre nous qui vive
véritablement en 1959. Avec lui, le mot science-fiction perd tout ce qu‘il
peut avoir de péjoratif et d‘enfantin dans la mesure où Resnais sait voir le
monde moderne tel qu‘il est. Il sait nous en montrer, comme les auteurs de
science-fiction, tout ce qu‘il a d‘effrayant, mais aussi tout ce qu‘il a
d‘humain. (p. 15)34
Resnais‘s form of science-fiction is definitely not conservative but it lucidly and lovingly
embraces the world of modern technology. ―Non seulement il prend son parti de ce monde
moderne et futuriste, non seulement il l‘accepte, mais il l‘analyse en profondeur avec lucidité et
amour. Pour Resnais, puisque c‘est le monde dans lequel nous vivons, nous aimons, c‘est donc
34 ―It is right to talk about Resnais‘ science-fiction side. But it is also wrong, because he is the
only cineaste who gives the feeling that he has already rejoined a world that remains still futuristic in the
eyes of the others. In other words, who knows that we are already in the age in which science fiction has
become a reality. In short, Resnais is the only one among us who really lives in 1959. With him, the word
science-fiction loses its pejorative and childish meaning to the extent that Resnais is able to see the
modern world as it is. He is able to show us—like the authors of science-fiction—how scary it is, but also
how human.‖
228
ce monde là qui est bon, juste et vrai‖ (p. 16).35 Domarchi replies that Resnais‘ ―terrible
tenderness‖ presents the conflict of the individual with an anonymous universe. His ―tenderness‖
as a director derives from the fact that it is not necessary to show a Romantic indignation against
a universe that has lost its definite and palpable forms. On this point, Domarchi appears almost
as the precursor of Morin‘s criticism of the ―ash-colored nihilism‖ of Hiroshima mon amour.
However, Rivette replies that Resnais begins from the evidence of this abstraction of the world,
but he overcomes it through a Hegelian form of dialectics: ―en juxtaposant à chaque abstraction
une autre abstraction afin de retrouver une réalité concrète par le mouvement même des
abstractions mises en rapport‖ (p. 16).36 Godard comments then that Resnais‘ ―tenderness‖ is
metaphysical and there is no sense of charity in his view of the world. As Rivette says, in fact,
Resnais is an agnostic. In other words, there is no relation between him and the mystical
incarnation that the Cahiers read in Alfred Hitchcock and Roberto Rossellini.
To conclude this reading of the debate of the Cahiers, my purpose has been simply to
unearth the lines of force that show the importance of a conception of modern technology in the
Cahiers‘ interpretation of Hiroshima mon amour. It has also been to stress how Resnais‘ film
provided the occasion for a theoretical self-interpretation of the Cahiers. In fact, the theoretical
heritage of André Bazin provided a constant resource for debates and re-elaborations. Bazin had
argued that photography as the art of mechanical reproduction of the ―things as they are‖ had
freed painting from the mimetic obsession toward reality. In the same way, cinema had freed it
from the baroque desire to freeze the movement. Therefore, photography made Picasso possible.
In Bazin‘s words, ―la photographie nous permet d‘une part d‘admirer dans sa reproduction
35 ―Not only does he take the side of this modern and futuristic world, not only does he accept it,
but it also analyzes it in depth with lucidity and love. According to Resnais, as it is the world in which we
live, and we love, therefore that world is good, right, and true.‖
36 ―Juxtaposing to every abstraction another abstraction in order to find again a concrete reality
through the movement itself of these abstractions that he articulates.‖
229
l‘original que nos yeux n‘auraient pas su aimer et dans la peinture un pur objet dont la référence
à la nature a cessé d‘être la raison‖ (Bazin 1958, p. 19).37
Eric Rohmer had radicalized Bazin‘s distinction in arguing that the other arts were
destroying themselves and only cinema remained classic. Rivette‘s reading of Hiroshima mon
amour, however, showed that Resnais expressed his lucid love for the world of modern
technology precisely through a modernist attitude toward cinema. The auteur did not dominate a
welcoming reality with the ease of a classical author. Rather he was tempted to build a critical
construction on the shaky foundations of its fragments and unsolvable contradictions. This was
the world where we have to live and that, therefore, he loved. In this way, Rivette heralded the
future direction of the Cahiers and its opening toward a more complex and politically charged
reality. In the next sections, I show how the Situationists developed their reading of Hiroshima
mon amour as a critical response to the discourses of technology of the Cahiers. They radicalized
Rivette‘s modernist turn, but they also criticized its lack of relation with Marxist thought and
particularly with Henri Lefebvre‘s theorization of daily life as a new source of revolutionary
politics.
The Situationists between Modernism and the Marxism of Daily
Life
The Situationists were a group that had its roots in the avant-garde but that was also
attempting to rethink Marxism. Their leader was Guy Debord and their journal was the
provocative and brilliant L’Internationale Situationniste. The Situationists thought that
modernization was positive because it had created a general crisis of culture and hence the
possibility to overturn the views of the world and the engrained hierarchies that prevented the
full expression of human potentialities and entailed a subordination of the working class. Their
37 ―Photography enables us on the one hand to admire in its reproduction the original that our
eyes could not have loved and in painting a pure object which no more has its reason in its reference to
nature.‖
230
aim was the global and unitary transformation of practical life. In turn, the qualitative enrichment
of daily life would necessarily entail a permanent reconversion of technical means. The
Situationists worked from the legacy of Surrealism, but they subordinated the importance of the
unconscious to the dialectical and conscious transformation of modern technology.
I argue that the Situationists‘ interpretation of Hiroshima mon amour begins from the
modernism with which the roundtable of the Cahiers ended. But it gestures more radically
toward a reformulation of Marxism that went beyond the Cahiers‘ range. The Italian cinema
scholar Giorgio de Vincenti (1980, p. 20-23) describes the trajectory of the early Cahiers also as
an attempt to reduce Surrealism to its historical reality as a mainly prewar modernist movement
in order to better incorporate the lasting appeal of its characterizing themes into Bazin‘s
ontology. In this sense, Rivette‘s choice of Resnais as the auteur of the abstract and fragmented
world to oppose to Rohmer‘s classicism opens the way also to a recuperation of Surrealist
notions such as the reality of the imaginary and the collective unconscious. In particular, Last
Year in Marienbad constituted one of the terrains on which the Cahiers negotiated this heritage
of the Surrealist avant-garde and anticipated the new opening of the journal to a semiological
problematic. Through this trend, as well, the attention to psychoanalysis and the social became
more important in the Cahiers of the Sixties (de Vincenti 1984, 202-204).
The Situationists, however, came from the avant-garde experience of Lettrism. This
movement founded by Isidore Isou was situated at the Left of Surrealism and carried forward its
modernist project. The name ―Lettrism‖ came from the choice of focuing on meaningless sounds
rather than on meaningful poetry, in order to signal the critical stage of the poetic art. Poetry had
to become fully part of life—rather than a creation of the ivory tower—and assist in the
integrated development of every emotion and environment. The Situationists took from the
Lettrism the idea that the crisis of culture opens the possibility of a radical transformation and
enrichment of life. But they marked their difference from the older group when they articulated
this thought more radically with a Marxist theorization of daily life. This background led them to
231
hail Hiroshima mon amour as an attempt to destroy the filmic form from within, both on the
level of artistic elitism and as a commercial enterprise.
The aim of the Situationists was not destruction per se. They rather thought that with the
collapse of ―art for art‘s sake‖ daily life would emerge as the real site of struggle. At the turn of
the Sixties, in fact, the Situationists were drawing alliances with Marxist thinkers that examined
with great hopes the possibility of the development of daily life as a form of resistance against
technocratic alienation. They were particularly close to Henri Lefebvre and to the group of
Socialisme ou barbarie after the departure of Claude Lefort. Also Socialisme ou barbarie, in fact,
analyzed the technocratic developments of French society and focused on the organization of
forms of resistance. Its name derived from the alternative that modern technology posed: Either a
revolutionary solution or a barbarous and repressive science-fiction. Last Year in Marienbad,
however, caused the definitive break of the Situationists with Resnais. The director appeared to
them only as the epigone of a distorted view of Surrealism that coincided with Ado Kyrou‘s
Positif and that did not grasp the concrete and committed meaning of Breton‘s combined
slogans: ―Transform the world‖ (from Marx) and ―Change life‖ (from Rimbaud).
In this section, therefore, I provide a brief overview of the Situationists‘ thought in their
relation with Surrealism and the Marxism of daily life. I then read the two essays that announced
their earlier enthusiastic embrace of Hiroshima mon amour and their later—equally definitive—
rejection of Resnais‘ works as a whole. In both cases, the discourse of technology plays an
important role. In fact, it is perhaps fair to say that the Situationists were the result of the
productive clash between the most progressive aspects of Surrealism and the discourse of
technology in the late Fifties. This international group had Guy Debord as their charismatic
leader, even if they often wrote collective tracts anonymously, such as their first essay on
Hiroshima mon amour. In fact, Debord‘s correspondence shows his mark on the group‘s reading
of Resnais‘ film. His impulse was decisive in bringing the avant-garde activities of Lettrism to
bear onto the structures of the capitalist metropolis and the modern mass media in a
reinterpretation of Marxist thought.
232
The eternal glitter of art for art‘s sake had lost its meaning for the Lettrists. Their aim was
the creation of an active audience of viveurs ready to experiment with new ways of life. In 1954,
Debord explained the position of Lettrism to Belgian Surrealists. ―La poésie a épuisé ses derniers
prestiges formels. Au-delà de l‘esthétique, elle est toute dans le pouvoir des hommes sur leurs
aventures. […] La poésie est dans la forme des villes. Nous allons donc en construire de
bouleversantes. La beauté nouvelle sera DE SITUATION, c‘est-à-dire provisoire et vécue‖
(Debord 2006, p. 119).38 Surrealists had praised chance. By contrast, Lettrists thought that the
décor had to be consciously built to facilitate encounters, in view of the continual emotional
stimulation of a new civilization. This reflection addressed the problem of the alienation of
leisure time that would become the only problem of tomorrow. ―De ce problème des loisirs, dont
on commence à parler alors que les foules sont à peine libérées d‘un travail ininterrompu—et qui
sera demain le seul problème—nous connaissons les premières solutions‖ (p. 120).39
In the same way, the Surrealist exploration of dreams and the unconscious lost
importance. The only legacy that Debord claimed from Surrealism was their attention to daily
life. Moreover, the passage from Lettrism to Situationism entailed a serious study of Marxism.
The priority became understanding the underlying structure of capitalist society in order to
collectively develop a liberating usage of modern technological means. ―À partir d‘une mainmise
sur de tels moyens, l‘expérimentation collective, concrète, d‘environnements et de
comportements nouveaux correspond au début d‘une révolution culturelle en dehors de laquelle
il n‘est pas de culture révolutionnaire authentique‖ (p. 373).40 The technological progress had
38 ―Poetry has exhausted its last formal prestiges. Beyond aesthetics, it lays all in the power of
human beings over their adventures. […] Poetry is in the shape of the cities. We will then build
bewildering cities. The new beauty will be SITUATIONAL, i.e. provisional and lived.‖
39 ―Of this problem of leisure time, about which people begin to talk when the masses have been
scarcely liberated from an uninterrupted labor—and that tomorrow will be the only problem—we know
the first solutions.‖
40 ―Through a firm grasp on such means, the collective, concrete experimentation of new
environments and behaviors corresponds to the beginning of a cultural revolution without which there is
no authentic revolutionary culture.‖
233
created a more affluent society and more leisure time. But it had also occupied this time with a
mass-mediated spectacle that increased alienation and did not allow the development of a
political consciousness. Debord joined Henri Lefebvre in thinking that the alienation of modern
technology had brought the struggle to ―change life‖ to a more concrete and contentious level.
The only answer was conceiving the experimentation with modern technology as a way to build
collective styles of participation that target alienation and empower grass-roots ways of
rethinking the political in action.
Therefore, Debord argues that it is urgent to develop a new meaning and new practices
for the world ―revolution,‖ particularly after the demise of the revolutionary hopes in Stalinism.
It is also urgent to think about the new forms and priorities of the working class. But it is
important to challenge the specialization that leads sociologists to divide the world into sealed
domains of study. In fact, they often end up undervaluing daily life and looking for politics
elsewhere—as we saw in part also in the case of Edgar Morin‘s reading of Hiroshima mon
amour. By contrast, for Debord as for Lefebvre, daily life is the very center of the political,
because every project receives its full meaning in it. But daily life is artificially maintained in a
state of scarcity and not allowed to develop its potential that would entail the creation of a
working class that is no more submissive and politically analphabet. In a speech recorded in
1961 for Lefebvre, Debord stated that daily life was not only slow compared with history, as
Lefebvre argued. It was also exploited and colonized. ―Je crois que l‘on peut aller jusqu‘à
qualifier ce niveau de la vie quotidienne de secteur colonisé‖ (p. 575).41
The International Situationniste –the group‘s journal—challenged the society of the
spectacle. The ―spectacle‖ is, in fact, a central concept in the Situationists‘ reading of Hiroshima
mon amour. Therefore, it is important to trace some of its basic lines. As Debord said in 1959, its
principle is ―la non-intervention‖ (p. 465).42 It is connected with alienation and it is the
41 ―I think that we can even qualify this level of daily life as a colonized sector.‘‖
42 ―The non-intervention.‖
234
atomization that prevents real communication between people. It dominates capitalist countries,
but also the distortion of Stalinism. Debord stresses how it is important to challenge the spectacle
in order to elaborate new revolutionary thought. Revolutionary research in culture has to attempt
to undermine the psychological identification of the viewer to the hero. The audience has to be
led to act in changing their own life, instead of being lost in a passive contemplation. When the
spectacle starts crumbling the new viveurs can construct situations and experiment with new
emotions and behaviors. A higher play can transform their lives. In other words, the view of
commitment that the Situationists propose sees daily life and private life as a terrain of struggle.
Their ideological representation can be analyzed in the Barthesian sense of myth. But the real
focus is on actually experimenting with ways of living and acting more freely outside of
capitalist and Stalinist conditioning. Daily life is directly and most originally political because it
is the very terrain of this elaboration.
We have now all the elements to attempt a reading of how Hiroshima mon amour helped
the Situationist International to negotiate its passage from a neo-Surrealist conception of avantgarde art to a neo-Marxist conception of daily life. I address this task in the next section.
The Situationists‘ Reading of Hiroshima mon amour
The Internationale Situationniste published the editorial ―Le Cinéma après Alain
Resnais‖ in December 1959. The essay is anonymous to better convey the shared convictions of
the group and it is uncommon in its global backing of a contemporary director who was not a
Situationist. The invective against artistic and theoretical failures was, in fact, more typical of
this small and combative group that wanted to prove that they were the real heirs of the historical
avant-garde. The essay on Hiroshima mon amour starts directly with an attack against the
Cahiers. Accordingly, the Nouvelle Vague is defined by its ―well-known‖ lack of artistic
innovation and is economically predicated on the self-promotion of the critics of the Cahiers.
However, Hiroshima mon amour is much superior to the other films of the Nouvelle Vague and
marks a qualitative leap in the ―spectacle cinématographique mondial‖ (Anonymous 1959, p.
235
8).43 As a commercial film, Hiroshima mon amour joins in originality with experiences that had
hitherto remained at the margins of cinema, such as the content innovations of Jean Rouch and
the formal experimentations of the Lettrist Isidore Isou. It is the most original film of the talking
era:
Hiroshima, sans renoncer à une maîtrise des pouvoirs de l‘image,
est fondé sur la prééminence du son: l‘importance de la parole procède
non seulement d‘une quantité et même d‘une qualité inhabituelle, mais du
fait que le déroulement du film est beaucoup moins présenté par les gestes
des personnages filmés que par leur récitatif (lequel peut aller jusqu‘à faire
souverainement le sens de l‘image, comme c‘est le cas pour le long
travelling dans les rues qui termine la première séquence). (p. 8)44
Resnais had consciously attempted to develop a cinema based on the autonomy of sound.
His admiration for Sacha Guitry and his search for an ―opéra cinématographique‖ went in this
direction (p. 8).45 Georges Sadoul had criticized Resnais for his modesty in accepting the
contribution of Duras even if it was a defect in the diamond of Hiroshima. By contrast, the
Situationists blame Resnais for his modesty in not having stated more clearly the sense of the
evolution that this predominance of sound represented. ―L‘objection la plus banale et la plus
fausse consiste à dissocier Resnais de Marguerite Duras, en saluant le talent du metteur en scène
pour déplorer l‘exagération littéraire des dialogues. Le film est ce qu‘il est à cause de cet emploi
du langage, que Resnais a voulu, et que son scénariste a réussi‖ (p. 9).46 However, the
Situationists are also far from seconding Pierre Kast of the Cahiers and praising the way in
43 ―World cinematographic spectacle.‖
44 ―Hiroshima, without renouncing a mastery over the powers of the image, is founded on the
preeminence of sound: the importance of the word comes not only from an unusual quantity and even
quality, but also from the fact that the unfolding of the film is much less presented through the gestures of
the filmed characters than through their recitative (which can even dominate the sense of the image, as in
the case of the long tracking shot inside the streets that concludes the first sequence).‖
45 ―Cinematographic opera.‖
46 ―The most banal and false objection consists in dissociating Resnais from Marguerite Duras,
hailing the talent of the filmmaker in order to deplore the literary exaggeration of the dialogues. The film
is what it is thanks to this use of language, which Resnais wanted and in which his screenplay writer
succeeded.‖
236
which Resnais‘ cinematic ambition as an auteur had reached the freedom of Duras‘ literary
expression.
In fact, the Situationists‘ perspective is best illustrated by their reference to Isidore Isou—
the Romanian-born leader of Lettrism and the famous inventor of the barbe-claxon, extremely
useful in crowded taxis. Isou (1964, p. 25) had invented the ―cinéma discrépant‖ as the breach
between the words and the images in his 1951‘s film Treatise of Venom and Eternity.47 He
argued that the films of the Fifties had a classical perfection and calm. ―Cela résulte de
l‘harmonie des éléments de composition, de l‘unité classique entre les parties constituantes:
parole-image‖ (p. 25).48 However, Isou refused Rohmer‘s ―classicist‖ ideal of cinema and
wanted the viewer to come out blind and with destroyed ears. In order to achieve this effect he
added a baroque screenplay to the images of himself walking on the streets of Saint-Germaindes-Prés and to a montage of partially destroyed films. Radio had turned into cinema through
television. So also cinema had now to turn into radio. The Marquis de Sade loved toothless and
ugly gonzesses as the maximum of refined taste that his unrestrained experimentation had
achieved. In the same way, cinema had already given its masterpieces and had no more anything
new to say. Therefore, it had to reach the critical stage of the other arts, such as painting with
Cubism and poetry with Lettrism. It had to become cinema about the meaning of cinema.
For the Situationists the objective importance of Hiroshima mon amour was, in fact,
―l‘apparition dans le cinéma ‗commercial‘ du mouvement d‘auto-destruction qui domine tout
l‘art moderne‖ (Anonymous 1959, p. 9).49 Several critics had spoken of the topics of memory
and of the destruction of linear time in Hiroshima mon amour, often in connection with
American writers such as Faulkner. But they failed to see that this theme of destruction did not
47 ―Discrepant cinema.‖
48 ―This results from the harmony of the composing elements, from the classical unity between
the constituting parts: word-image.‖
49 ―The appearance in ‗commercial‘ cinema of the movement of self-destruction that dominates
the whole of modern art.‖
237
have only a superficial meaning. It was the organizing structural principle of Hiroshima mon
amour, as the sign of a movement of self-dissolution, that was internal to the historical
development of art. ―Le temps d‘Hiroshima, la confusion d‘Hiroshima, ne sont pas une annexion
du cinéma par la littérature; c‘est la suite dans le cinéma du mouvement qui a porté toute
l‘écriture, et d‘abord la poésie, vers sa dissolution‖ (p. 9).50 Similarly, the importance of the
theme of memory indicated that also the art of cinema had entered the critical phase of
questioning that unleashes its own destruction. ―Dès que le cinéma s‘enrichit des pouvoirs de
l‘art moderne, il rejoint la crise globale de l‘art moderne. Ce pas en avant rapproche le cinéma de
sa mort, en même temps que de sa liberté: de la preuve de son insuffisance‖ (p. 9).51 Art for the
art‘s sake crumbles and only here cinema can find its liberation.
From this point of view, there is no point in upholding a formalistic view of cinema. ―La
proclamation du ‗film d‘auteur‘ est déjà périmée‖ (p. 9).52 The Cahiers wanted to see the value
of the auteur in his ability of nuanced self-expression that had to match the freedom of
expression of the other arts. But they did not understand that cinema had just reached the stage of
the very failure of expression that was the necessary culmination of every modern art. Moreover,
the economic conditions in capitalist society could never allow cinema to be free. The
independence of the auteur in commercial cinema is a dangerous illusion. After the revolution,
cinema will be really free. But then it will also not be chained in formalist fetters any more,
because it will be part of an organic development of all the potentials of human collective
emotions and actions. The great merit of Hiroshima mon amour is to hasten this transformation
by showing how the commercial spectacle cannot but stage its own destruction:
50 ―The time of Hiroshima, the confusion of Hiroshima, is not literature annexing cinema; it is a
continuation inside cinema of the movement that had brought all writing, and in the first place poetry,
toward its own dissolution.‖
51 ―As cinema adopts the powers of modern art, it also rejoins the global crisis of modern art.
This step forward brings cinema close to its death, and at the same time to its freedom—to the proof of its
insufficiency.‖
52 ―The proclamation of the ‗film of auteur‘ has already lost its value.‖
238
Et quand le renversement prévisible des conditions culturelles et
sociales permettra un cinéma libre, beaucoup d‘autres domaines d‘actions
auront été introduits nécessairement. Il est probable qu‘alors la liberté du
cinéma sera largement dépassée, oubliée, dans le développement général
d‘un monde où le spectacle ne sera plus dominant. Le trait fondamental du
spectacle moderne est la mise en scène de sa propre ruine. C‘est
l‘importance du film de Resnais, assurément conçu en dehors de cette
perspective historique, d‘y ajouter une nouvelle confirmation. (p. 10)53
In a letter to the Situationist Patrick Straram of October 1960, Guy Debord already
explained this question of the ruin of spectacle in relation with Hiroshima mon amour and
connected it directly with Lefebvre‘s ―daily life.‖ The destruction of the spectacle reinforces the
realization that what matters is that the audience become empowered in living ―moments‖ that
could be individually and collectively enriching. ―Moment‖ is a word that Henri Lefebvre
opposed to the ―structures‖ of structuralism with their immobile conditioning. Debord reads it as
the provisional coalescing of forces and emotions that can really produce a change in the
oppressive structures of the capitalist environment.
ne pouvant supprimer par décret le monde du spectacle, je m‘y
trouve très heureux d‘y rencontrer une occasion de vivre un spectacle
(aussi, négation du spectacle) comme Hiroshima. Pourtant, ce serait
mentir, me mentir, si j‘en venais à dire que ce spectacle me satisfait plus
que certains moments de ma vie, que j‘ai moi-même pu vivre; ou surtout
que d‘autres moments, que je pourrais—si les conditions étaient réunies—
organiser sur-le-champ. (Debord 2001, p. 34)54
Hiroshima mon amour presented most fundamentally the movement toward the
dissolution of modern art. Debord deduced from this stance that Resnais had a deep and global
knowledge of Breton and of post-Joyce writings, in contrast with the other directors of the
53 ―And when the foreseeable reversing of the cultural and social conditions allows a free
cinema, several other domains of action will necessarily have been introduced. Probably then the freedom
of cinema will be largely outrun, forgotten, in the general development of a world where the spectacle
will not be dominant any longer. The fundamental feature of modern spectacle is the performance of its
own ruin. The importance of Resnais‘ film, certainly conceived outside this perspective, is to add a new
confirmation to it.‖
54 ―As I cannot abolish by decree the world of the spectacle, I find myself very happy to find a
chance to live a spectacle (also, negation of the spectacle) like Hiroshima. However, it would be to lie, to
lie to myself, if I would then say that this spectacle is more satisfactory for me than certain moments of
my life that I could live myself; and particularly than other moments that I could—if the conditions were
met—organize without delay. ‖
239
Nouvelle Vague who had only a rather shallow and bourgeois cinematographic culture. But this
reflexive destruction of art did not open onto a void. What emerged from it, in fact, was daily life
with its revolutionary potential. ―Cette dissolution n‘est pas réduction pure : la v[ie]
q[uotidienne] envahit le domaine de l‘art, aussi, à mesure que ce domaine se retire et s‘effondre
devant elle‖ (p. 35).55 This letter by Guy Debord is very interesting in relation to daily life
because it begins with a discussion of Lefebvre‘s thought that shows the reciprocal relation
between the two theorists. In particular, Debord had successfully convinced Lefebvre not to
underestimate the revolutionary reality of Surrealism in daily life, which includes also dreams
and adventures.
The letter to Straram concludes the discussion on Hiroshima mon amour arguing that
Hiroshima mon amour showed how cinema could be used in a positive way. ―Aucun progrès ne
peut venir de la suppression d‘un moyen d‘intervention existant. À nous d‘en faire le meilleur
usage‖ (p. 35).56 This statement well illustrates the Situationists‘ position in relation to
technological progress. Ado Kyrou privileged the theme of the unconscious in the Surrealist
heritage. Therefore, he conservatively thought that only a ―real woman‖ could save cinema from
the technological progresses that denatured it, such as giant screens and stereophony. By
contrast, the Situationists thought that every aspect of industrial cinema could be employed for
the construction of richer situations through the practice of ―détournement,‖ i.e. the extraction of
fragments to be deployed in a situation that profoundly changes their meaning and that they, in
turn, destabilize (Chollet 2000, p. 96). Debord himself amply used the practice of détournement
in the films that he created at the turn of the Sixties. Sur le passage de quelques personnes à
travers une assez courte unité de temps (1959) and Critique de la séparation (1960) had as
theme the theories and the practices of the Situationist group. In this sense, Debord‘s unusual
55 ―This dissolution is not pure reduction: d[aily] l[ife] invades the domain of art, too, as this
domain withdraws and collapses before it.‖
56 ―No progress can come from the suppression of an existing means of intervention. It is on us
to make the best use of it.‖
240
interest in Hiroshima mon amour was also based on his desire to find an ally in Resnais for
launching the project of a cinema that embraced the modernist collapse of narrative structures in
order to develop more meaningful and global forms of action.
However, the honeymoon between the Situationists and Alain Resnais did not last long.
The neo-Surrealists of Positif had empowered a woman like Michèle Firk to sing the praise of
Resnais‘ ―mad love.‖ By contrast, the Situationists let to a woman like Debord‘s partner Michèle
Bernstein the task to deduce from Last Year in Marienbad that they had been retrospectively
mistaken in their choice of backing the director even in Hiroshima mon amour. The title of
Bernstein‘s essay— ―Sunset Boulevard‖—borrows the title of Billy Wilder‘s film on the crazy
decadence of a former diva of the silent era to indict Resnais‘ failure to ride the tide of modern
art (1962, p. 42). Particularly, Resnais‘ disappointing choice of Alain Robbe-Grillet as a
screenplay writer and his association with the boring and empty Nouveau Roman had shown his
inability to understand the most productive germs of Hiroshima mon amour.
At the same time, Bernstein argues that only the Situationists can judge what is true or
false in modern art. They participate in it and know what it must become (p. 42). The implication
is that they are the only real heirs of the progressive aspects in Breton‘s Surrealism. Bernstein‘s
essay is, in fact, also an attack against the neo-Surrealists of Positif. It particularly targets Ado
Kyrou‘s laudatory criticism of Marienbad. The Greek critic had argued that Hiroshima mon
amour was a failure that only the snobbism of the audience had turned into a success. By
contrast, Marienbad was the real deal, as it ventured into the depths of the Surrealist
unconscious. Bernstein argues the exact opposite. Marienbad had become a subject of
conversation in the feminine press like Elle, but it was an insignificant and atemporal film, cut
out from history, from reality, and from life. ―Ceci au contraire d‘Hiroshima qui, s‘il n‘était pas
précisément révolutionnaire, était assez sympathiquement situé par rapport aux comportements
actuels des gens‖ (p. 43).57 Bernstein implies, therefore, that the authentic heritage of Surrealism
57 ―This is the contrary of Hiroshima that, if it was not precisely a revolutionary film, was quite
sympathetically situated in relation to the current behaviors of the people.‖
241
is not the flight out of history into the personal unconscious, but rather the ability to perceive the
actual productive trends in daily life and to push them into a more stimulating direction.
Kyrou was enchanted with the baroque atmosphere of Marienbad. However, for
Bernstein the real baroque was connected with the richness of Surrealist poetry in its relation
with life and not with a rococo setting. Marienbad had been filmed in one of the castles of
Ludwig II of Bayern, but it was not even a pale ghost compared with the constant
experimentation that the queer king had carried on in his everyday conduct that brought to the
limit the Wagnerian idea of total art. Resnais ignored the great tradition of baroque cinema and
the real games that Welles and Sternberg had succeeded in creating. Kyrou also had loved the
way in which Marienbad returned to the silent era of the Italian divas. From the Situationist
perspective, these words were obviously anathema. In fact, this ―retour au muet‖ and the boring
insignificance of the soundtrack were the clearest proof that Resnais had not understood the most
important innovation of Hiroshima mon amour (p. 43).58
In fact, commercial cinema had reached the global crisis of modern art through
Hiroshima. Resnais had appeared to realize the meaning of his intervention thanks to his culture
that was broader than the other directors of the Nouvelle Vague, ―qui n‘avaient de culture que
cinéphilique‖ (p. 44).59 However, now the ―case Resnais‖ must be reexamined and the verdict is
not so positive. Resnais had often referred to André Breton in his discussions on Hiroshima, but
the choice of Robbe-Grillet showed its cultural inanity. Also Breton, in fact, criticized the
conservative trend that had led to the international recognition of the Nouveau Roman. ―Resnais
avait des ambitions, mais il faut maintenant s‘apercevoir qu‘il ne connaissait rien que le milieu
58 ―Return to silent cinema.‖
59 ―Who had only a cinephilic culture.‖
242
du trucage moderniste, entre le T.N.P. et Les Temps Modernes, l‘art de Mathieu et la pensée
d‘Axelos‖ (p. 45).60
This reference to the thought of Kostas Axelos is particularly interesting also because the
last part of Bernstein‘s essay reserves an even harsher criticism for Edgar Morin. Bernstein (p.
45) particularly targets his collaboration with Jean Rouch in Chronique d’un été (1961) that the
Situationists considered the systematic imposture of a fake cinéma-vérité. The 1959‘s editorial
on Hiroshima mon amour had indicated Rouch‘s work as a positive example of a still marginal
cinema. However, the Situationists had extremely tense relations with the group of Arguments
that was guilty of having snubbed them at the beginning. They criticized Morin and Barthes for
not having signed the Manifesto of the 121 that both Debord and Bernstein joined with personal
risk. And they argued that the only two interesting items in Arguments were the translations from
foreign texts (particularly the Frankfurt School) and the contributions of Henri Lefebvre.
However, they broke also with Lefebvre in 1963 because the philosopher had published in
Arguments a text on the Parisian Commune without indicating that the Situationists had written
the greatest part of it. Debord could forgive the quasi-plagiarism, but not the choice of the
journal.
In fact, these tense relations were also due to the fact that the Situationists and Arguments
had actually much in common (Poster 1975, p. 386). Themes such as daily life and play were
important for the two groups. However, Axelos‘ focus on Heideggerian thinking beyond the
metaphysic will-to-power of the homo faber led him also to question the autogestion (workers‘
self-management) that was the key to the alliance between the Situationists and Cornelius
Castoriadis from Socialisme ou Barbarie and that will have a great importance in 1968.61 As for
60 ―Resnais had some ambitions, but now we finally realize that he had no knowledge beyond the
fake-modernist milieu, between the National Popular Theater and Les Temps Modernes, the art of
[Georges] Mathieu and the thought of [Kostas] Axelos.‖
61 Kostas Axelos (1964, p. 203) wrote at the turn of the Sixties: ―Ne voyant d‘autre sens dans le
monde et dans l‘histoire de l‘humanité que l‘autoproduction du monde et l‘autoproduction de l‘homme,
nous croyons que l‘autogestion résout le problème. Ce que l‘antique et héraclitéenne unité des contraires
devient ne nous est pas perceptible: nous n‘apprenons pas la nouvelle unité de la production et de l‘usure,
243
Morin, his sociological approach tended to reinforce the barriers between daily life and ―actual
politics‖ that the Situationists attempted to erase. Moreover, both Morin and Axelos attempted to
reduce the Surrealist contribution to the thought of daily life and they did not take into account
its connection with the history of aesthetics.
It is precisely in this connection between the history of aesthetics and daily life that the
Situationists had seen the importance of Hiroshima mon amour as ―un cinéma dominé par la
parole‖ (Bernstein 1962, p. 45).62 Resnais‘ documentaries had overcome the delay of cinema in
comparison with the other arts and the honest text of Marguerite Duras had allowed him to move
into this direction. ―Hiroshima qui était incontestablement à un stade moderne de l‘histoire du
cinéma se situait, par rapport à l‘évolution culturelle générale, aux environs de Proust‖ (p. 45).63
Hiroshima contested the spectacle from within. However, the evolution of Marienbad into a
hazy and disempowering direction had rescinded the alliance between Resnais and the
Situationists. Bernstein concludes her essay stating that Debord‘s group has proven to be the
only authentically avant-garde movement left thanks to their conscious theorization.
Mais nous—qui n‘avons aucunement l‘habitude de prendre parti
favorablement dans le débat culturel officiel de ces années—nous avions
dit ici que le premier film de Resnais confirmait les thèses situationnistes
sur la destruction du spectacle, bien qu‘il ait été évidemment conçu en
dehors de ces thèses (―Le trait fondamental du spectacle moderne est la
mise en scène de sa propre ruine,‖ Internationale Situationniste 3). Avec
la retombée de Resnais dans le plus redondant et le plus mite des
spectacles, force est de conclure que ce sont précisément de telles thèses
qui ont manqué à Resnais pour son développement ultérieur. Et qu‘il n‘y a
plus d‘artiste moderne concevable en dehors de nous. (p. 46)64
de l‘intelligence et de la bêtise…‖ [As we don‘t see in the world and in the history of humanity any other
meaning than the self-production of the world and the self-production of man, we believe that the
workers‘ self-management solves the problem. We are no more able to perceive what the old Heraclitean
unity of the opposites becomes: we don‘t grasp the new unity of production and consumption, of
intelligence and stupidity…]
62 ―A cinema dominated by the word.‖
63 ―Hiroshima that was incontestably at a modern stage of the history of cinema was situated, in
relation to the general cultural evolution, in the surroundings of Proust.‖
64 ―But we—who are not at all in the habit of taking favorably any side in the official cultural
debate of these years—we had said here that Resnais‘ first film confirmed the Situationist theses on the
244
The rhetorical situation of Positif had empowered Michèle Firk to develop her politics of
aimance from Duras‘ ―mad love.‖ The rhetorical situation of the International Situationniste
empowered another Michèle to question the theoretical understanding that Resnais had of his
own art. In both cases, the possibility to speak comes from the porous relation that the Surrealist
heritage allowed between daily and private life and politics at large. Their position as women
does not simply enable them to comment on their identification with the sexually liberated
character of Elle or to criticize her narcissistic features. They overcome the close sociological
boundaries of private life in which the female students and scholars of the Brussels seminar were
contained. The colonized reality of daily life in technocratic France created a contrasted space
that women inhabited in a perhaps more original way due to their only marginal inclusion into
History. But this threatened space had also become the key to a different understanding of the
political. Their reading of Hiroshima mon amour cannot be understood without grasping this
paradoxical situation and the possibilities that it creates.
Firk found in Resnais‘ film an attempt to question the binary oppositions of the given
conceptions of the political and to bring to center stage the oppressions that could not be grasped
through them. Her reading of Hiroshima mon amour justified her activism in favor of the
Algerian freedom fighters despite her party stance on the question of Algerian independence.
The legacy of Breton‘s ―mad love‖ become for her the first link for the articulation of various
forms of oppression that could create a resistance against the de-politicization of technocratic
France and against the more capillary and vicious colonization of the private sphere of human
survival. Bernstein, instead, read Resnais‘ first commercial film as working from inside the
spectacle toward its destruction. From its ruins daily life emerged as a creative site where a new
destruction of the spectacle, even if it had evidently been conceived outside these theses. (‗The
fundamental trait of the modern spectacle is the performance of its own ruin.‘ Situationist International
3). With Resnais falling back into the most redoubtable and most moderate spectacle, we are forced to
conclude that Resnais lacked precisely these theses for his further development. And that no more modern
artist is conceivable apart from us.‖
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revolutionary culture of the working class could be created. The Surrealist legacy of chance and
play had to be rescued from its elitist thrust and deployed on a larger scale against the structures
of capitalist economy, in order to attack its nerve centers through ―moments‖ of richer and more
meaningful collective action. In both cases, Surrealism enables elaborating a counter-culture that
aims at a redefinition of the political itself.
In the next section, I shift the perspective and address how the Surrealist heritage became
a resource for Georges Sadoul in dealing with the question of modernization that was highly
problematic from a Stalinist point of view. In his contribution to Esprit‘s special issue on French
cinema, the Stalinist critic finally embraces the ―baroque‖ discrepancy that Duras‘ screenplay
brings to the measured classicism of the images in Hiroshima mon amour. Through this
irresolvable tension the Surrealist space of modern technology in everyday life becomes a
productive question mark. It enables Sadoul to maintain his Stalinist priorities. But it also forces
him to enlarge them and reformulate them in order to include a broader humanist understanding
of a situation that Stalinism could not fully explain. I conclude the chapter with a brief reference
to another essay in the special issue of Esprit. The Personalist critic Michel Mesnil, in fact,
begins from Bazin‘s ontological view of cinema like the Cahiers. But he asks not to forget the
Leftist commitment that had guided his creator and that the question of modern technology
makes even more imperative.
Sadoul‘s Mystery of the Everyday
A brief flashback can help us to understand the massive change in priorities that Sadoul
had to negotiate in his historical account of the sources of the new French cinema for Esprit in
1960. Ten years before, Sadoul had considered René Clair‘s The Beauty of the Devil (1949) the
most significant film at the turn of the Fifties. This modern version of the myth of Faust was a
grand poetic metaphor of patriotic relevance that translated the popular dynamism of the
Communist view of technology. The new Faust condemned nuclear weapons. But he also still
maintained an optimistic belief in a positive form of scientific progress that could benefit the
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common people. The hero of the film was the artistic equivalent of the Communist scientist
Frédéric Joliot-Curie, who opposed the atomic bomb but had set up the French nuclear program
to solve the country‘s chronic scarcity of energy:
Son Faust est parent d‘Einstein maudissant dans une déclaration
retentissante (et confuse) l‘arme qu‘il a contribué à créer. Oui, il faut
détruire les machines et la ‗science‘ qui préparent l‘anéantissement de
l‘humanité. Mais faut-il pour cela demander d‘abolir tout progrès
technique ? […] La leçon essentielle du film n‘est pas, à nos yeux, dans
ces propositions. (Sadoul 1979, p. 99)65
Sadoul read Clair‘s film as a call to arms in the full swing of the Zhdanovist period.
―Soyons des Faust, n‘acceptons pas la fatalité du Destin, refusons la dictature fasciste, la guerre,
la bombe atomique. Sachons que Faust ne peut vaincre individuellement Méphisto, mais que le
peuple peut tout. Nous tenons notre destin entre nos mains‖ (p. 100).66 Also Aragon had used
The Beauty of the Devil to support the Mouvement de la paix in its antinuclear protest. The
persuasive force of Clair‘s film had helped the Communist initiative of the Stockholm Appeal for
the absolute ban on nuclear weapons in 1950 that Sadoul was among the first to sign:
Un soir de 1949, à Montreuil, Aragon, qui venait d‘applaudir ce
nouveau film, saluait Joliot-Curie en le comparant à un ―chevalier Henri,‖
dont la personnalité dominait ce troisième Faust. Tandis que parlait le
poète, un feuillet circulait de table en table, que nous étions presque les
premiers à signer, sans savoir que ces cinq lignes allaient s‘appeler, pour
les cinq cents millions qui les contresignèrent, l‘Appel de Stockholm.
(p.134)67
65 ―His Faust is a relative of Einstein‘s who curses in a captivating (and confused) declaration the
weapon that he has contributed to create. Yes, the machines and the ‗science‘ that prepare the annihilation
of humanity should be destroyed. But is it therefore necessary to ask for the abolition of all technical
progress? […] The essential lesson of the film is not, as we see it, in these propositions.‖
66 ―Let us be Fausts, we shall not accept the fatality of Destiny, we shall refuse Fascist
dictatorship, war, the atomic bomb. Let us understand that Faust cannot individually win over Mephisto,
but the people can do everything. We hold our destiny in our hand.‖
67 ―One evening in 1949, at Montreuil, Aragon, who had just applauded this new film, greeted
Joliot-Curie comparing him to a ‗knight Henri,‘ whose personality dominated this third Faust. While the
poet was speaking, a sheet of paper circulated from table to table, which we were almost the first to sign,
without knowing that those five lines would become, for the five hundred million who would sign them,
the Stockholm Appeal.‖
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In the Mid-Fifties, Sadoul‘s only criticism of Clair‘s film was that its symbolic density
veiled the directness of the message and its committed thrust. ―Nous souhaitons que cette leçon
soit comprise par tous, bien que l‘œuvre, très dense, n‘emploie pas toujours une symbolique très
intelligible‖ (p. 134).68 However, ten years later Sadoul did not lament the dense and indirect
representation of the world of modern technology in Hiroshima mon amour in his essay for
Esprit. Paradoxically, the force of Resnais‘ film resided now in the very ambiguity and mystery
of its images rather than in an explicit call to committed actions. Sadoul praised, in fact, ―le
rythme profond du montage, son modulement de flûte, sa musicalité utilisant les e muets plus
que les coups de clarion‖ (p. 207).69 Resnais devotes a Racinian attention to the ―mystérieuse
résonance‖ that springs from the combination of simple things (p. 207).70 In this technological
world Sadoul could now read the Surrealist mystery of the everyday.
Sadoul had already noticed Resnais‘ attention to the décor of daily life in a modern city
in his 1959‘s essay ―The Universe and the Dew.‖ Resnais‘ outlook was both documentary and
fascinated. ―Sa matière première, il la prend dans la vie et dans la ville‖ (p. 176).71 From these
raw materials, montage and camera angles initiate a Surrealist flight from the mundane into the
marvelous. ―Tout ce qu‘il touche, ce sorcier, il le métamorphose. Du lieu le plus banal surgissent
l‘insolite, le singulier, le bouleversant‖ (p. 176).72 The real nightclub Casablanca in Hiroshima
must be rather ugly with its cheap furniture and its artificial waterfall. On the screen it becomes,
however, ―un lieu plus prestigieux qu‘un château fort en ruine, plus fantastique que les décors
68 ―We wish that everybody would understand this lesson, even if the work—very dense—does
not always use a very intelligible symbolism.‖
69 ―The profound rhythm of the montage, its flute-like modulation, its musicality using silent ‗e‘s more than clarion calls.‖
70 ―Mysterious resonance.‖
71 ―He takes his raw material from life and from the town.‖
72 ―This sorcerer metamorphoses everything he touches. From the most banal site, the unusual,
the singular, and the moving do emerge.‖
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expressionnistes de Caligari. Le bruit de la cascade hante la pénombre. La banale marquise de
verre devient un signe, un idéogramme de la plus parfaite beauté‖ (p. 176).73 The future-oriented
heroism of Socialist Realism and the increased technological productivity for the social good of
the working class are under the spell of the marvelous cinematic metamorphosis of a civilization
of leisure.
However, in Les Lettres françaises the question of ―National Communism‖ and the harsh
tones of the Stalinist controversy on ―mad love‖ had partly diverted attention from this growing
fascination with modern technology. By contrast, Esprit was the ideal terrain for it to emerge
front stage. The Personalist journal, in fact, had embraced modernization. It was trying to
reconcile this new trend and the critical support of technocracy that it entailed with the Leftist
commitment that had characterized its past. Therefore, Sadoul could find here the ideal rhetorical
situation to negotiate his own troubled relation with the positive aspects of modernization. The
Stalinist rhetoric of progressive pauperization of the working class in capitalist countries could
not account for the actual rising of living standards. But this reality was increasingly evident in
technocratic France and was a main force in changing the composition and the self-perception of
the proletariat. Accordingly, the relationship between poetry and banality in the representation of
modern technology in Hiroshima mon amour becomes the center of Sadoul‘s treatment of the
film for Esprit. It becomes the key to understand what sets Resnais‘ work apart from the other
young directors of French cinema. Resnais reminds the critic of the old poet, Racine, plus the
magic of the modern camera:
Le cinéaste moderne prend les lieux les plus banals, la tournée
préparée par l‘agence Cook pour les touristes de passage à Hiroshima;
musée, grand hôtel, gare, rue commerçante, café, promenades, boîtes de
nuit…Mais leurs images singulièrement cadrées ou explorées par la
camera sont ordonnées dans une phrase filmique où les mots-plans
prennent, par leur assemblage, rythme et résonance. Une poésie insolite
73 ―A site more prestigious than a castle in ruins, more fantastic than the expressionist décor in
Caligari. The noise of the waterfall haunts the dusk. The banal glass canopy becomes a sign, an ideogram
of the most perfect beauty.‖
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naît du quotidien, le verre de cuisine le plus grossier tinte comme un
cristal. (p. 208)74
A Surrealist double emerges from the coffeehouse and commercial passageway in
Hiroshima. The life-long friend of Aragon and the former friend of Breton finds in his past the
resources to read the poetic resonances of the mundane appearance of modern technology. In this
sense, Hiroshima mon amour appears as a cinematic translation of Aragon‘s Le Paysan de Paris
(1926) in which the poet discovered the modern mythology that was born from the passageways
and the public gardens of Paris. In this work—which influenced the pearl diving of Benjamin‘s
Passagenwerk—Aragon interrogated the inanimate objects that inhabit our cities like
unrecognized sphinx and change our ways of life. They construct a new geography of pleasure
that the Surrealist drug of imagination can inhabit. But they can also lead to the active planning
of chance and can create new forms of protest. Breton in Nadja (1928) explored the secret link
between a prophetic woman on the verge of madness and the urbanism of the modern city as a
gigantic cryptogram.
At the beginning of Nadja, Breton (1988, p. 649-650) recalls how the universe in the
paintings of Giorgio de Chirico until 1917 was born from the surprise for certain dispositions of
things. A limited number of objects such as the glove or the reel appeared. They were close to
what had originated them, but also mysteriously transformed in a way that recalled the strange
resemblance between two brothers or between the real person and his image in dream. Therefore,
it is not surprising that in his essay for Esprit Sadoul links Resnais‘ work in Hiroshima mon
amour to the early Chirico that the Surrealists considered one of them for his revelations on the
world of modern things:
L‘impressionnisme français imprègne depuis vingt ans nos plus
grands operateurs. Le nouveau cinéma français rompt-il avec cette
tradition? Dans Hiroshima certainement, où la référence serait plutôt
74 ―The modern cineaste takes the most banal places, the tour prepared by the agency Cook for
tourists passing through Hiroshima; museum, grand hotel, station, commercial street, coffeehouse,
promenades, nightclubs…But their images, singularly framed or explored by the camera, are ordered in a
filmic phrase where the words-shots acquire, through their assemblage, rhythm and resonance. An
unusual poetry is born from the everyday; the coarsest kitchen glass tinkles like a crystal.‖
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Chirico de 1912. Mais ailleurs? Henri Decae, operateur favori de certains
nouveaux cinéastes, a certes su montrer de façon encore inédite autoroute,
néon, juke-boxes, snack-bars, billards électriques…mais après tout,
comme les yeux baudelairiens découvrirent les ―gaz neuf.‖ (Sadoul 1979,
p. 212)75
In Elevator to the Gallows, Decae had assisted Louis Malle in systematically presenting
the ―air‖ of Paris in its modernism of 1957 like no other directors had done with a European city.
However, in the words of Chirico‘s friend Jean Cocteau, ―Chirico nous montre la réalité en la
dépaysant. C‘est un dépaysagiste‖ (Cocteau 1932, p. 57).76 The pleasure is not simply in
recognizing the elements of reality ―as they are‖ and as they surround us. As Breton explains,
Chirico‘s painting is ―emblematic‖ because it keeps only that part of the exterior aspects that can
raise an enigma and move the viewer to face the secret life of things. Its aim is to transform
painting into an ―interrogation du spectateur‖ (Breton 2008, p. 104).77 This comparison with the
Italian painter shows that Sadoul thought that one of the strengths of Hiroshima mon amour was
its ability to present the clash of different aspects of reality as a question mark for the audience.
This aspect had indeed become so important for Sadoul that he further developed the comparison
with Chirico in relation to Last Year in Marienbad:
Marienbad fait aussi penser aux tableaux de 1912-1916 où Giorgio
de Chirico (alors très grand peintre) transposait sa Bologne natale dans
d‘étranges paysages pneumatiques (je veux dire privés d‘air) où les statues
en redingote gesticulaient, immobiles, devant les arcades, les locomotives
et des cheminés d‘usine… Je me souviens d‘avoir vu, il y a très longtemps
à la devanture de la galerie Guillaume, un de ces tableaux que je jugeais
d‘abord insignifiant dans son objectivité disparate. Et puis brusquement je
compris sa modernité singulière, significative à sa façon, de son temps.
(Sadoul 1979, p. 224)78
75 ―French impressionism has impregnated for twenty years our greatest operators. Does the new
French cinema break with this tradition? In Hiroshima of course, where the reference would rather be to
the Chirico of 1912. But elsewhere? Henri Decae, the favorite operator of certain new cineastes, has
certainly been able to show in a yet unprecedented fashion highways, neon, juke-boxes, snack-bars,
pinball machines...but after all, just like the eyes of Baudelaire discovered the ‗new gas‘ […].‖
76 ―Chirico shows us reality through displacement. He is a dispainter.‖
77 ―Interrogation of the viewer.‖
78 ―Marienbad also recalls the paintings of 1912-1916 in which Giorgio de Chirico (then an
extremely great painter) transposed his hometown of Bologna into strange pneumatic (I mean deprived of
air) landscapes in which statues in frock-coat gesticulated, immobile, before the passageways, the
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In ―The Universe and the Dew‖ Sadoul had criticized the style of Duras‘ screenplay that
did not maintain the level of tragic lyricism that the subject of Hiroshima mon amour required.
He particularly blamed Duras for having fallen into the temptation of telling the story of Nevers
through the witty turns of phrases of Boulevard cinema that did not refrain from conservative
subjects—such as a clear nostalgia for Versailles—and were the opposite of commitment. Now,
instead, Sadoul accepts Resnais‘ declaration of love for the brilliant Boulevard screenplays of
Sacha Guitry. He also notices that the director appears to have systematically researched a
―romantic‖ clash between the classicism of his filmic language and the preciosity of the
commentary throughout his works, even before Hiroshima mon amour (p. 208). From this point
of view, the discrepancy between the text and the images is no more the failure in the diamond
Hiroshima. It acquires a new meaning for its ability to further displace the audience and increase
the question mark of modern technology.
In the roundtable of the Cahiers, Eric Rohmer had started with a critique of Duras‘
screenplay that clashed with his classical ideal of cinema. The Situationists, by contrast, had
particularly embraced the baroque quality of the screenplay that dominated the images of
Hiroshima mon amour. They read in the profusion of a brilliant voice the proof that cinema was
finally approaching the critical stage of every modern art. In Esprit, Sadoul suggests that
Hiroshima mon amour hinted to a third way between the universal canon of Rohmer‘s Boileau
and the Situationists‘ love for the inventiveness with which the Précieuses elaborated their style
on every level of life. The Stalinist critic reconciles this opposition between Classicist simplicity
and Baroque exuberance as a French national tradition:
Elle procède des traditions françaises du XVIIe siècle, qu‘on ne
saurait réduire à l‘opposition scolaire entre les Précieuses et Molière, le
foisonnement baroque et le dépouillement plastique. Ils se concilièrent
chez certains, et des plus grands. Vous trouverez dans Jacques Callot le
maniérisme des opéras italiens et le documentaire social des gueux, la
locomotives, and factory chimneys…I remember having seen, long time ago in the window of the gallery
Guillaume, one of these paintings that at the beginning I had judged insignificant in its disparate
objectivity. And then suddenly I understood its singular modernity, significant in its way, of its times.‖
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pompe des Jésuites et la simplicité mystérieuse du quotidien, Tintoret allié
aux le Nain, et le Cavalier Bernin à Georges de la Tour. Sommes-nous si
loin d‘Hiroshima, ces nouvelles ―grands misères de la guerre‖? (p. 209)79
Georges Sadoul was fascinated with Jacques Caillot and wrote a book on his works that
was published after his death. Therefore, this comparison can perhaps illuminate what he meant
in stressing the mystery of the everyday in Hiroshima mon amour. Sadoul considered the
etchings of the Lorraine engraver the most important social documentation of the suffering of the
humble classes before the invention of photography. They were a mass medium for their time
and their indictment of the horrors of war would be almost unthinkable in modern cinema.
Caillot is immortal because he always sided for the humble people and was the loudspeaker of
their suffering. He even thought that the peasants should revolt and fight back. The engraver
completed the series known as the ―Miseries of War‖ only six days before his death in 1635. His
etchings cursed the war and the suffering that it brought to the peasants, even in ―peaceful
times.‖ ―Dans sa série, une seule montre les combats mais dix décrivent les supplices ou les
assassinats normalement commis, dans ces temps épouvantables, par les troupes traversant
paisiblement un pays‖ (Sadoul 1969, p. 347).80
Perhaps Sadoul now knew that the beginning of Hiroshima mon amour did not refer only
to the war-time bombing of Hiroshima, but also to the peace-time explosion of Bikini. As a
filmologist, he had close relations with some of the participants in the Brussels seminar who had
reconstructed the shot by shot transcription of the film and clarified this point. He was also
sympathetic and supportive enough toward the young critics of Positif like Firk to follow with
79 ―It comes from the French tradition of the Seventeenth century, which cannot be reduced to
the academic opposition between the Précieuses and Molière, baroque abundance and simple
reproduction of forms. They coexisted in certain authors, and among the greatest. You will find in
Jacques Callot the mannerism of Italian operas and the social documentary of the beggars, the pomp of
the Jesuits and the mysterious simplicity of the everyday, Tintoretto allied with le Nain, and the Knight
Bernini with Georges de la Tour. Are we so far from Hiroshima, these new ‗miseries of war‘?‖
80 ―In a series, only one etching shows the fighters but ten describe the tortures and the murders
that were normally committed, in those frightening times, by the troops that peacefully crossed a
country.‖
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interest their articulations of Hiroshima mon amour with other issues such as decolonization and
the Algerian war. His position inside the Communist Party was not so marginal as to allow him
ample spaces of maneuver. However, he undoubtedly felt the need for a revision that could
enable him to chart areas of oppression and possible revolt that the strict binary oppositions of
―National Communism‖ failed to account for. His later interest in Arab cinema was part of this
process of filling a gap that had left its Party behind in the movement of the Left.
We can now perhaps attempt to answer the question of what rhetorical function served
the mystery of the everyday in Georges Sadoul‘s reading of Hiroshima mon amour. The return to
the Surrealism of his youth enabled the Stalinist writer to deal with the issue of modernization
that was creating a radical change in the habits and mentality of the French working class. The
Communist Party invoked the proletariat as its ideal justification. But the proletariat was no
longer the same and it did not fit the preconceived formats of Marxist theory. The sociology of
work and leisure time was tracing this gradual but radical transformation that undermined the
very foundations of the Communist Party. Also the focus on ―daily life‖ that characterized the
hopes of Lefebvre and of the Situationists partook in this critical work. It was to become the
center of the cultural and political elaboration of a new working class that could resist the
capitalist system. But it had also to withstand and undermine the ―spectacle‖ of the fixed and
controllable identity that Stalinist centralism wanted to impose on the workers in order to better
control them. In all these cases, the question of modernization opened an abyss of uncharted
possibilities.
Sadoul did not find in Hiroshima mon amour the enthusiastic representation of modernity
that he found in other young French directors. But he considered it the most important film at the
turn of the Sixties because he found in it the resources to negotiate his position as a Stalinist and
to come to terms with the challenge of modernization. The discrepancy between the classicism
and the baroque in Hiroshima mon amour enlarged the range of representation. The focus was no
longer on direct commitment but on embracing a wide fresco with different and contradictory
elements that could no longer be easily reconciled through the magic of dialectical materialism.
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Nevertheless, even if commitment was now part of a more complicated scenario, its direction
had to remain clear. Its priority must still be the defense of the suffering people and the
condemnation of the horrors of war (even when they might be masked as the upholding of
―peace‖). At the end of Hiroshima mon amour—as in the last etching of Caillot—a hope
remains: The hope in the future of humanity.
Mesnil and the Commitment of the Cinematic Ontology
Sadoul and the Situationists were both looking back to the Surrealist heritage as a
justification of their reading of Hiroshima mon amour. Michel Mesnil confronted the Cahiers on
the terrain of the legacy of André Bazin. He brought back to the phenomenology of the cinematic
image the Personalist commitment that Rohmer‘s classicism and the de-contextualization of the
politique des auteurs had excluded. Mesnil was not the most elegant writer on cinema in Esprit.
Marie-Claire Wuilleumier, for instance, had developed a more nuanced and sophisticated reading
of the language of Hiroshima mon amour though which Resnais faced with lucidity the anguish
of the modern world. However, Mesnil was the editor of Esprit‘s special issue on French cinema
and he most clearly articulated the rhetorical negotiation that the journal had to face at the turn of
the Sixties. In fact, the Leftist tradition of Personalist engagement clashed with the critical
backing to Gaullist technocracy that the center of the group was willing to risk. In this section, I
examine how Mesnil‘s reading of Hiroshima mon amour recuperated the committed aspect of
the Bazinian theory of cinema in order to perform a difficult translation. He attempted to
recognize the concerns with modernization of the Sixties without losing the connection with the
main areas of post-war Personalist activism, such as the participation in anti-nuclear and anticolonial movements.
Michel Mesnil had played an active role in the commemoration of André Bazin in the
pages of Esprit in 1959. His article ―‖Une méthode critique‖ was an answer to Eric Rohmer‘s
presentation of Bazin‘s collected works as a complete theoretical framework that could sustain
the further theorizations of his heirs in the Cahiers. Mesnil agrees with Rohmer that the whole of
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Bazin‘s work is based on the central idea of the affirmation of cinematographic ―objectivity.‖
But he immediately adds that this objectivity should not be read as an excuse for a decontextualized cinephilic approach. ―Mais, partant du réel, c‘est au réel aussi, au concret que
Bazin aboutit […]. Le travail de Bazin est profondément enraciné dans son siècle; avec lui, le
critique sort de sa tour d‘ivoire, le mythe de la critique ‗pure‘ s‘abolit‖ (Mesnil 1959, p. 848).81
Mesnil stresses how Bazin was attentive to every aspect of the production and reception of
cinema and how he filled his articles with constant references to topical political and cultural
questions.
The question of the context in its relation with cinematographic objectivity is also the
main concern in Mesnil‘s main essay for the special issue of Esprit on French cinema in 1960.
The article ―A la recherche d‘une signification‖ begins with the memory of how the discovery of
Italian Neo-Realism had brought for the post-war French audience a collective hope and a
renewed taste for a fight. Bazin had loved and promoted the Neo-Realist authors for their social
and political content. However, times have changed and the hope for the Italian beacon has faded
away. Despite its greater freedom from economic conditioning, the young French cinema is not
able to account for questions that touch the French people closely such as the dramatic changes
in ways of life due to a relative Americanization, the decolonization struggles, and the fear of the
Cold War. They fail in the domain of ―investigation sociale‖ (Mesnil 1960, p. 981).82 In this
context, Hiroshima mon amour is one of the rare films that address problems that concern the
relation between French people and the society to which they belong. The young French cinema
is, in fact, ―un des cinémas les plus désengagés du monde‖ (p. 981).83
81 ―But, as he starts from the real, it is also back to the real, to the concrete that Bazin ends […].
Bazin‘s work is profoundly rooted in his century; with him, the critic abandons his ivory tower, and the
myth of ‗pure‘ criticism is abolished.‖
82―Social investigation.‖
83 ―One of the least committed cinemas in the world.‖
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Even Resnais‘ films, moreover, ―ne sont jamais attachés simplement à la peinture de la
réalité française d‘un point de vue objectif‖ (p. 981).84 They mix documentary with imagination.
And there is a level of escapism in their choice of foreign environments, like Japan. French
cinema is unable to present ―le visage ouvrier ou paysan de la France‖ and leaves to the press
and to television the burden of sociological surveys (p. 982).85 American cinema is able to
present the density and diversity of the social reality that surrounds it to a much greater extent.
The modernization of France, however, creates other areas of inequalities, new social conditions,
and political responsibilities that film should study:
Sommes-nous tellement anesthésiés par la presse à grand tirage, les
tirades historiques du général de Gaulle, la bombe de Reggane, la
décadence des études primaires et une guerre qui s‘éternise, que nous ne
puissions pas secréter un cinéma qui nous parle enfin de nous? […] Pays
sous-développé, méconnu, ne méritons-nous pas notre lot de films
ethnographiques, qui nous renseigneraient sur les étranges habitudes ou les
pénibles conditions de vie de nos compatriotes? Quel Jean Rouch tournera
―Moi un Breton‖? (p. 985)86
Mesnil is careful to distinguish the cinema of Resnais and his friends Varda and Marker
from the more depoliticized cinema that constitutes the great part of the Nouvelle Vague. And he
criticizes Georges Sadoul for being too indulgent with these conservative tendencies. If Eric
Rohmer does not see censorship as a problem it is because he would never even think to shoot a
film on the issue of torture in the Algerian war or to turn onto the poorest departments of France
the objective camera of Luis Buñuel. However, Mesnil stresses that the objectivity of the
cinematographic image does not allow even the most uncommitted among the young authors to
exclude themselves from their most immediate and limited surroundings. It is rather the opposite.
84 ―Are never engaged simply to paint French reality from an objective standpoint.‖
85 ―The proletarian and peasant face of France.‖
86 ―Are we so anesthetized by the popular press, the historical tirades of General de Gaulle, the
bomb of Reggane, the decadence of elementary education and a never-ending war, that we cannot secrete
a cinema that finally talks about us? […] Underdeveloped country, unrecognized, doesn‘t our sort deserve
ethnographic films that would inform us on the strange customs or the pitiful life conditions of our
compatriots? Which Jean Rouch will ever shoot ‗I a Breton‘?‖
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They relish their world and their age. ―Ils s‘y jettent, les acceptent, s‘y adaptent avec une
jouissance de jeunes chiots. L‘amour des voitures rapides, c‘est le symbole du temps présent;
tous les petits copains des Cahiers du Cinéma, nourris de films américains, le partagent‖ (p.
990).87 Beautiful girls of a type distinctly ―Nouvelle Vague‖ are a product of this civilization as
the same level as Cokes, and they are always presented surrounded with luxurious commodities.
―Dans le monde de Truffaut ou de Godard, il n‘y a pas de place pour la métaphysique‖ (p.
991).88
However, Mesnil suggests that this unconditional and superficial acceptance is perhaps
the necessary condition for the development of a future critique. ―Pour que demain nos petits
monstres critiquent leur époque, il faut peut-être que d‘abord ils l‘acceptent, ce qui ne veut pas
dire qu‘ils l‘entérinent. En attendant, ils se meuvent avec ce qu‘ils croient être du bonheur dans
un univers dont ils croient connaître la structure‖ (p. 991).89 Under the surface of uncritical
pleasure these film share the essential virtue of lucidity. ―Lucidité, fille d‘un rationalisme
sceptique, encore qu‘inconscient et qui, empruntant ses couleurs à l‘atmosphère même du temps,
se révèle en dernière analyse pessimiste‖ (p. 991).90 The ensuing attitude is ambiguous and often
perverse. ―On n‘aime pas seulement les belles filles, les ice-creams, les voitures et les snackbars, l‘aspect riant d‘un monde traversé d‘infra-rouge et de néon, mais aussi l‘angoisse qu‘il vous
procure‖ (p. 991).91
87 ―They throw themselves into them, they accept them, they adapt to them with an enjoyment of
little puppies. The love for the fast cars, it is the symbol of today; all the little friends of the Cahiers du
Cinéma, nourished with American films, share it.‖
88 ―In the world of Truffaut or Godard, there is no place for metaphysics.‖
89 ―In order for our little monsters to critique their age tomorrow, it is perhaps first necessary for
them to accept it, which does not mean to ratify it. Meanwhile, they move in what they believe is
happiness in a universe whose structure they believe they know.‖
90 ―Lucidity, daughter of a skeptical—even if unconscious—rationalism and that, borrowing its
colors from the very atmosphere of the times, appears as pessimism after all.‖
91 ―One does not only love the beautiful girls, the ice-creams, the cars and the snack-bars, the
smiling appearance of the world crossed by infrareds and neon, but also the anguish that it brings.‖
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In fact, the most advanced fringes of the young cinema like Hiroshima mon amour join
the descriptions of the Nouveau Roman in a certain exclusion of human beings who are no more
the center and the measure of things. The stability of the world crumbles with the ability to judge
reality. Elle in the cellar in Nevers is cut away from any social structure that could ease her
meaningless isolation. The lovers in Hiroshima spend the night walking and waiting, in an
almost abstract way. But this fear is different from the apocalyptic fears of the past that suffered
from scarcity in information. ―Au contraire, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Franju succombent
sous le poids d‘une information et d‘une connaissance si étendues que la notion même du réel s‘y
dissout‖ (p. 993).92 We can recall Rivette‘s statement in the roundtable on Hiroshima mon
amour that Resnais worked from abstractions and attempted to overcome them through other
abstractions until he could reconstruct from them a certain form of reality. ―La minutie
effrayante des longs travellings de Resnais à travers Nevers et Hiroshima, cette ample moisson
d‘images purement objectives qu‘il nous apporte, seuls le rythme et la construction interne du
film viendront les justifier. Il s‘agit d‘appréhender le tout, d‘essayer, par un embrassement
lucide, de restituer sur l‘écran la vérité cosmique‖ (p. 993).93
Mesnil cannot but come to the realization that Neo-Realism as the cinema of goodness
and hope is far from this young French cinema that brings ―une vérité sans l‘homme‖ (p. 993).94
Mesnil—in the first part of the article— was faithful to Bazin and to the Leftist heritage of
Personalism in asking for a cinema that could have also a direct social commitment. He even
linked it with the question of sociological inquiries that—we saw— had a politically charged
meaning at the turn of the Sixties. However, this main road of commitment was limited in French
92 ―On the contrary, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, [Georges] Franju succumb to the burden of
information and knowledge that are so widespread that very notion of the real dissolves into them.‖
93 ―The frightening care with details of Resnais‘ long tracking shots through Nevers and
Hiroshima, the ample harvest of purely objective images that it brings to us, only the rhythm and the
internal construction of the film will justify them. It is a question of grasping the whole, of attempting,
through a lucid embrace, to restitute on the screen the cosmic truth.‖
94 ―A truth without man.‖
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cinema. Mesnil searched for another—narrower—path and found it through technology itself. In
fact, the critic of Esprit thinks that hope can perhaps still be found if Bazinian objectivity can
articulate with the question of modern technological objects and overcome the growing
abstraction of the information on the world that they convey. ―Et pourtant, les problèmes que
pose au niveau le plus élevé une certaine démission sociale du cinéma français trouveraient peutêtre leur solution dans la découverte de l‘obsession croissante des objets au sein de l‘art
moderne. On ne raisonne plus, on montre, et de la connaissance globale des choses naît
l‘angoisse‖ (p. 993-994).95 The greatest part of French cinema succumbs to this challenge with
skepticism and exacerbated pessimism. Even love is reduced to its sensual aspect and cannot
solve the incommunicability of consciousness.
However, the passage through this anguish of modern technology is necessary in order to
transcend it. ―Un seul créateur dépasse ce monde, Alain Resnais, ce qui donne à Hiroshima la
valeur exemplaire d‘un triomphe remporté sur l‘angoisse, et explique l‘exaltation des premiers
spectateurs‖ (p. 994).96 His courage is the ability to contemplate despair and to overcome his
own self-centered isolation through communication. We can certainly see in this triumph over
the depersonalization of modern technology and its abstract communication of objective data the
―loving communication‖ in border situations that early Personalists adapted from Karl Jaspers‘
Existential philosophy. Hopeless lucidity turns into mystical joy that creates a new life. ―C‘est
par l‘approfondissement de cette désespérance même qu‘à travers une lucidité agnostique il
retrouve la joie déchirante, celle d‘un nom qui meurt au bord des lèvres, symbole d‘une victoire
95 ―Nevertheless, the problems that represent at the highest level a certain social resignation of
French cinema could perhaps find their solution in the discovery of the increasing obsession with objects
in modern art. One does no more reason, one shows, and the global knowledge of things generates
anguish.‖
96 ―Only a creator overcomes this world, Alain Resnais. This gives to Hiroshima the exemplary
value of a triumph won over anguish, and explains the exaltation of the first viewers.‖
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sur l‘oubli, et sur la solitude, qui va ouvrir la voie à une nouvelle vie: ‗Hiroshima, c‘est ton
nom…et toi, Nevers, en France‘‖ (p. 994).97
Mesnil‘s essay ends in a crescendo with these words. His rhetorical negotiation is
accomplished. Through these last words he has reunited with the thought of the founder of
Personalism—Emmanuel Mounier—and with his thought that human beings are not mere means,
but rather ends of technology. This thought had been the basis of the Personalists‘ commitment
in anti-nuclear and anti-colonial activism as well as in their efforts in popular education. Bazin‘s
conception of the objectivity of the cinematographic image had its roots in his life within this
cultural and spiritual environment. Mesnil criticized his heirs in the Cahiers for their superficial
and apparently uncomplicated relation with modern technology. However, he appears to agree
with Rivette that one of the strengths of Hiroshima mon amour is its ability to lucidly face the
increasing abstract characters of the information that modern technological objects convey in too
large quantities.
In Mesnil‘s reading of Hiroshima mon amour and the other best films of the French
young cinema, the question of modern technology and its abstraction came front stage and
increased the ambiguity that Bazin had put at the basis of his ontology of cinema. In this sense,
his reading is not very different in his premises from these of Rivette. However, Mesnil‘s
conclusion is completely in line with the mainstream of Personalist thought and successfully
solved the problematic antithesis between modernization and engagement from which he started.
In fact, the modernization of France at the turn of the Sixties radicalized one of the two sides of
Jaspers‘ ―loving communication,‖ i.e. the depersonalization brought by the objective
communication of modern technology that increased loneliness. According to the positive
resilience in Jaspers‘ otherwise pessimist thought, however, the palpable reality of this
97 ―It is by deepening this despair itself that—through an agnostic lucidity—he recovers this
tearing joy, that of a name that dies on the edge of the lips, symbol of a victory over forgetting, and over
solitude, which is opening the way for a new life: ‗Hiroshima, is your name…and you, Nevers, in
France.‖
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technological threat is only a greater incentive to find ways to initiate an authentic dialogue from
existence to existence. Mounier already knew it in 1947 that this ―loving communication‖ can
never be a constant domain of interpersonal exchange, but has to be courageously searched and
achieved every time. ―Pour la pensée de Jaspers, au point où elle se trouvait en 1939, il n‘y a pas
de royaume établi des existants, mais dans la nuit de la séparation un firmament discontinu de
visitations exaltantes, qui suffisent à nous laisser un goût substantiel de souvenir et d‘espérance
plus fort que l‘expérience massive de notre solitude‖ (Mounier 1962, p. 141).98
Mesnil‘s reading of Hiroshima mon amour rhetorically is similar to that of Sadoul, as it
attempts to find ways of translating forms of commitment that had been elaborated in another
scenario into an environment that is profoundly changed by the influence of modernization.
Mesnil, Sadoul, and the Situationists oppose to the auteur and the cinephilia of the Cahiers the
need for a direct social and political commitment. In different ways, they all attempt to trace
what these forms could be. There is no doubt, however, that the reading of the Cahiers was the
most important and the most influential in terms of the further history of the criticism of
Hiroshima mon amour. I positioned it at the beginning of this chapter in order to show that the
question of the language of modern technology was extremely complex at the time and it
articulated with the objectivity of the cinematographic image in a way that was not conducive to
de-contextualization.
This linguistic thrust will continue in the next chapter, where it is redefined through the
paradigm shift of semiology. The raise of a narrative form of semiology that was not attentive to
cultural connotations and the academization of film studies joined in creating a de-contextualized
trend in the later interpretation of Hiroshima mon amour. Questions such as decolonization and
98 ―According to the thought of Jaspers, to the point in which it found itself in 1939, there is not
established domain of the existents, but rather in the night of separation a discontinuous firmament of
exalting visitations, which suffice to leave us a substantial taste of memory and hope stronger than the
massive experience of our loneliness.‖
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antinuclear activism that Mesnil still strived so hard to translate into the language of
modernization disappeared from sight during almost two decades. The terministic screens of
auteur and cinéphilie that the Cahiers had launched with a controversial maneuver against
filmology, ideological criticism, and the old school of French cinema had triumphed. But they
were also emptied of their radical edge by the Mid-Sixties. It is this rather fossilized tradition
that film studies inherited, blinding itself to the unsettling trends that had attempted to cross the
line between the films and their social and political context.
The Cahiers‘ roundtable on Hiroshima mon amour in 1959, in fact, clearly shows that
some of the most vocal of the Young Turks had started to feel the need for a radical revision that
took into account the complicated role of modern technology. Their reinterpretation of Bazin
prepared the way for the more committed Cahiers of the late Sixties and Seventies. Only a
rhetorical reading attentive to the context could react against the formalistic reading of
Hiroshima mon amour and show us that the theory of the cinematic language was under strain
and revision. Some of these germs will resurface in the Eighties, when the question of modern
technology becomes one of the doorways through which commitment could return to film
criticism and to cinematic theory. This time, however, it had to open it way with a machete
through the abstract jungle of semiology and struggle with decades of forgetting. My next and
last chapter will tell this story.
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CHAPTER FIVE
STRUCTURES OF FORGETTING
“Commitment” vs. “Abstraction”
In the last chapter, I showed that the language of the modern world put the critics of the
French Left before an antinomy that could be summarized as “commitment” vs. “increasing
abstraction.” The interest of Hiroshima mon amour as a film was its position at the center of
different combinations of these two terms. “Commitment” required finding ways to use cinema
to change the conditions of society and entailed searching for reformulations of the political that
could still indicate a major direction of intervention, despite the failure of Stalinism.
“Abstraction” was not only a negative isolation from the world. It also accounted for the
exponential growth of information in a world of cybernetics and computing. It captured a new
reality at the second degree that semiotics would study from the mid-Sixties. However, it also
posed the problem of excessive dispersion. This world of fragments with no head and tail could
made commitment impossible or at least more difficult. The authors that I discussed in the last
chapter brought different solutions to this question through their interpretations of Hiroshima
mon amour.
The solution of the Cahiers du cinema was the most influential in the development of
film studies as a discipline. On the surface, it was also the version in which “commitment” was
reduced to the minimum and “abstraction” prevailed. However, Rivette‟s clear formulation of a
discourse of technology in his criticism of Hiroshima mon amour still connected “abstraction”
with the changing conditions of the world. Its criticism of Rohmer‟s classicism prepared a fertile
terrain for the Cahiers‟ later adoption of a semiological approach that could deal with the
excessive and fragmentary information of modern technology. The development of this line of
thought enabled the yellow journal to continue to be at the avant-garde of the theorization on
cinema in France. The new critics of the Cahiers embraced the issue of the Third-World and
linked the study of cinema to a broader questioning of the mass media. Rivette‟s reformulation of
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Bazinian thought in his reading of Hiroshima mon amour started a broader movement that
eventually led to temporary alliances between the Cahiers and intellectuals interested in the
reframing of Marxism in the late Sixties and Seventies. Kristeva‟s Tel Quel and Gilles Deleuze
were among the partners who collaborated with the Cahiers on this path. Despite their
divergences, in fact, they agreed in considering cinema a productive ground in which to work
through semiology to the recuperation of “commitment.” Accordingly, also the question of
politics and of technology returned to the front.
Unfortunately, the film studies approach that developed in America from the Cahiers for
a long time has not been interested in the questions of “commitment” and technology. Dudley
Andrew published his book on Bazin in the late Seventies. But he did not account for the
reformulations of the critic‟s thought in relation to modern technology that Rivette and Godard
sketched in their readings of Hiroshima mon amour. His focus on the “age of purity” of French
criticism proposed a conservative image of the Cahiers to the American film scholars. Andrew
himself balanced this gap through his sympathetic understanding of Personalist commitment in
popular education as an Irish Catholic who had come to love cinema through cine-clubs.
However, the young film scholars that he helped to form did not have this richer
background on which to rely and were subjected to twin distortions of academia. First, they
concentrated only on films rather than context. In this trend, they followed a limited view of
auteur and cinephilia that were reduced to mere terministic screens on which to build the
discipline of Film Studies in opposition to neighboring fields like communication studies.
Secondly, they imported more recent “French theory” in order to justify their elitist status as a
new discipline. However, the lack of contextual knowledge affected also the understanding of
this theory that was often rather shallow and bent to the needs of the American academia in the
Cold War. A great part of it was lost in translation, particularly when it entailed thinking of the
interrelations among politics, technology, and the role of women from a neo-Marxist perspective.
In the previous chapters, I have examined the rhetorical situation of the first critical
reception of Hiroshima mon amour. I have shown how the controversy on “mad love” had
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opened the way to a questioning of the traditional conceptions of the political through Firk‟s
aimance and Resnais‟ peut-être. In both cases, the role of modern technology in the colonization
of daily life and in the changing meaning of the binaries war/peace was crucial. I have stressed
how Resnais‟ “distancing” reframed Bazin‟s conception of “ambiguity,” asking the audience to
judge situations that question the traditional understanding of the political. In this way, he also
overcame the binary opposition between the private and the public sphere that seemed still to
orient Edgar Morin‟s sociology of private life. Finally, the focus on “technological objects” and
“abstraction” in critical texts that discussed the possibility of a cinematographic language of
modernity showed how the questions of modernization and cybernetics influenced the reading of
Hiroshima mon amour in technocratic France at the turn of the Sixties.
In this final chapter, however, I examine some moments in the later reception of
Hiroshima mon amour. This literature review continues and increases the trend of the first
chapters in not aiming at exhaustiveness. Rather, I select only the moments in which the
underlying tensions are most visible and most interesting. In the first part of the chapter, I discuss
four critical readings that are connected with different moments in the establishing of film
studies as an academic discipline in France and in America. I argue that through them it is
possible to trace a gradual forgetting of the question of technology and of an understanding of
politics that was contextually based and empowering for women. I am particularly interested in
the way in which a politics of aimance able to draw powerful political articulations from an
understanding of the oppressions of the private became increasingly impossible. In the second
part of the chapter, I argue that the questions of technology and commitment come back front
stage from the Eighties in some important French readings that had also an important reception
in academia in France and abroad. However, the four readings that I discuss in this second part
are not simply the proof of a successful dialectical synthesis. In a Benjaminian way, they tell also
the story of a forgetting that is not completely overcome and that requires further scrutiny.
The path that I follow begins again with the Brussels seminar. In my discussion of
Resnais‟ interview I focused mostly on how politics entered the well guarded walls of
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filmological neutrality. Here, instead, I focus on its academic strategies of containment of
disturbing political issues. In particular, the proceedings of the seminar significantly reduced the
anti-colonial thrust that Firk and Benayoun had read in Hiroshima mon amour and in Resnais‟
other works. In fact, the seminar took place at a time of grave unrest in Belgian Congo. A civil
war fomented by foreign interests was ravaging the former colony when Ravar published the
collection. I also discuss the deep contradiction that troubles the consideration of women in the
Brussels seminar. Morin‟s sociology of private life found the deepest meaning of the film in the
representation of Elle as a sexually liberated woman. However, another contributor modified the
biographic data of Duras‟ married life according to standards of academic decency. This
containment of private life signals a standstill in the possibility of a politics of aimance.
I then address Christian Metz‟s semiological discussion of the narrative structure of
Hiroshima mon amour in an essay that he first published in the Cahiers in the mid-Sixties and
republished in 1968 in the collection that became the most important tool in his academic
teaching of film. This essay is extremely important from a rhetorical point of view, because it
ends with a debate with Pier Paolo Pasolini‟s semiology of cinema as the “unwritten language of
reality.” Metz‟s stress on “denotation” was more conducive to the close study of the complex
mechanisms of filmic narration. But it also tended to cut the relations with an ambiguous and
dramatically changing reality that Pasolini‟s focus on “connotation” aimed to maintain. In
contrast with Pasolini‟s vibrant interest in Third-World issues, Metz‟s semiology constituted
another step toward the forgetting of the political question in the reading of Hiroshima mon
amour. The density of Metz‟s work, however, stems from its conscious effort to focus on the
syntagmatic structures of cinematic intellection from his awareness of the linguistic issues that
cybernetics had made unavoidable. The forgetting of the discourse of technology in him is not
the starting point, but rather the point of arrival. It will not be the same for some of the epigones.
The American student of philosophy Janice Etzkowitz traveled to Belgium in the MidSeventies to study the Brussels seminar‟s découpage of Hiroshima mon amour. Her reading is at
the confluence between the interdisciplinary approach of academic filmology and Christian
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Metz‟s narrative semiology. Memory becomes the organizing structural principle of Hiroshima
mon amour as an example of cinematic literature. The geographical displacement did not prevent
Etzkowitz from following the French aesthetic and semiological discussions on cinema.
However, her cosmopolitan approach was not enough to allow her to track the political and
technological debates in France at the turn of the Sixties. The most important character of
Etzkowitz‟s contribution is perhaps her personal motivation in pursuing this study to find a way
that could have freed her mother and other victims from the memory of concentration camps.
This stance draws a powerful (if possibly unaware) link with Rivette‟s discussion of Resnais‟
cinephilia as “terrible tenderness” in the roundtable of the Cahiers and can be read in terms of a
politics of aimance. The publication of Etzkowitz‟s study in the Eighties made the shot by shot
transcription of Hiroshima mon amour available also to Film Studies scholars in American
universities. I examine only one example of these readings. Debbie Glassman clearly considered
the establishing of disciplinary boundaries much more important than a reconstruction of the
context of Hiroshima mon amour. Moreover, her elitist attempt to introduce a Lacanian approach
reduced it to a mere claim against the victimization of women in a patriarchal society. In this
way, it diminished the chances for a politics of aimance that unites to the understanding of
particular oppressions a greater sense of empowerment in addressing the political from the
concerns of the private.
In the second part of this chapter, I examine the return of the question of politics and
technology in some of the French main readings of Hiroshima mon amour from the Eighties.
This dialectical development overcomes the too close focus on récit in Metz‟s narrative
semiology. Accordingly, the interest in “abstraction” becomes the source for a renewed
conception of “commitment” that takes into account the complexity of the world of modern
technology. However, the mark of the terministic screens of semiology can still be felt in their
lack of interest in specific instances of activism such as the protest against the French nuclear
tests. The territory of cinema includes now the non-representable that complicates given
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conceptions of politics. But the step from Hiroshima mon amour to the concrete political
instances that it might have addressed has become more difficult.
The case of Robert Benayoun illuminates this paradoxical transition. His first writing for
the anti-Gaullist journal Le 14 juillet considered Hiroshima mon amour a film of protest against
the French nuclear tests that also raised the colonial question. However, Benayoun‟s book on
Resnais in the Eighties presents a distinct shift in stress. It focuses on the personal links of the
director with personalities in the Surrealist movement and with popularized Surrealist themes.
The “communal unconscious” appears now as a resource that enables him to take into account
the myths of the atomic era. The mark of semiology is evident in this stress on cultural data and
information. However, Benayoun now tends to underplay the commitment that he shared with
Resnais and Duras in the paradoxical communities at the turn of the Sixties and he does not
mention the nuclear tests in the Algerian Sahara that were so important for him in 1958.
Julia Kristeva and Gilles Deleuze are the two authors who most thoroughly developed the
theorization of Rivette for Les Cahiers du cinema. In the Eighties, they were both internationally
known academics. But their activity covered a much broader range and exceeded university
responsibilities. It ventured into the revolution of psychology, the reformulation of Marxism, and
the support for avant-garde literature. This rich combination of academic and extra-academic
cultural capital made their contributions crucial in terms of a renovation of Film Studies. Deleuze
wrote the two books that are still the most solid foundation to the current theorization of cinema.
Resnais has a special place in his system as one of the directors of the “time-image” that
revolutionized the coherent narrative structure of classical cinema. Duras‟ écriture in Hiroshima
mon amour is featured prominently in Kristeva‟s feminist book on melancholia.
Deleuze embraces the concept of auteur, but he also moves away from Rohmer‟s
classicism and elaborates on Rivette‟s discourse of technology. Kristeva develops the link
between cinéphilie and the non-representable of historical horror. But she reverses its focus from
the visuals to how Duras‟s écriture taps into areas of pain that can never be fully expressed. Her
“blank rhetoric” of suffering undermines the false satisfaction of our well-adjusted social life and
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shows the open wounds of WWII and of a world in which the political has become mad and
unreal. Kristeva‟s psychoanalytic reading of Hiroshima mon amour recuperates and pushes to
extreme consequences the actual madness of “mad love” in Breton‟s Nadja, which closed with
an indictment of asylums as institutions. Kristeva aims to develop a politics of aimance that sees
the mad pain of a woman occupy and be mercilessly faithful to the whole space of the political.
Deleuze, instead, shows the clashing reality of the ghosts of a past that is all the more
ambiguous, fragmentary, and spectrally present in the world of information technology. His idea
of the undecidable develops Nietzschean concerns that are similar to those that brought Derrida
to formulate his politics of the peut-être.
Scholars in Film Studies have eagerly embraced authors such as Kristeva and Deleuze for
their theoretical complexity. However, they have not always developed their political aspect.
Sarah Leperchey (2000), for example, well illustrates Deleuze‟s undecidable with good examples
in relation to Hiroshima mon amour. But her work does not address its political edge nor discuss
the question of technology. It also does not think about the possibility of a politics of aimance.
Overall, it simply remains a formal study on more complex narrative patterns. Moreover, even if
a study were able to fully understand what Kristeva and Deleuze attempt to do on the political
level, another reflection is necessary. In fact, their theorizations spring from the influence of
semiology and are more geared toward linguistic nets rather than able to grasp the uniqueness of
political events.
Accordingly, Deleuze overvalues “thinking” at the expenses of “judgment,” which is a
faculty more versed in political issues that ask for a distanced, but attentive, audience endowed
with common sense. Kristeva attempted to correct this tendency in her own thought through a
return to Hannah Arendt and an effort to gear the Arendtian thought on judgment toward a
concern for a politics of narration. However, Kristeva‟s reading of Arendt‟s “reification” has its
foundation in psychoanalysis and in avant-garde literature. It tends to stress the depth of the
semiological undermining of fixed ideologies that “reify” the world and the individuals. In this
sense, it is far from the ontological thrust of the Arendtian effort to preserve a world of stable
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objects in which politics can be born and remembered. The preservation of this world, in fact, is
necessary for the creation of an enlarged common sense and judgment. The atomic age makes
politics even more necessary because this world is most eroded in its foundations by modern
technology and consumerism. I suggest that this undervaluation of judgment and “reification” in
the theorizations of Deleuze and Kristeva are the symptoms of the distance from concrete
political circumstances that Film Studies has not yet completely overcome, because it entails a
reflexive thought on the linguistic premises of semiology and poststructuralism. They are also
the ideal site of intervention for rhetoric as the discipline that bridges between the linguistic
focus of semiology and the situated singularity of political events.
I close this brief review with two short essays by Kristeva‟s friend Philippe Forest that
illuminate the shortcomings of a method that forgets the rhetorical situation. In 1995, the
academic and historian of Tel Quel sided with the Japanese novelist Ōe Kenzaburō in his protest
against the French resumption of nuclear tests in the Pacific. Forest‟s references to Hiroshima
mon amour as a mere “romantic idyll” in his argument proved that he had forgotten that
Resnais‟ film was also a protest against the Gaullist inception of the French atomic tests and their
colonial implications. Forest‟s highly commendable stance in favor of Ōe could have been more
convincing if it was based on a deeper knowledge of French history and if had been able to
muster the rhetorical legacy of Hiroshima mon amour in relation to the paradoxical communities
of the peut-être at the turn of the Sixties. Forest‟s position is only the logical consequence of the
history of the criticism of Hiroshima mon amour. The increasing development of a semiological
grasping of abstraction entailed the gradual forgetting of concrete commitment. It also increased
the difficulty in rethinking the relation between these two antinomies without crashing the
second under the weight of the first. In the next section, I symbolically trace the first step in this
forgetting of commitment in the academization of Film Studies that started with the Brussels
seminar.
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Chaste Wives and Colonial Ghosts in the Brussels Seminar
In Chapter Three, I have argued that the Brussels seminar was a highly paradoxical
venture. It attempted to launch Film Studies as an independent discipline in the Department of
Sociology at the University of Brussels according to the model of the Institute of Filmology at
the Sorbonne. But the interdisciplinary filmological model was designed only for general
theoretical discussions on “filmic facts” and “cinematic facts” without reference to specific
films. Its unprecedented application to the thorough analysis of every aspect of a Hiroshima mon
amour generated some upsetting consequences in the filmological strategy of interdisciplinary
alliances. A famous Belgian philosopher like Léopold Flam, for example, could easily discuss
aesthetics in international conferences with his French colleagues like the filmologists and
Sorbonne professor Etienne Soriau. However, Flam—a Jew and a concentration camp
survivor— clearly resented the sexual freedom that made Elle act “comme une putain” with
foreigners in Hiroshima mon amour (Ravar 1962, p. 234).1 The philosopher considered that the
film did not have any meaning apart from representing the meaninglessness of modern life, to the
great embarrassment of the organizer Raymond Ravar that justified his contribution
sociologically as the typical reading of an older man.
Filmology strove toward an ideal of scientific neutrality. But the participation of Duras‟
friends and the prominent role of Morin‟s sociology of private life steered the Brussels seminar
toward a more politically challenging arena. At the turn of the Sixties, in fact, the empiric
understanding of the deep transformations of modernization could contest the Stalinist myth of
an unchanging working class. In this sense, sociological inquiries could open the way to different
conceptions of the Left, as I showed in Chapter Three. Now, however, I discuss how the
academic outlook of filmology constructed antidotes to these undeniable political germs. Two
areas stand out in particular. The first is the modification of the biographical data of Duras‟
married life in order to fit the representation of a “chaste wife” that academic standards of
1 “Like a whore.”
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decency required. The containment of Duras‟ personal choices and the forgetting of her political
commitment undermined the articulation of a politics of aimance. The second area concerns the
systematic underplaying of the anti-colonial theme in the discussion of Hiroshima mon amour
and of the other works by Duras and Resnais. This omission is particularly important because it
intersects with contextual issues that only increased in importance during the lapse of time
between the seminar in 1960 and the publication of its proceedings in 1962. This interval saw the
escalation of the Algerian War in France and of the neo-colonial civil war in the former Belgian
Congo.
The Belgian scholar René Micha took to himself the task to introduce the life and the
works of Marguerite Duras to the audience of the Brussels seminar. Micha aimed to inscribe
Duras‟ work into the ranks of the Nouveau Roman, which was still a contested attribution at the
time. But he also offered a short biography of the novelist. He told how Duras went from South
Vietnam to Paris where she studied law, mathematics, and political sciences. “Plus tard, elle se
marie. Elle épouse un homme remarquable, Dionys Mascolo (qui a longtemps appartenu au parti
communiste, qui a écrit l‟un des meilleurs livres qu‟on ait faits sur le communisme). Elle a un
enfant de lui. Elle le quittera un jour, mais sans que cesse leur amitié, leur estime réciproque”
(Ravar 1962, p. 225).2
This statement contains one factual mistake and several omissions. Duras‟ close friends
that participated in the seminar like Edgar Morin and Clara Malraux could have easily rectified
the imprecision. However, evidently the desire to maintain a façade of “decency” prevailed over
accuracy. In fact, Duras was never married to Dionys Mascolo. In Mascolo‟s words, “Nous
n‟avons jamais été mariés. Nous étions contre ces cérémonies” (Adler 1998, p. 244).3 Instead,
2 “Later, she gets married. She marries a remarkable man, Dionys Mascolo (who has belonged
for a long time to the -Communist Party, who has written one of the best books that one has ever written
on Communism). She has a child from him. She will leave him one day, but without an end to their
friendship, to their reciprocal esteem.”
3 “We have never been married. We were against these ceremonies.”
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Duras had been married to Robert Antelme before knowing Mascolo. Her relationship with
Mascolo began during the war after Antelme had been deported for their communal activities in
the underground. Mascolo went to Dachau to bring an almost dying Antelme back when he heard
that he had been seen there alive. The three were extremely close after the war. Duras divorced
Antelme only when she was pregnant with Mascolo‟s child. Micha writes of the friendly
separation between Duras and Mascolo. But he omits to say that Gérard Jarlot who appears as
“literary advisor” in the credits of Hiroshima mon amour was having an affair with Duras at the
time.
Were these omissions an attempt to guard the legitimate privacy of Duras? Perhaps they
were. However, significantly they combine with an underestimation of Duras‟ political
commitment. Micha rightly stresses that Dionys Mascolo was the author of the 1953‟s book Le
Communisme. We saw that Breton praised this book for contesting the strictness of Stalinist
bureaucracy through the importance of the imaginary and of communication as original human
needs. However, it is significant that Micha does not say also that Duras had been a member of
the Communist Party and that she was one of the few women politically active in the intellectual
Left. In fact, she had joined the Stalinists during the war for their activities in the internal
Resistance. Mascolo and Antelme followed her example and entered the Party after the war. She
had some administrative functions for a brief period and sold the Communist newspaper
L’Humanité in the streets every Sunday morning. In this sense, she was more committed in
everyday militant chores than her former husband and partner. The Party expelled Duras with
Mascolo and Antelme in 1950. However, her treatment was particularly harsh due to her gender.
Her former comrades accused her also for being a divorced woman who lived with a man
without being married, even if it was a communal arrangement in the intellectual environment of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés (Adler 1998, p. 275).
Edgar Morin argued that the most important contribution of Hiroshima mon amour was
to illuminate the obscure areas of transformations in the modern conducts and conceptions of
love. The new active role of women was the most crucial factor in this sociological earthquake.
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Morin‟s sociology of private life empowered women to talk about Elle in Hiroshima mon amour
as a character with whom they could identify or whom they were not ready to accept in toto.
However, this empowerment of women‟s voices in the Brussels‟ seminar contrasts with the
rewriting of Duras‟ private and political life. In Chapter Three, I have shown that Morin‟s
sociology of private life still maintained an impermeable boundary between the innovations of
the private and the public that remained the sole site of the political. In this sense, his sociology
was not completely conducive to the development of a politics of aimance. Micha follows a
similar compartmentalized thinking and carries it to the extreme consequences when he does not
stress that Duras had been active politically in the paradoxical communities of the peut-être that
attempted to create a non-Stalinist Left at the turn of the Sixties.
Micha also follows a highly selective procedure in his description of Duras‟ works. The
scholar states his intention to focus on the parts of Duras‟ novels that best illuminated her
contribution to Hiroshima mon amour. In fact, his aim is to stress her belonging to the
fashionable movement of the Nouveau Roman. However, he completely overlooks the topic of
colonization that figures prominently in some of her novels. For example, Micha writes that the
brother is the most important character in Un Barrage contre le Pacifique (1950) and that he is
substituted by another man who recalls him in part (Ravar 1962, p. 226). This similarity
prefigures Lui as a sort of “double” of the German soldier in Hiroshima mon amour. Micha does
not write, however, that this novel was inspired by Duras‟ childhood in colonial Vietnam. Laura
Adler (1998, p. 63) describes it as “le roman de la mère.” 4 In fact, it presented the figure of the
mother as a Greek tragic figure crashed by the empty promises and the corrupted practices of the
colonial administration.
Micha sees the theme of the “double” also in the novel Le Marin de Gibraltar (1952),
where the protagonist assumes the character of the lost lover of the heroine. Also in this case,
however, Micha focuses on themes such as the abundant drinking that pulses through the novel,
4 “The novel of the mother.”
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but ignores the critical view of colonialism that it depicts. In fact, the hero is a former employee
of the Ministry of Colonies, disgusted with his job, who helps a rich American woman to look
for a lost lover across Africa. In the background, the physical and moral degradation of the
colonial system unravels itself. Duras herself had held a post in the Ministry of Colonies and she
was highly familiar with the geography of raw materials. In fact, she had set in a bar of
Léopoldville in the Belgian Congo a discussion that mixed crocodiles, reaction jets, and the ice
age with the atomic bomb and nuclear energy. “Comme si, continua Henri, il y avait pas assez de
catastrophes naturelles sans aller chercher les bombes atomiques. […] C‟est atomique, les
crocodiles maintenant?” (Duras 1952, p. 269).5 This reference was a reminder that the Katanga
mines had provided the uranium for the bombing of Hiroshima and they still were the main
furnisher of the rare U235 for the American nuclear program.
Micha, however, ignored the traces of an indictment of colonialism in Duras‟ novels and
did not cast Hiroshima mon amour in the anti-colonial terms of Positif. In fact, the situation of
the Belgian Congo did not allow addressing the colonial question in the detached and neutral
terms that befitted an academic enterprise. In the words of a scholar of the Free University of
Brussels, “en 1959, le Congo en était arrivé à cette étape classique de la situation coloniale au
cours de laquelle on assiste à l‟émergence de rapports violemment antagonistes entre le
colonisateur et le colonisé” (Bouvier 1965, p. 63).6 In January 1959 there had been the first
violent riots in Léopoldville against the colonial system. The rebellion and the strikes had
extended to the whole country during the first months of 1960, while the seminar on Hiroshima
mon amour was quietly going on in Brussels. The violence increased during the two years that
Raymond Ravar needed to publish the proceedings of the seminar. The unrest that followed the
independence of Congo in June 1960 led to Belgian military intervention. The secession of the
5 “As if—continued Henri—there were not enough natural catastrophes without looking for the
atomic bombs. […] Are they atomic now, the crocodiles?”
6 “In 1959, the Congo had reached that classical stage in the colonial situation during which one
sees the emergence of violently antagonistic relations between the colonizer and the colonized.”
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mining province of Katanga that employed mercenaries to protect foreign interests laid the bases
for neo-colonialism. In January 1961—after Mobuto‟s coup d‟état— Belgians in the presence of
Swedish soldiers of the UN killed the non-aligned Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. The United
Nations had lost all their prestige in the eyes of Third World nations. Only in 1963 did the UN
succeed in reuniting the country. Moreover, also the leadership of the Algerian F.L.N. had
moved to Belgium in 1960 after an increase of the repression in France.
Brussels was, therefore, a neuralgic place in which decolonization struggles could hardly
have been ignored. This systematic erasing of the colonial question from Duras‟ works was a
reaction to an extremely tense rhetorical situation. In fact, the historian of cinema Paul Davay
also acts in a similar way in relation to Resnais‟ earlier productions. Davay duly cites Les Statues
meurent aussi that Resnais co-directed with Chris Marker in 1953. He recalls that this work had
received the Prix Jean Vigo in 1954 and that the French government has forbidden its public
screening (Ravar 1962, p. 221). But he does not say anything of its content, while he devotes
some lines even to a relatively less successful documentary like Gaughin (1949). Davay does not
mention that Les Statues meurent aussi was an anti-colonial documentary that had been filmed in
part in the Museum of the Belgian Congo in Brussels. Similarly, the historian does not stress that
Night and Fog evoked also the oppressive measures that the French were using in their
repression of the Algerian Resistance. Davay‟s image of Resnais‟ works is at the antipodes of the
anti-colonial thrust that characterized them, according to Michèle Firk and Robert Benayoun. By
contrast, the historian is very attentive to the formal characters and to the stylistic evolution of
the films. He is particularly careful to point out the traces of the themes of memory and
forgetting that Hiroshima mon amour developed and that Bernard Pingaud linked to the complex
temporal constructions of the Nouveau Roman. Paradoxically, however, this focus on “memory”
was predicated on a “forgetting” of the context that later research would increase.
The “forgetting” of colonialism condemned the seminar as outdated and limited its
influence in film criticism, despite the immense feat of the shot by shot analysis of Hiroshima
mon amour. Such experiences were so rare and time-consuming that this study could have been
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much more important. However, in the two years that had elapsed between the end of the
seminar and its publication, a paradigm shift had started to happen in cinema criticism. The era
of filmology was now bathed in a nostalgic twilight. Rohmer‟s classicism was under attack. The
new era of semiology was ready to start. On its wings, the question of the Third World would
soon start to penetrate even the formerly closed gates of the Cahiers through the new European
cinema and the instances of the “Tiers cinéma.” The academic requirements of neutrality of the
Brussels seminar ended up stripping Resnais‟ film of its most vital elements. The politics of
aimance and the critique of colonialism that had characterized the most combative readings in
the early cinema journals could have been more attractive to the committed intellectuals of the
late Sixties.
In the next section, I read how Christian Metz interpreted Hiroshima mon amour in the
mid-Sixties. The cinema scholar revitalized Film Studies in France, after the fading of the early
enthusiasms for post-war filmology. He translated the findings of this older discipline into the
new language of semiology. For example, he read Morin‟s “participation” in terms of Roland
Barthes‟ semiological reading of Aristotelian verisimilitude. Metz also developed a close
collaboration with the Cahiers from the mid-Sixties. He influenced their transition toward a
semiological reading of cinema that criticized the auteur and centered on the text. Other scholars
provided more extended readings of Resnais‟ films in the same years. However, Metz‟s
contribution was the most influential in the development of an academic reading of Hiroshima
mon amour that was directly linked to a new theorization on cinema. He framed his criticism in
terms of a semiological discourse that focused on récit (narration). However, Metz‟s attempt to
prove that the syntagmatic structures of semiology could account for the subtler narration of
modern cinema entailed an undervaluation of contextual aspects that the narrative level
presupposes, but does not completely contain. In fact, they overtly or inadvertently open the
filmic structure to broader resonances. The cultural connotations of love and of the discourse of
technology in Hiroshima mon amour are among them.
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Metz‟s Narration vs. Pasolini‟s Connotation
Metz first published the essay “Le cinema moderne et la narrativité” in a special issue on
cinematic and literary narration of the Cahiers du Cinéma in December 1966. He also included
this study in the collection Essais sur la signification au cinema in 1968. Metz aimed to contest
the opinion that the originality of modern cinema resided in its destruction of narration. He
needed to negate the myth that its most innovative feature was its absolute freedom from
syntagmatic constraints. However, he also wanted to align his semiology with the most vital
tendencies in modern cinema. In fact, nobody could reject Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais in
1966 without putting oneself outside of cinema (Metz 1968, p. 186-187). Therefore, Metz‟s task
was to make semiology into a subtler tool that allowed grasping the specificity of the Nouvelle
Vague. This discipline was scientific enough to be taught in academia, but flexible enough for
the Cahiers to adopt it in their study of the new tendencies of European and Asian cinema.
Metz‟s essay is structured as a sequence of objections against the various forms of the
anti-narrative myth. They cover most of the critical stances that we have encountered in relation
to Hiroshima mon amour. First, he contests the death of “spectacle,” arguing that it is not clear
what “spectacle” means and that images have not lost their importance. He then argues that the
new cinema still owes much to theater, recalling Resnais‟ debt to Brechtian “distancing” (p.
189). Georges Sadoul and Marie-Claire Wuilleumier had argued that Hiroshima mon amour was
a film of dédramatisation (de-dramatization) that gave a new importance to the time that passes
by. However, according to Metz, this lack of action did not mean lack of narration. “Sans
„drame,‟ plus de fiction, plus de diégèse, donc plus de film” (p. 193).7 Antonioni and Resnais
had simply been able to promote the lack of action to a narrative status.
Resnais and Godard represented, in Metz‟s words, “les deux grands pôles de la modernité
filmique: réalisme méticuleusement indirect contre réalisme généreusement désordonné” (p.
7 “Without „drama,‟ no more fiction, no more narration, therefore no more film.”
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198).8 Older and heavier forms of plot were not able to capture the sudden precision of an
attitude or the inflection of a voice in Godard‟s subtler realism. By contrast, Resnais was the
most important representative of a highly regulated cinema, based on premeditation and
indirection. It disposed with a meticulous patience a series of insistent and concerted signs that
solicited a problematic and ambiguous deciphering through their studied character, “un cinéma
qui hésite entre l‟ambigüité et la devinette” (p. 198).9 Both authors, moreover, were the
protagonists of the “grande renaissance du montage” (p. 200).10 This return of montage that
countered Bazin‟s theorizations of the plan-séquence (long take) was particularly evident in the
counterpoint Hiroshima/Nevers in Hiroshima mon amour and stressed the importance of
syntagmatic structures.
Metz argued that the most advanced authors of the Nouvelle Vague had undermined the
rules of a normative aesthetics of cinema. However, they had not negated “syntax.” They had
only enlarged the meaning of “narration.” A semiological approach was not a normative
grammar and conceived these rules in constant evolution in their details. Therefore, it could
better account for the transformations of the new cinema than the supporters of an obsolete
aesthetics who wanted to limit “narration” to its commercial or ideological character (p. 207).
The syntagmatic thrust of semiology shifted the attention toward the large figures of cinematic
intelligibility that these authors still respected in their minds. Like an innovative literary author,
in fact, their originality did not entail inventing a completely new language.
Metz touches the question of Pier Paolo Pasolini‟s “im-segni” (image-signs) in the last
part of this essay. In fact, a semiological debate opposed the French theoretician to the Italian
director. It did not directly concern Hiroshima mon amour, which Pasolini probably never saw.
8 “The two great poles of filmic modernity: meticulously indirect realism against generously
disorderly realism.”
9 “A cinema that hesitates between ambiguity and riddle.”
10 “Grand renaissance of montage.”
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At the turn of the Sixties, in fact, the director was not particularly interested in the new French
cinema (Pasolini 1996, p. 23).11 In 1962—by mere hearsay—he considered Mariebad an
epigonic imitation of Proust‟s Madeleine (Pasolini 2001, p. 2817). However, from the theoretical
point of view, the debate with Pasolini illuminates what is missing in Metz‟s semiological focus
on narration in relation to Hiroshima mon amour. The difference between the two theories can be
summarized as a stress on “denotation” versus a focus on “connotation.” Metz privileged the
simple concatenation of the story at the level of the cinematic language (langage). By contrast,
Pasolini thought that considering cinematic language merely as langage tended to limit its
impact to the realm of art. According to the Italian director, the language (langue) of cinema has
as its most elementary elements the objects of reality and the connotations that they bring to
cinema from their social and cultural meanings.
In fact, Metz considered that the “denotative” meaning of the simplest image of a car
sufficed to understand what was going on in the narration of a film. By contrast, Pasolini‟s
conception of cinema as the “unwritten language of reality” asked to consider the cultural and
historical connotations that were at play in our deciphering of objects and people both in reality
and in films. Pasolini translated into semiology Morin‟s idea that films help us to understand the
social transformations of reality. Metz is far from negating the value of Pasolini‟s theorization,
but he stresses that these connotations are extra-filmic and do not illuminate the larger
syntagmatic structures through which films work. “Ces „im-segni,‟ que Pasolini analyse
d‟ailleurs fort bien, nous sommes persuadés qu‟ils existent, et qu‟ils jouent le plus grand rôle
dans la compréhension des images particulières des films particuliers—, mais non point dans le
mécanisme le plus fondamental de l‟intellection filmique” (Metz 1968, p. 209).12
11 “Tacerò sulla “nouvelle vague” perché tutti ne hanno piene le tasche, e soprattutto perché sono
poco documentato. A stento ho sopportato I quattrocento colpi” [I will be silent about the “nouvelle
vague” because everybody is sick and tired about it, and especially because I am not well-informed. I
barely tolerated Les 400 coups.]
12 “These „image-signs,‟ which Pasolini analyzes certainly very well, we are persuaded that they
exist, and that they play the greatest role in the comprehension of particular images of particular films--,
but not in the most fundamental mechanism of filmic intellection.”
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Similarly, Metz was careful to separate between the syntagmatic relations of semiology
from the metonymic relations of rhetoric, which Pasolini considered synonyms following Roman
Jakobson‟s view of cinema. Also in this case, Metz aimed to limit the discussion to the level of
narration, without entering into the ambiguous meanders of a changing reality that Pasolini‟s
metonymy captured. Metonymy, in fact, was for Pasolini the instrument to chart the drastic
transformations of the world of modern technology, the decolonization struggles, and the
imbalances of neocolonialism that Rohmer‟s classical view of cinema based on metaphor failed
to account for. Metonymy confronted directly the unsettling phenomena of a changing reality
and faced their still undefined meaning, gesturing toward another form of praxis. It was a form of
engagement that opens up stiffened and blind signifieds to more global and difficult questions. In
an essay of 1966, the director writes:
E poiché quella realtà ci parla col suo linguaggio ogni giorno,
trascendendo—in un “senso” ancora indefinito (è certo solo che è
disperazione e contestazione furente)—i nostri significati—è bene, mi
pare, piegare a questo i significati! Se non altro per porre, appunto, delle
domande in opere anfibologiche, ambigue, a canone “sospeso” (come il
Brecht giustamente inteso da Barthes): ma niente affatto, in questo,
disimpegnate, anzi! (Pasolini 1999, p. 1425)13
Pasolini wrote this sentence only two years after having taken part in a project of an
international magazine to rethink the sense of “commitment” in terms of translation with Duras
and her friends. It marks all the difference between his semiological project and that of Christian
Metz. The French scholar and the Italian director debated at the Festival of New Cinema in
Pesaro in 1966 and they both contributed to the Cahiers. Metz was careful to stress the
importance of Pasolini‟s connotations in abundant footnotes in his Essais sur la signification au
cinéma. But he always maintained his view that the social and cultural meanings that they
conveyed were not “strictly” filmic as they did not directly concern narration. Pasolini‟s focus on
13 “And since this reality speaks to us by its language every day, by transcending—in a
“meaning” still undefined (it is only certain that it is desperation and furious contestation)—our
signifieds—it is good, I think, to submit the signifieds to this! If nothing else, precisely in order to ask
some questions in amphibological works, ambiguous and with “suspended” canon (like the Brecht rightly
understood by Barthes): but in this not at all unengaged, far from it!”
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developing a semiology that could bring to a reframing of engagement is absent from Metz‟s
theorization on cinema. By contrast, Metz‟s effort starts from the realization of the importance of
cybernetics that makes imperative the study of language. His starting point is a discourse of
modernization. But he attempts to overcome the constraints of the context in his elaboration of a
semiological competence for the study of films. Accordingly, topics like the discourse of
technology and decolonization exit from the scene. The semiological tool that Metz prepared was
ready to take over and increase the neutral and scientific attitude of early filmology in the French
academia.
The next stage of this story that accompanies Hiroshima mon amour through the
academization of Film Studies leads us back to Brussels. But this time the heroine is an
American student of philosophy with the additional asset of a Metzian semiology of cinema.
Janice Etzkowitz and Debbie Glassman
Janice Etzkowitz (1983) completed her thesis on Hiroshima mon amour as “cinematic
literature” in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University in 1978. She published it in
book format in 1983 in a collection of dissertations on films. Her Freudian study on memory is
the only American text listed in French bibliographies on Hiroshima mon amour. Etzkowitz
appears as a cosmopolitan New-Yorker who is familiar with French cinematic theory and attends
various cinema events. But she is not a cinema specialist as is evident by the unusual terms that
she uses for describing the kinds of shots (such as “travelling” instead of “tracking shot”). She
interviewed Resnais in 1971 in New York and knew some of the literature on Hiroshima mon
amour, such as Marie-Claire Wuilleumier‟s essay for Esprit. Her main source is, however, the
Brussels seminar. She went to Belgium to study the découpage and asked Raymond Ravar to
preface her book.
Her work unifies the interdisciplinary thrust and the découpage of the Brussels seminar
with Metz‟s semiology of narration. Metz‟s Essais figure prominently in Etzkowitz‟s
bibliography together with his 1971‟s Language et cinéma. In her words, “I propose to construct
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a structural model as my methodology for the analysis of film. Working on the assumption that
each work of art has its own internal structure and unity of form, I propose to demonstrate that
the unity of Hiroshima is derived from seeing the film as an illustration of the functioning of the
memory process.” The dedication to the author‟s mother who died prisoner of her memories of
concentration camp adds another layer to Etzkowitz‟s study. It closely relates her book to the
cathartic developments of cinéphilie among French orphans of war. The Cahiers’ critic Serge
Daney, for example, found himself searching in Night and Fog for his father who died in a Nazi
camp. In both cases, the “terrible tenderness” that Rivette found in Resnais‟ reflecting
representation of horror helped the ciné-fils to make peace with their lost parents (Lindeperg
2007, p. 242).
Etzkowitz read extremely closely the découpage of the Brussels seminar and she made it
available to the American scholars in English translation through her study. However, the
geographical displacement adds to the de-contextualized tendencies of her sources. Etzkowitz
has a certain knowledge of French aesthetic debates and she brings explicitly to the fore the
Surrealist theme that the Brussels seminar presented only indirectly. But it is not the Surrealism
of experimentation in private and daily life. Rather it is the Surrealism of the unconscious that
invades the whole of the external world and almost makes it recede. “Resnais allows the inner
world to totally dominate, to protrude and visualize itself on screen and become a total universe
with its own rules” (Etzkowitz 1983, p. 277). There is no reference to the protests against nuclear
tests and to the indictment of colonial oppression, which were so important in the reading of the
film for Le 14 Juillet and Positif. In fact, Etzkowitz ignores any references to the discourse of
technology and to the French political context at the time of the film production and reception.
The Eighties saw an increase of studies on Hiroshima mon amour in American academy
due to the development of film studies as a discipline and perhaps—more or less
unconsciously—also to the topical concerns with the Cold War. American journal articles of the
time could utilize Etzkowitz‟s analysis as a base or return from it to the Brussels seminar in order
to check the accuracy of their description of the filmic text. But they are more specialized and
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they have a growing awareness of film studies as a disciplinary reference for research on cinema.
The decontextualization of film studies affected even an article in Rhetorical Studies as Martin
Medhurst‟s essay (1982) on Hiroshima mon amour. Medhurst checked his understanding of the
text with the découpage of the Brussels seminar. He shared with Pasolini a starting point in
Erwin Panofsky‟s inconography that could have led him to develop a study of connotation more
in line with his background as a scholar of nuclear rhetoric. However, this turn did not happen.
Medhurst‟s study consists in a decontextualized analysis of the different parts of the film that is
not fundamentally different from essays in film studies of the same era, despite its use of
rhetorical terminology. In this sense, his view of rhetoric is extremely different from my listening
to the rhetorical situation of the film and its criticism.
In the Eighties, the need to develop a competency for the new discipline of Film Studies
was sometimes combined with an adoption of French theory. Debbie Glassman quotes Etzkowitz
in her bibliography when she writes on Elle‟s voice from a feminist perspective in the students‟
cinema magazine Enclitics that adopted continental psychoanalysis as a mark of distinction. The
American scholar describes Elle as the writer of an alternative history of suffering that reacts
against the militarist and patriarchal history of men. In this sense, she would superficially appear
to revive Firk‟s politics of aimance. However, the focus on victimization of American identity
politics brings Glassman (1981) to a pessimistic conclusion. In fact, the protagonist loses her
ability to speak by overcoming her madness and being reincorporated into a patriarchal society.
We are extremely far from the positive thrust of Firk‟s understanding of amour fou as a
force that brings Elle to courageously face her own past and to develop a political voice through
her understanding of the sufferings of the others. Accordingly, Glassman can hardly account for
the importance of the woman in the last scene of Hiroshima mon amour. Paradoxically,
Etzkowitz‟s cathartic reading is perhaps closer to a politics of aimance in her dedication to all
those who are prisoners of their memories like her mother, who survived the concentration
camps. In fact, Glassman‟s essay appears to be based on a limited understanding of Lacanian
psychoanalysis that reduced it to a claim against victimization. However, even the
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psychoanalyst‟s famous motto “On la dit-femme, on la diffâme” [Who says woman, says dissoul-ute] does not simply express the traditional belittling of women in moral terms for their
impossibility to fulfill the masculine striving toward one single soul in Aristotle‟s friendship. It
also indicates that it is impossible to describe a woman‟s pleasure and to capture what a woman
is in symbolic language.
In Lacan‟s terms, this impossibility is not simply an indictment of the oppressive
submission of women to the institution of patriarchy as Glassman reads it. Rather, it is also a
source of empowering, because women are at the limit of what the symbolic can say and
constantly threaten its stability in order to enlarge it. This is the hint that Kristeva takes up and
develops in her theorization of the semiotic, i.e. the rhymes, alliterations, meaningless repetitions
and linguistic inventions that do not belong to the symbolic. They carry energies that are
constitutive of individual identity but not resolved in it. However, they are meaningful and
broaden the net of rationality and judgment. Moreover, Kristeva stresses how women‟s marginal
position that relegates them to the private makes them also more fit to address the global crisis of
representation, which is also a crisis of the political. Therefore, despite the communal influence
of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Kristeva‟s reading of the “awkward rhetoric” of Hiroshima mon
amour in Soleil Noir gives to the voice of the woman a much more powerful role.
In other words, the forgetting of the political and cultural context in Glassman‟s reading
not only orients her understanding of Hiroshima mon amour in a superficial direction. It also
ends up maiming the very possibility of a politics of aimance by limiting her understanding of
the more long-term possibilities of the theorizations that she attempts to use in her study.
Therefore, Glassman‟s study of Hiroshima mon amour is dated now. The restrictive view of
feminism as a mere fight against the patriarchal victimization of women has receded in
importance with the obtainment of partial equality in different fields. However, the thrust of
feminism has not ended and Derrida indicates its direction at the very center of the political with
his politics of aimance.
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The three French authors whom I discuss in the next sections also write in the Eighties.
They bring back the question of technology and work toward the resurgence of commitment in
the study of Hiroshima mon amour. Therefore, they all end up raising the question of a politics
of aimance in more interesting terms than Glassman. None of those authors is exclusively an
academic, and the first one not at all. However, in the new rhetorical situation of the Eighties
they address also an academic audience in France and abroad that is interested in the criticism of
the Nouvelle Vague and in cinema theorization. The readers of their books are not just film
fanatics like the first followers of the Cahiers. Sometimes, they might be thinkers interested in
the renovation of Marxism like their authors. But they might also just be film scholars interested
in finding a theoretical framework for their discipline in which the political question is framed in
a more stimulating way through a confrontation with Post-Marxist thought. It is fair to say,
however, that their political thrust is not always understood.
Benayoun from Commitment to the Atomic Imaginary
Robert Benayoun represents in the clearest way the need for the elaboration of a different
idea of commitment after the paradigm shift of semiology. He was not an academic teacher of
Film Studies. He was a Surrealist critic of the cinema journal Positif. In Chapter Two, we have
already encountered him in relation to Hiroshima mon amour. In July 1958, in fact, this critic
had referred to Hiroshima mon amour in relation to the prospected French nuclear test in the
Algerian Sahara in the anti-Gaullist journal Le 14 juillet. In the same article, he had connected
the censorship of Night and Fog in the colonies with the fear that it could have fomented a
Resistance. Benayoun was close enough to the authors to know what their political intention was
at the time of the production of Hiroshima mon amour. His aim was to indict Gaullist
technocracy from the contested terrain of censored media representations and to contribute to a
reframing of Leftist commitment.
However, in the book on Resnais that Benayoun wrote in the Eighties the militancy of the
turn of the Sixties has become less important. Benayoun (1980, p. 63) still refers to it and
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particularly to Resnais‟ signature in the Manifesto of the 121, without adding that he himself had
signed it. But he presents this committed action mainly as a logical consequence of a movement
of reflection that Resnais had started in his films. The direct link between decolonization and the
testing of the bomb disappears. In fact, the attack against nuclear tests disappear, leaving at its
place a vaguer, if still powerful hint to the way in which the film addresses and reframes the
atomic imaginary. At the turn of the Sixties, Surrealist imaginary had galvanized the resistance
of former Stalinist intellectuals against the Party and Gaullist technocracy. Now, amour fou has
to find its way through the semiological myths that surrounds us and construct our world. In
other words, in Benayoun Surrealist commitment reemerges, but only through the paradigm shift
of semiology.
In fact, the image of love in Resnais was not a sexuality of diversion. The “skin” was
central to it, “parce qu‟elle matérialise une conscience cutanée, élémentaire de l‟atome” (p.
70).14 The skin of the lovers covered with atomic ashes, source of the greatest pleasure and the
greatest pain, was the place for a Heraclitean coexistence of values without dialectical
transcendence:
Hiroshima hissait le libre don de soi au niveau des refus
d‟aliénation, des renversements de signe, d‟une volonté de recharge
magnétique des valeurs, il conciliait les images archétypiques de son
époque: Montres molles (La Persistance de la mémoire), monstres surgis
de l‟atome (La créature du Lagon noir, Godzilla), gadgets ambigus de
l‟espace (Gilda et le Spoutnik) avec les mots d‟ordre du grand mystère
rédempteur de l‟analogie poétique. (p. 70)15
The visual images of the massacre from the museum, the photographs, and the newsreels
of Hiroshima are scandalously the reverse of the science-fiction that Resnais collected.
“L‟érotisme naît de cette transgression à la Bataille d‟interdits implantés par la science à même
14 “Because it materializes a cutaneous, elementary consciousness of the atom.”
15 “Hiroshima promoted the free gift of the self to the level of a refusal of alienation, of reversals
of sign, of a will of magnetic recharging of values; it conciliated the archetypical images of its era:
deformed watches (Persistence of memory), monsters born from the atom (The creature of the Black
Lagoon, Godzilla), ambiguous gadgets of the space (Gilda and Sputnik) with the imperatives of the great
redemptive mystery of poetic analogy.”
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la chair des êtres” (p. 71).16 However, the dialectical image of the naked skin of the lovers
covered in atomic ashes was still so shocking for the Japanese audience that only five year later
Teshigahara and Abe broke the taboo in Suna no onna. Benayoun probably did not know that the
two Japanese former Surrealist authors had been introduced by the sculptor Okamoto Tarō, who
had taken part in Bataille‟s secret societies while he was in France to study ethnography. In any
case, sensuality represents a concrete response to the mythical monsters and gadgets that
surrounds us for the emotional recharge that it allows:
Le film a pour fonction ultime et bénéfique de dégager de cet
érotisme des corps, volontiers sacrificateur, celui du cœur, qui régénère et
anoblit. Si l‟érotisme est bien, comme l‟écrit Bataille, “l‟approbation de la
vie jusque dans la mort,” Hiroshima mon amour accomplit cette correction
d‟angle qui, d‟une étreinte iconoclaste, d‟un amour blasphémateur, fait un
vrai cri de vie et de recharge émotionnelle. (p. 71)17
Benayoun duly refuses the concept of “auteur” of the Cahiers. Resnais chooses a
screenplay writer in relation to whom he can also be a spectator, which starts a process of
internal critique of his films. Resnais is not a demiurge who claims to have total control over his
creation. However, a great part of the two chapters that Benayoun devotes to Hiroshima mon
amour are devoted to prove that Resnais is an “auteur” closer to Positif than to the Cahiers. His
Leftist commitment, his great admiration for Surrealism, and his choice of collaborating with
Surrealist writers and painters are proofs of this tie. Resnais is a believer in “mad love” and in
the mystery of the everyday. The imaginary plays the leading role in his films. These cultural
choices are also the reason why the roundtable on Hiroshima mon amour was mostly off target.
The more conservative Cahiers was not familiar with Surrealist values. “Visiblement le petit
16 “Eroticism is born from this Bataille-like transgression to the prohibitions that science has
implanted into the flesh of people.”
17 “The film has as its ultimate and beneficial function to free out of this eroticism of the
bodies—willingly sacrificing—that of heart, which regenerates and ennobles. If eroticism is well, as
Bataille writes, „the approval of life even in death,‟ Hiroshima mon amour accomplishes this correction of
angle that turns an iconoclastic embrace, a blasphemous love, into a real cry of life and of emotional
recharge.”
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groupe ne se sent aucun lien théorique, intellectuel, moral avec ce cinéaste qu‟ils respectent” (p.
80-81).18
However, Benayoun makes an exception for Godard, also for his later more Leftist
commitment in relation to the Vietnam War. It is true that when Godard made his famous
statement “tracking shots are a matter of morality” he had politically confused stances, while
Resnais always maintains a coherent moral reflection. However, Godard did well in stressing the
role of the verbal image and the “cinema about cinema” in Hiroshima mon amour. The irony of
the signs of the anti-nuclear parade in Hiroshima signals a tender distance that Resnais marks
between his own film and a pacifist pamphlet. “La différence entre Resnais et Godard tient peutêtre justement à ce regard tendre mais critique que le premier jette sur un militant, fût-il de son
bord” (p. 82).19 In other words, it seems that Benayoun now embraces Resnais for his political
and moral conscience, but also for the distance that he marks from a model of militancy in which
Benayoun himself had believed. Resnais stresses the need to talk loudly about things that people
tend to forget otherwise, but not to modify the reality of protest to follow pre-given myths of
political participation. Few people showed up to join the march that Resnais had organized for
his film in Hiroshima, because the question of the bomb started to be forgotten. This realization
itself is part of the protest.
In chapter two, I showed how Benayoun‟s critique of technocracy from the perspective of
amour fou was influential in Firk‟s development of her politics of aimance in relation to
Hiroshima mon amour. Firk argued that Elle was able to face her own past and to articulate the
understanding of her own suffering with the history of oppression of other people. Here,
Benayoun seems somehow to contain this model when he presents Elle in contrast with the calm
of Lui, who still lives at the geographic center of unimaginable destructions. “De l‟autre une
18 “Visibly the small group does not feel any theoretical, intellectual, and moral link with this
cineaste that they respect.”
19 “The difference between Resnais and Godard lies perhaps exactly in this tender but critical
look that the former throws on a militant, even of his own side.”
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femme exaltée, psychotique, malmenée certes par un calvaire injuste (on l‟a emprisonnée, on lui
a rasé les cheveux), mais qui se charge des infortunes d‟un peuple entier, voire de tous les
peuples, offerte à tous les sacrifices, à toutes les croisades” (p. 67).20 Perhaps in these lines we
can read a certain distance from the too direct model of a politics of aimance that Firk had
articulated in Positif. Also aimance, in fact, had to go through a confrontation with the structures
of semiotics and reemerge as a different form of commitment through a confrontation with the
excess of information of the modern world. In part, this is the move that Deleuze accomplishes.
Deleuze‟s Time-Image
Gilles Deleuze‟s study in L’Image-Temps dons the clothes of the tradition of the auteur in
order to subvert it from the inside, recuperating political concerns as a reformulation of Marxist
imaginary in a time of crisis. Resnais for him is one of the thinking auteurs who most clearly
addressed this problem. Julia Kristeva‟s concluding chapter in Soleil Noir inscribes Duras‟
contribution to Hiroshima mon amour into the territory of melancholia. Her reinterpretation of
cinéphilie turns the “awkward rhetoric” of the non-representable into a political resource that
reminds the mixed and matched times of postmodernism of a pain that has not healed. The two
projects share similar aims, despite the evident dissimilarities. They both reframe the language of
film criticism in terms of a concern with a necessary rethinking of Marxist commitment. Neither
of them talks effusively about technology in relation to Hiroshima mon amour. But a comparison
will show that their critique can only be understood from the standpoint of a confrontation with
modern information and media technology.
Deleuze‟ two books on cinema—L’Image-mouvement (1983) and L’Image-temps (1985)
are also one of the major contributions to cinematic theory in the last three decades. Therefore, I
do not limit myself to his reading of Hiroshima mon amour and of Resnais‟ work as an auteur.
20 “On the other hand an exalted, psychotic woman, certainly ill-treated by an unjust calvary (she
has been imprisoned, her hair has been shaven), but who takes upon herself the misfortunes of a whole
people, or of all the peoples, offering herself to every sacrifice, to every crusade.”
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Rather, I attempt to see how they fit more generally in the flow of Deleuze‟s theorization on
cinema. Two aspects immediately come to the fore in relation to Hiroshima mon amour. First, in
Resnais‟ films thought comes back from the death of Hiroshima to face its own constitutive lack.
This failure of thinking has in turn political implications. For Deleuze, the absolute memory of
Auschwitz and Hiroshima remains as an implicit unsettling horizon in the whole of modern
cinema, even in its predilection for images of everyday life. The direct presentation of
contradictory temporalities that characterizes the so called “time-image” of modern cinema
shocks the audience into physical passivity. They can neither find compensation in easy
identifications nor release in action. In this way, the new image interrupts the causal and futureoriented links of classical cinema, which were ideologically based on the organicist fulfillment of
the American dream, the dialectical progress of Soviet revolution, or on admiration and fear we
face in the rise of the machines.
Given this background, Deleuze‟s theorization is also an attempt to rephrases cinéphilie
into a political direction. He glimpses a different configuration for politics in an intolerable clash
of temporalities that defies causal thinking. Therefore, Deleuze (1983, p. 289) rather
anachronistically describes the Nouvelle Vague (which includes in prominent position the
Cahiers‟ self-defined Rightist critics of the late „50s) as “hitchcocko-marxienne” rather than
“hitchcocko-hawksienne.” Marxist myths and in primis the cathartic belief in revolution in the
most advanced countries have come to an end. AWestern director should make the audience
confront, in Deleuze‟s words, “l‟impensé dans la pensée, naissance du visible qui se dérobe
encore à la vue” (1985, p. 262).21 Resnais is with Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet the
most political Western director, as he shows the lack of an already constituted people. He refuses
the nationalist Marianne of Gaullism, but he also does not leave the Communist vulgata of the
Proletarian Party untouched.
21 “The unthought inside thought, the birth of the seeable that cannot yet be seen.” One of the
inspirations for this formulation, apart from Blanchot and Artaud, is the Heidegger of What is Thinking?
(1954).
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Therefore, Resnais offers a glimpse of hope that new conditions for the birth of a people
could eventually be imagined from the singularities pressing to the scene of the world. This
thinking can proceed only through questioning without easy solutions and giving voice to a
private that has become political (Deleuze, 1985, p. 281-4). Deleuze‟s reference to the “peopleto-come” seems to privilege a thought of identity and community. By contrast, Derrida avows
some uneasiness concerning the idea of “community” even when conceived in Nietzschean and
paradoxical terms. However, Deleuze certainly joins Derrida‟s politics of aimance in stressing
how the distinction between private and public that guided older conceptions of the political
clouds our perception of the modern world of global technology. Also for him it is necessary to
imagine new forms of political participation that have their roots in the increasing colonization
and policing of the private. Deleuze‟s early participation with Edgar Morin in the special issue
on love in the neo-Marxist journal Arguments in 1961 with an essay on masochism is a proof of
the constancy of this concern in his thought, which has become paramount through his friendship
with Michel Foucault. In fact, the experimentation and the insertion into the consolidate nets of
knowledge-power of forgotten, marginal forms of love and sexuality can create productive
interruptions and bring to new alliances. Derrida‟s politics of aimance is doing something similar
in exposing the marginality of love in the traditional thought of political friendship.
Secondly, Hiroshima mon amour shows memory as bringing forth undecidable
alternatives between different coherent maps of the past, in a way that exceeds the psychological
use of flashbacks for which the movie is famous. Objects and events take up different meanings
when seen from the standpoint of each person. The two protagonists position themselves each
time on a different layer of the preexisting regions of their past. Their recollections forget their
own individual particularities. They become a shared memory that is also external and mundane,
beyond mere psychological remembering. This undecidable has its artistic source in a
Nietzschean power of untruth [puissance de faux] that transforms and creates. Through it PostMarxist political hopes can be glimpsed.
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Also in this sense Deleuze‟s thought is very close to Derrida, who finds in Nietzsche the
source of his theorization of the peut-être. Derrida, however, focuses particularly on how
Nietzsche‟s reversal of a famous Aristotelian motto on friendship into a motto on enmity blurs
the binary opposition friend/enemy, which is the first of several oppositions (such as war/peace,
military/civilian) that organize our understanding of the political. The politics of the peut-être
targets all of them, by showing that they are a reaction to an original de-territorialization that
modern technology only increases. By contrast, Deleuze‟s undecidable is not cast primarily
against these binary oppositions, but it mobilizes them only secondarily through the construction
of a debated communal memory that targets every area of knowledge.
Interestingly—to press the question of the undecidable further—Deleuze (1985, p. 142143) first offers this elaboration on the Bergsonian nappes de passé [vast expanses of past] in
relation to Citizen Kane. Resnais is for him the best unfaithful disciple of Orson Welles, who
radicalizes the lesson of the master. Deleuze clearly refers to Bazin‟s famous discussion of the
profondeur de champ [depth of field] in Kane, but with a crucial difference in interpretation.
Describing the scene of the failed suicide in Citizen Kane, Bazin argued that the simultaneous
presence on the screen of spatially unrelated elements (the poison in the foreground, Susan
laying in the middle ground, and Kane rushing in from the background) stirred the audience into
a closer relation with reality. They had to pay attention and actively read the image in order to
reconstruct the event in their own minds, because the director did not explain it to them.
According to Bazin, Welles‟ profondeur de champ [depth of field] reintroduces an ambiguity
into the image. This proceeding, however, “ne cherche pas de nous tromper, au contraire” (Bazin
1958, p. 144).22 The whole of Citizen Kane should be conceived as a gigantic depth of field:
“L‟incertitude où l‟on demeure de la clef spirituelle ou de l‟interprétation est d‟abord inscrite
dans le dessin même de l‟image” (p. 144).23 In terms of Bazin‟s involvement in popular
22 “[It] does not attempt to fool us, far from that.”
23 “The uncertainty in which we are left concerning the spiritual or interpretive key is originally
inscribed in the very design of the image.”
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education, we can think that a movie in depth of field like Citizen Kane must have been a perfect
occasion for debate. It must have been for him a valuable resource to lead ciné-club audiences
toward exerting their reflection and judgment.24 In this way they would constitutively participate
to the mise en scène.
I have argued in Chapter Three that Resnais maintained this focus on judgment in
ambiguous situations. He is far from considering this faculty unuseful and his Brechtian
distancing aimed to empower more active audiences that Hiroshima mon amour could help to
understand also apparently unrelated issues in their own lives. However, I have also argued that
Resnais‟ conception of judgment is not only an offspring of Bazin‟s commitment in popular
education. It is also deeply influenced by the paradoxical commitment of the peut-être at the turn
of the Sixties that attempted to rethink the traditional conceptions of the political in order to fit a
situation in which it was difficult to distinguish between friends and enemies, war and peace.
Resnais asks the audience precisely to judge situations in which these binary oppositions that
orient the political are at stake.
By contrast, Deleuze denies the importance of judgment. He begins with developing the
temporal aspects of depth of field in Citizen Kane that were only sketched in Bazin‟s
theorization. He argues that depth of field is always connected with memory, and only in some
cases with the function of reality that Bazin describes. In particular, Deleuze sees Welles as the
moment of a definitive demise of judgment. He was the culmination of a crisis started with
Brecht, who however still believed in the educative distancing of the audience. “Chez Welles, le
système du jugement devient définitivement impossible, même et surtout pour les spectateurs”
24 Citizen Kane is an example that modern filmmakers found the way (1959, p. 108), “d‟exciter
la conscience du spectateur et de provoquer sa réflexion: quelque chose qui serait une opposition au sein
d‟une identification.” [of stirring the consciousness of the audience and provoking their reflection:
something like an opposition in the midst of identification]. Theatre appeals to “volonté” [will]. By
contrast, a film appeals to “bonne volonté” [good will]. In fact, “il a besoin de mes efforts pour être
compris et goûté, mais non pas pour exister” [it needs my efforts in order to be understood and
appreciated, but not in order to exist]. The stress on reflection and taste in opposition to will recalls the
Kantian conception of judgment.
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(Deleuze 1985, p. 181).25 Deleuze thinks that also in Resnais—as in Welles—the audience can
only glimpse possibilities for transformation from the failure of thought when confronted with
undecidable temporalities. However—I suggested—we could reverse the path that Deleuze is
tracing away from Bazin. This Bazinian root unearths the original connection between the
undecidable memory in Hiroshima mon amour and the practice of ciné-club discussions, in
which the audience was led to exert judgment on films and on the ambiguous questions they
raised. This missing link leads perhaps also to a greater trust in an enlarged sensus communis and
in the practice of a questioning rhetoric of argumentation at the very heart of the topological
contradictions of Resnais‟ time-image.
Rhetoric in Deleuze‟s books on cinema is only the tropology of Eisenstein‟s pathetic, and
therefore is part of the dialectical structure of the Soviet movement-image. However, the wild
and paradoxical connections that Resnais draws as the most important auteur “of the brain” are
based on highly mobile and uncontrollable changes in “feelings.” In this sense, Deleuze appears
to consider how Resnais transformed the teleological dialectical bases of Eisenstein‟s montage of
attraction into a more volatile and unsolvable coexistence of contraries. However, we saw in
Resnais‟ interview for Esprit in Chapter Three that the director connected feelings and judgment.
In fact, feelings were precisely the engines that set in motion the combination of distancing and
fascination that led the audience to judge on the binary oppositions of the political. Most
importantly, Deleuze‟s focus on thinking rather than on judging is only secondarily directed
toward the undecidable that organizes the very conceptions of the political. His primary focus is
the linguistic net of knowledge that includes the political as everything else. It would appear that
when he asks the audience to “judge” the characters of his film Resnais is asking them to exert a
faculty that directly concerns the political. By contrast, Deleuze‟s focus on thinking absorbs this
task of judgment in order to enlarge it, but it also makes it more secondary.
25 “In Welles, the system of judgment becomes definitively impossible, also and especially for
the audience.”
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Finally, we should discuss the way in which technology profoundly changes Deleuze‟s
way of intending the auteur. Deleuze does not specifically write about the discourse of
technology in relation to Hiroshima mon amour. But his work as a whole is hinged on a
reflection on modern media. In fact, for him the auteurs are not simply the filmmakers who use
the technological means at their disposal so as to be ethically responsible toward the form of
representation. Instead, an auteur has to directly confront the meaning of technology and of the
changes that it brings to our world. The directors of the movement-image still had to face the
world of machines. The directors of the time-image are confronted with the world of cybernetics,
computing, and excessive information. In any case, the auteur has to find from this confrontation
the only possible ground for transformation.
For this reason, the word “automaton” recurs repeatedly in Deleuze‟s work on cinema.
According to the philosopher, the apex and the crisis of the classical cinema of the movementimage is the aestheticization of Nazi politics in Leni Riefenstahl that turned the German masses
into automata. Walter Benjamin‟s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction—
whose French translation had been released in the same year as Hiroshima mon amour—is the
source of Deleuze‟s thought on this point. However, Benjamin still hoped in the ability of
Vertov‟s cine-eye to represent real workers through a mechanical art that would not disguise its
industrial aspect under a false aura. In this way, it would make them see new possibilities of
progressive developments, through a fragmentary montage that would connect proletarians with
the different facets of their work, lives and environment. For Deleuze, instead, the dialectical
automata of Soviet revolutionary cinema are not fundamentally different from the other futureoriented automata of movement-image. They all find their model in Hitler as a filmmaker
working for the advent of a New Order where the automata are the masses.
The time-image has to address different challenges from modern technology. The new
automaton needs to engage the loss of faith in a revolutionary future and the a-centered, diffuse
tyranny of an omnipresent information technology (Deleuze 1985, p. 345). The only positive
way to address the apparent neutrality of information is to show the constitutive impotence of
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thought. The automaton of modern cinema, like Artaud‟s automatic writing, has to become a
“vigilambule” who is awake to the inherent violence of the apparently harmless webs that
encircle and control us. The hope is that some different configurations might eventually be
glimpsed from a momentary disturbance of these nets of knowledge-power. Despite their
ephemeral frailty, these narrow paths through information are our only chance to transform our
lives for the better.
Therefore, the auteur has to fight at the level of information technologies, engaging what
in them can bring to creative transformations and countering what is fixed and oppressive.
Resnais—especially in his later films—is not an exception. In fact, “les zombies de Resnais se
définissent en fonction de la parole ou de l‟information, non plus de l‟énergie ou de la motricité.
Chez Resnais, il n‟y a plus de flashes-back, mais plutôt des feeds-backs et des ratés de feedback” (p. 348).26 Like most of Deleuze‟s statements about Resnais in Time-Image, this
description would seem to hold true especially for the director‟s later films that retrospectively
illuminate the mise en scène and the worldview of the auteur. In the case of Hiroshima mon
amour, it could certainly recall what Jacques Derrida (1984, p. 23) called the “fabulously
textual” character of nuclear technology. Derrida had launched this concept in a conference on
nuclear rhetoric the year before the publication of Deleuze‟s Time-Image. The “fabulously
textual” alludes to the information technologies needed to control and operate nuclear weaponry,
but also to the nuclear imaginary of impending doom that has repressive implications for people
and politics even in the actual absence of an atomic war. Benayoun‟s description of the way in
which Hiroshima mon amour engages and undermines the contemporary atomic imaginary
reflects a similar concern for the repressive character of an information society.
These readings of the Eighties certainly supplement the meaning of Resnais‟ film with
their postmodern focus on waging the struggle at the level of language and representation. They
26 “Resnais‟ zombies define themselves in function of words or information, not any more in
function of energy or engines. In Resnais, there are no more flashsback, but rather feedsback and failures
of feed-back”.
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come through semiology and attempt to think a new idea of commitment that takes into account
the abstract aspect of information technology. They do not simply eschew the problem, as did
Christian Metz when he began his study on cinematic montage from the realization of the
linguistic importance of cybernetic, but decided eventually to focus simply on the narrative level
of the film. Deleuze, significantly, opposes Pasolini‟s “unwritten language of reality” to Metz‟s
exclusive focus on récit. They also do not think, as did the Personalist Michel Mesnil, that a
Christian “loving communication” could magically solve the problem of abstraction that the
excess of information of modern technology creates. In fact, religion is among the first victims of
the global crisis of representation, together with existing conceptions of politics.
However, I would argue that also the way in which Hiroshima mon amour plays a
relatively minor role in Deleuze‟s account in comparison with later films by Resnais is
significant. Perhaps it shows a certain degree of resistance to Deleuze‟s smooth conception of
Resnais as the director of the brain. According to Deleuze, Resnais turns information technology
against itself adopting its weapons, by drawing synaptic-like connections that face us with the
undecidable and make us aware of the arbitrary and constructed character of the net of
information that surrounds us. However, Hiroshima mon amour does not simply ask us to face
the clash of different myths and temporalities that turn the historical figure of a crook into the
almost well adjusted living ghost of Stavisky… (1973-1974). Hiroshima mon amour‟s
undecidable tackles also the material unspoken of the “fabulously textual” in its dangerous
potential. It shows that a river is pure and bright water, but its meaning deeply changes when it is
thought in relation with the bomb. Nature is challenged by modern technology. Water can turn
into black rain. The menace to our lives is too close to be ignored. The semiological
interpretation of Hiroshima mon amour forgot precisely this point and made it unreadable, as it
does not fit into a narrative reading of the film. Philippe Forest‟s reduction of Resnais‟ film to a
“romantic idyll” unrelated to antinuclear protest shows that part of the memory concerning the
film has been systematically erased. Significantly, it is the least “combinable” in fancy
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syntagmatic strings. It is most deeply connected with the technocratic developments that have
built France as a nuclear power on the military and peaceful level without public scrutiny.
Also the role of judgment that Resnais stresses in relation to Hiroshima mon amour
should not be undervalued. Hiroshima mon amour is too close to the event of the paradoxical
communities of the peut-être. It was released at the watershed between two paradigms. The
dramatic difference between Benayoun‟s two readings of the film clearly shows that it was
created at the very border between an existentialist understanding of commitment and the rise of
semiology. In his interview to Esprit Resnais still has faith in the effort of the audience to judge
the character of Elle through all her contradictory feelings. To Firk she appeared as a “who”
rather than a “what.” Common sense was required to approach her story beyond ideological
interpretations and politically safe assumptions. Judgment, according to Resnais, appears the
responsibility of the audience toward this reinvention of commitment that begins from an
understanding of the characters in their complexity. By contrast, Deleuze‟s focus on the auteur
appears to be combined with a certain undervaluation of the judging audience. We can wonder,
however, whether this attitude that privileges unbounded thinking does not end up being
disempowering in terms of action. The Situationists alluded perhaps to this danger when they
accused Last Year in Marienbad of following Kostas Axelos‟ interpretation of Heidegger rather
than Breton‟s desire to promote actual changes in private and daily life.
Julia Kristeva‟s writings on Duras come extremely close to this question of judgment. In
fact, Kristeva probably referred to Arendt‟s thought for the first time in relation to Duras‟ writing
in Hiroshima mon amour. A note that opposes Duras‟ language of madness to Arendt‟s view that
language cannot become mad also closes Kristeva‟s book on the political thinker. There,
Kristeva explores Arendt‟s focus on judgment and common sense but wants to correct it with the
psychological realization that every “who” is also carried by crisis and malady that come from a
language that has become mad. “Arendt était fort loin de tout cela. Et cependant si proche… ”
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(Kristeva 1999, p. 371).27 These words close Kristeva‟s book on Arendt. In the next section, I
explore Kristeva‟s reading of Hiroshima mon amour against the background of her interest in
Arendt‟s political thought and of her related concern with a new conception of commitment.
Kristeva and the Language of Madness
Kristeva devoted a chapter to Hiroshima mon amour at the end of her 1987 book on
melancholia, Soleil Noir. Melancholia is connected with Saturn and literary creativity. It is not
only psychical, but also connected to the body through the black humor, bile. It is particularly
related with women. And it covers a broader area than the most “scientific” terms of modern
psychology. Madness and grief can also be part of it. Kristeva wrote this book at the convergence
of these features. It combines her interest in modern literature and in the feminism of sexual
difference with her practice as a psychoanalyst that gives a great importance to language. It
reflects her faith that literature can contribute to fight the tendencies to use neutralizing antidepressants to achieve the integration of the subject to society. In fact, literature can support the
task of psychoanalysis if it becomes a lucid counter-depressant that helps to develop the
possibilities of the subject. Duras‟ writing, however, represents extreme territory in this book.
Her writing is not cathartic. It is the closest possible testimony to the language of madness that
shows the global crisis of representation of our times.
Kristeva is not interested in discussing Resnais‟ role as a Deleuzian auteur. It was an
established Tel Quel tradition even in their collaboration with the Cahiers to write about cinema
only when the screenplay writer was a novelist. Also Kristeva bases her reading exclusively on
Duras‟ screenplay. Moreover, Deleuze based his reading of Resnais mostly on the concept of
“indecidable” [undecidable], which expresses the ambiguity that comes from conflicting
associations and temporalities. By contrast, Kristeva thinks that the most important characteristic
of Duras‟ work is that it constantly borders on the “innommable” [unnamable]. Duras
27: “Arendt was far from all this. And yet so close…”
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contemplates a “rien” [nothing] that cannot be expressed in words. It refers to the trauma of the
world wars and to the potential of modern technology to destroy humanity. But it also concerns
the shattered psyche of modern individuals and their inability to deal with family, society, and
the others. Duras‟ infatuation with “la maladie de la douleur‟ [the malady of grief] is contagious.
The mourning of the mother invades the autonomy of the subject through reduplications that are
like boomerangs and are dangerous for the stability of individual identity. Accordingly, Kristeva
advises readers to watch Duras‟ films rather than to read her books, if one is not strong enough.
Gruesome representations of horror make us feel fear on the screen. However, cinematographic
images generate a profusion of associations in the audience. Therefore, “le „rien‟ devient
indécidable et le silence fait rêver” (Kristeva 1987, p. 234).28 The screen exorcises part of the
infective power that awkward and asocial words have on us.
By contrast, the writing of Duras stages a “rhétorique blanche de l’apocalypse” (p.
229).29 Theodor Adorno famously argued that no art was possible after Auschwitz. Duras‟
writing has one of its roots in the pain for her husband‟s deportation to concentration camps. Her
style follows closely her grief in an awkward rhetoric that either borders silence or is
exaggeratedly precious as if the words had been worn out. Sadoul had accused Duras of having
damaged Hiroshima mon amour with her ugly mixture of tragic lyricism and cheap brilliance of
Boulevard theater. According to Kristeva, however, the écriture of Duras undermines the
artificial platitude of standard good style and opens to the almost physical realization of the
uncharted psychic territories of madness and melancholia. It follows this deserted void without
skillful turns and with merciless faithfulness. It touches the core of the crisis of representation
that the Nazi camps and nuclear destruction have initiated, but that has a less visible parallel in
the global deflagration of political, moral, and psychical identities. Rivette described Resnais as
the auteur that connected cinephilia with an ethical effort of reflection. Therefore, only he was
28 “The „nothing‟ becomes undecidable and silence makes one dream.”
29 “Blank rhetoric of apocalypse.”
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able to depict the non-representable of historical horror though a “terrible tenderness.”
According to Kristeva, instead, the force of the non-representable lies in Duras‟s development of
a blank rhetoric of melancholia that follows step by step the conflagration of private and
historical suffering.
Kristeva‟s book joins Deleuze and Benayoun in a concern for Post-Marxist politics. The
feminine resources of melancholia—which are also part of the cultural heritage of Orthodox
Eastern Europe—help to resist in times that witness the shattering of political idols, including
those of Communism. Their despair can lead to a rebirth. Dostoevsky‟s melancholia was a
vanguard of the October revolution. Art can have a cathartic function that better integrates the
semiotic into the symbolic, when it does not lead to superficial resignation but to lucid
awareness. Duras‟ writing is not cathartic. There is no promise of hope or of a reunited subject.
However, it addresses the question of engagement and its crisis. The playful parenthesis of
Surrealism “toujours politiquement engagée” explored part of the dark sides of the psyche. But it
ended with the explosion of death and madness of WWII (p. 230).30 The new art that Blanchot
proposed in the postwar took refuge into formalism rather that in the representation of exterior
objects in order to escape the dictates of political control. This choice to explore language was
more lucid than, in Kristeva‟s words, “l‟engagement enthousiaste et l‟érotique libertairement
adolescente des existentialistes” (p. 231).31 Modern literature “s‟engage” [commits itself] on the
anti-spectacular path of melancholia that might make it asocial and uninteresting (p. 231).32
Duras‟ malady of grief, however, was not simply Blanchot‟s difficult return of Orpheus
to the sources of inspiration. According to Blanchot, the paralyzed and inactive artist is actually
the closest to overabundance, to the dark center about which she cannot write without tearing her
30 “Always politically committed.”
31 “The enthusiastic commitment and the libertarian adolescent eroticism of the existentialists.”
32 The English translation by Leon S. Roudiez (Kristeva 1989) is very elegant and well done.
However, it does not always translate “engager” and “engagement” with words relate to commitment.
Therefore, the importance of this motive for Kristeva results diminished.
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eyes away. In the international literary journal Gulliver—in which he participated with Duras—
Blanchot comes perhaps the closest to explain how this writing of Orpheus reformulates
commitment. In fact, Blanchot praised Uwe Johnson‟s novels on Berlin as a city in which
division was at stake, because the author did not attempt to write in realistic or political terms.
His novels respected the singularity of their subject, precisely because they rigorously refused to
close the gap between reality and the literary grasp of its meaning. Writing became then the
impossible inscription of the impossibility of addressing the question of Berlin:
Forse il lettore e il critico frettolosi potranno dire che, in opere di
questo tipo, il rapporto col mondo e con la responsabilità di una decisione
politica nei confronti di esso resta lontano e indiretto. Ma c‟è appunto da
chiedersi se, per aderire al “mondo” con la parola e soprattutto con la
scrittura, una via indiretta non sia la via giusta, e anche la piú breve.
(Blanchot 1964, p. 124-125)33
As Michel Surya argues, “Ce faisant, Maurice Blanchot ne s‟oppose pas seulement à
l‟instrumentalisation du langage par l‟action, il dit qu‟il n‟y a pas d‟action qui ne dépende du
langage […]” (Surya 2004, p. 124).34 The humanistic culture of the Left shares values with what
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, also a Gulliver‟s editor, calls the “consciousness industry.”35 Its
reductive and digesting stance cannot come up with viable practical answers to the problems that
face the world. Therefore, the artist has to risk the difficult detour of questioning the
transparency of representation, exchanging reductive propaganda for the obscure and unexpected
as a form of responsibility.
33 “Perhaps a hasty reader or critic could say that, in works of this kind, the relationship with the
world and with the responsibility of a political decision concerning it remains remote and indirect.
Indirect, yes. But one should ask if an indirect way is not actually the right way, and also the shortest one
in order to adhere to the “world” by words and especially by writing.”
34 “In this way, Maurice Blanchot does not oppose only the instrumentalization of language by
action, he says that there is no action that does not depend on language […].”
35 Blanchot (1971, p. 84) writes in L’Amitié: “Le titre „livre de poche‟ dit déjà presque tout: c‟est
la culture dans la poche. Mythe progressiste.” [The title „paperback‟ (literally: pocket-book) already says
almost everything: it is culture in the pocket. Progressive myth.]
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However, Kristeva argues that Duras‟ writing differs from Blanchot‟s idea of the work
that returns to the sources of the work and from similar conceptions of indirect writing. It is not
critical and self-critical. It does not twist meanings and it is not based on a generalized
ambivalence that mixes the false and the true, the real and the imaginary, and man and woman. It
is not based on the ambiguous play of the undecidable that Deleuze praises so much in Resnais
and in which Kristeva also engaged in the Seventies. Postmodern playfulness is not its domain.
Kristeva closes her chapter with a praise of postmodernism, if it is lucidly conscious of the
extreme limit that Duras indicates. However, Duras‟ writing is univocally driven by a fascination
for grief. It blurs only the crucial boundary between the private and the public, because the
madness that she witnessed around her since she was a destitute child in Vietnam prepared her to
be particularly receptive to the madness of history.
According to Kristeva, the screenplay of Hiroshima mon amour is the summa of Duras‟
work. It shows how the double erodes the foundations of identity and the fascination for love and
death in the melancholy of a woman. Most importantly, it is the work that best shows the
conflation of private and public suffering. Hiroshima mon amour presents the socio-historical
historical background that characterized Un Barrage contre le Pacifique and the almost decontextualized radiography of depression of Moderato Cantabile. These two levels coexist
autonomously and yet they are closely linked. The impossible amour fou of the lovers is
authentic and leads to an identification that seems to triumph over external events. And yet, Elle
in Hiroshima is what she is because of the war, of the Nazis, and of the bomb. Politics colonizes
private life. “Toutefois, par son intégration à la vie privée, la vie politique perd cette autonomie
que nos consciences persistent à lui réserver religieusement” (Kristeva 1987, p. 242).36 The
events of public life are seen from the point of view of madness. They become seriously severed
from reality. Official explanations do not make sense. By contrast, private life fills the whole of
the real and changes its meaning. Madness is political, particularly in its massacres.
36 “However, through its integration to private life, political life loses that autonomy that our
consciences persist in reserving religiously to it.”
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Kristeva‟s reading does not simply indict the forced silence imposed upon Elle in a
phallocentric society, as Glassman did. Her feminism values the sexual difference of women as a
source of a different understanding of the political. This understanding is not given, but it is
perhaps hidden in the fascination of the mystical “rien” that Duras continues to border. Women
are the Hegelian irony of the community in Duras‟ writing. Values do not hold before their
madness (p. 263). Elle‟s madness is so powerful that it absorbs the public to the point that the
different political commitments begin to lose their sense, even if their consequences are stated
and remain. Elle has loved an enemy. She has been shaven for it. There is a certain reason of war
for this punishment. But only grief matters in her madness. In this unreal sense, her suffering is
on the same level as the suffering of the victims of Hiroshima. The private acquires the political
dignity of a colonized sphere and absorbs the whole of the public. Its borders become immense.
The new world is both necessarily political and unreal because it is seen through the eyes of
madness. It is a painful world and madness adheres to it in a way that dignified official politics
could not.
Derrida indicated psychoanalysis as one of the institutions that police the private.
Freudian psychoanalysis was dominated by the figure of the Father. Jung substituted for the
Jewish father a Christian brotherhood without fundamentally changing its phallocentric
assumptions. It was, therefore, an institution predicated on the exclusion of the sister. Kristeva
chooses to work through psychoanalysis to undermine this limitation. The dignity that she gives
to private life as political resembles to Derrida‟s politics of aimance. The difference is perhaps a
matter of perspective. Derrida works from Aristotelian philía and attempts to enlarge it,
reintegrating to it the friendship between women and men and between women and women that
it had to violently exclude in order to constitute the public domain as separate from the private.
Also love had been relegated to the private domain, in contrast with friendship. However, the
drastic transformations in the world of modern technology have shown that there is not a private
sphere completely separated from the public and its consequences. Nuclear fallouts don‟t
distinguish between public and private. Therefore, also love can bring its resources to politics,
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such as the ability to listen and to be suspended to the beating of the heart of the other. Firk
articulated from a similar view her reading of Hiroshima mon amour in terms of Elle‟s
commitment of responsibility to the oppressions of the others that was made possible by her
effort to overcome the self-absorption of her private suffering. The common sense of the private
in Firk became a tool that could justify her commitment to the Algerian cause, despite her Party
reluctance.
Kristeva is more radical and less hopeful that in the global crisis of representation it is
enough to go back to the roots of the Western conception of the political in Aristotle and work
from there to enlarge it. Aimance does not simply enlarge the possibilities of political
engagement as in Firk. Amour fou is not simply connected to commitment for anti-colonialism
and antiracism as it was still possible in the Surrealist heritage. Instead, here the madness of
“mad love” explodes and occupies everything that is visible, including love that is frigid, and
mourns the abandonment of the mother through repeated relations with foreign doubles. Mad
love becomes the very impossibility of love. In her choice of Duras to close this book perhaps
Kristeva wanted to indicate that the only possible itinerary left to hope is despair. Despair means
welcoming grief and interrogating it in writing (Tommasi 2004, p. 37). It is better than the
emptiness of depression, because it means that it is possible to touch the bottom and to come
back to tell the story. The courageous effort that Duras as a woman undertakes is traversing the
language of madness without ever looking the other way.
It is in the context of this discussion of public and private from the point of view of
madness in Hiroshima mon amour that Kristeva refers for the first time to Hannah Arendt, who
will become a major reference in her later work of the Nineties:
La politique n‟est pas, comme pour Hannah Arendt, le champ où
se déploie la liberté humaine. Le monde moderne, le monde des guerres
mondiales, le tiers monde, le monde souterrain de la mort qui nous agit
n‟ont pas la splendeur policé de la cité grecque. Le domaine politique
moderne est massivement, totalitairement social, nivelant, tuant. Aussi la
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folie est-elle un espace d‟individuation antisociale, apolitique et,
paradoxalement, libre. (Kristeva 1987, p. 242-243)37
Arendt neatly separated the private and the public. She argued that the private should be
protected from the harsh light of the public. The private was not political, because it was based
on the repetitive gestures that sustain the reproduction of life. Politics started only when citizens
appeared freely in public before other citizens and courageously initiated something new. The
event of this “natality” was singular and fragile. Society was leveling as it reduced people to
“what,” i.e. to categories of belonging that could be controlled. Totalitarian states brought this
social control to the maximum. By contrast, politics required the free appearance of a “who”
with her singular life-story before the judgment of other citizens. However, Kristeva argues that
Hiroshima mon amour presents a world in which the madness of private life corresponds to the
massive irruption of the instances of the social into the once (ideally) civilized and free realm of
politics. The madness of the private and the madness of the political coincide.
Kristeva returned to this comparison between Duras and Arendt at the end of her 1999‟s
book on the political theorist. It was the first volume of a series dedicated to singular examples of
the feminine genius that could resist the leveling of mass culture. Arendt appeared as the theorist
of a conception of politics based on “natality” that attempted to defend the soundness of common
sense in the world. Colette followed her as Kristeva‟s homage to the gay spirit of her adoptive
country. The series ended with Mélanie Klein who—according to Kristeva— supplemented
Arendt‟s theorization on politics with the study of the dark abysses of melancholia and the
realization that language can become mad. In fact, the end of Kristeva‟s book on Arendt
develops the theme of the madness of language that already indirectly hinted in her writing on
Hiroshima mon amour. It also most clearly posits the question of commitment that her study on
Duras‟ screenplay repeatedly raised but did not directly solve.
37 “Politics is not—as for Arendt—the field in which human freedom deploys itself. Modern
world, the world of world wars, the Third World, the underground world of death that acts upon us does
not have the refined splendor of the Greek polis. The modern political domain is social, leveling, killing
in a massive and totalitarian way. So madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical and—paradoxically—free
individuation.”
308
According to Kristeva, “Humanité et langue sont les versions arendtiennes de l‟Etre”
(1999, p. 369).38 Arendt‟s conception of Humanity was based on an aptitude for enlarged
mentality and the communicability of a common sense. Therefore, it was strictly linked with
language. “Or la langue ne peut pas devenir folle. C‟est ce que pense Arendt” (p. 369).39 In fact,
the language is what always remained for her of the old Germany, despite the madness of the
Shoah. Only in this way, it was possible for her to ask what could be done. Kristeva‟s question,
by contrast, unites the possibility of a mad language with the question of commitment. “Mais estil vraiment indispensable de penser qu‟une langue „ne peut pas être folle‟ pour continuer à
„faire‟?” (p. 369).40 In fact, language conditions the subjects who inhabit it and carries the
possibilities of their crises. Their discourse is mad from the language. The problem is how it is
possible to continue to act despite the realization that language has become mad during Nazism
and that it can happen again.
Here comes the note that refers to Duras and Derrida (p. 370 n.1). In fact, Derrida
attributed Arendt‟s cult of language incapable of madness to her link with her mother. Only an
imaginary matricide could have severed this link and allowed her to examine the loss of the self
into melancholia as had Duras. This madness of language has consequences in the way in which
commitment and communities can be conceived. Only care can encourage provisional
revelations of the “who” without forgetting their fragility and their constitutive lack of a stable
identity. “Cela implique que chaque „qui‟ est porté par son impossibilité d‟être: néant, crise ou
maladie. A partir de là, le lien à l‟autre, dans cette communauté en effet bien fragile, s‟amorce
comme un soin qui n‟est pas un acharnement du vouloir, mais préserve cependant le miracle de
38 “Humanity and language are the Arendtian version of Being.”
39 “Now, language cannot become mad. This is what Arendt thinks.”
„do‟?”
40 “But is it really indispensable to think that a language „cannot be mad‟ in order to continue to
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la renaissance” (p. 370).41 In this sense, Duras‟ “awkward rhetoric” of madness in Hiroshima
mon amour mercilessly shows the fragility of every identity and opens us to the realization that
care is indispensable to preserve politics in a world in which the boundaries between the private
and the political have been erased.
However, this book on Arendt illuminates also another aspect of Kristeva that has some
consequences for her interpretation of Hiroshima mon amour. It has to do with the building of a
stable world that Arendt expresses with the term “reification.” According to Arendt (1998, p.
301), in fact, “work” and “reification” are “the most wordly of human activities.” Reification
refers particularly to the construction of a world of objects that are made to last. They connect
people like a table connects those who are sitting around it. This lasting presence of objects is
also connected to memory, occasionally also to the memory of political events. In fact, the
American Constitution can be considered a reification of the American Revolution that preserves
it for the future. Without the presence of this stable world of objects around us, actions could not
be remembered for the future generations. Hence, political courage would lose its meaning and
become impossible. Arendt considers that human life is engaged in a permanent process of
reification insofar as it is world-building and aims to construct a res publica. Her problem is not
with the building of the world through work. Rather, it is with the fact that the stable world of
things is threatened with “labor” that is based on repetitive mass production and consumption.
Labor, in fact, does not allow building a lasting environment in which the courageous fragility of
political action can appear.
However, Kristeva reads “reification” as related to “alienation” from the point of view of
Marxist literary theory. In fact, she had been a student of Lucien Goldmann when she arrived to
France from her native Bulgaria. According to her, “reification” is only negative. In her
understanding of The Human Condition, “Arendt met en garde contre les limitations internes à la
41 “This implies that every „who’ is carried by this impossibility of being: nothing, crisis, or
malady. From there, the link with the other--in this actually rather fragile community--begins as a care
which is not stubbornness of will, but still preserves the miracle of rebirth.”
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production d‟œuvres: les „œuvres‟ ou „produits‟ „réifient‟ la fluidité de l‟expérience humaine
dans des „objets‟ qu‟on „utilise‟ comme des „moyens‟ en vue d‟un „but‟: la réification et
l‟utilitarisme auxquels succombe la condition humaine sont déjà en germe dans la poiêsis ainsi
comprise” (Kristeva 1999, p. 121-122).42 Kristeva stresses, moreover, how this reification is
harmful to action that she intends mainly as narration. “Demeure néanmoins le risque immanent
à la parole, qui „durcit‟ ou „réifie‟ la fluidité des signes et peut à tout moment figer l‟energeia de
cette action et de son récit (muthos) dans la finitude d‟un caractère, quand ce n‟est pas dans
l‟idée que l‟histoire serait „produite‟ par tel ou tel „auteur‟” (p. 127).43
In other words, for Kristeva “reification” is negative and goes against the “human
condition” as it does not allow us to perceive that the “who” of narration is fragile and made of
composite drives, and it is always carried by a language that can become mad. “Reification” is
guilty of covering the psychoanalytical realization that the subject has to always cohabit with
personal and historical demons. According to Kristeva, the modern language of madness of
Hiroshima mon amour was precisely fighting reification in this sense. However, for Arendt
“reification” is part of the human condition of “worldliness.” Arendt is thinking of what we can
do in the atomic age in which the meaning of politics is threatened by the possibility of the
annihilation of humanity and therefore of the memory that could preserve and reward courageous
actions. The stable world of “things” is something that she strives to preserve against the threat
of mass consumption and of the gamble of harnessing the energy of the Universe. Without its
lasting character that unites us the fragile spontaneity of politics would be hampered. Therefore,
she does not want to leave the decision of what the world of things should look like only to
42 “Arendt warns against the limitations that are inherent to the production of works: „works‟ or
„products‟ „reify‟ the fluidity of human experience into „objects‟ that one „utilizes‟ as „means‟ in view of
an „aim‟: the reification and the utilitarianism to which the human condition succumbs are already
germinating in this understanding of poiēsis.”
43 “However, the risk immanent to speech persists. It „hardens‟ and „reifies‟ the fluidity of the
signs and it can always fix the energeia of this action and of its narration (muthos) in the finitude of a
character, when it is not in the idea that the story is „produced‟ by this „author‟ or another.”
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scientists and technocratic choices independent to public discussions. Her hope in common sense
and judgment was based also on a reaction against hyper-specialized thought that limits what can
be publicly discussed even when it threatens the human condition.
Arendt bases her view of reification on an ontological thought. By contrast, Kristeva
privileges a psychoanalytical thought that has been formed also through her study of semiology
and her proximity to the literary avant-garde of Tel Quel. However, Hiroshima mon amour was
conceived just before this paradigm-shift. In the last chapter, I showed how the Bazinian
ontology of the photographic image became complicated with the growing abstraction of modern
technology at the turn of the Sixties. However, the fascination with technological objects in the
criticism of Hiroshima mon amour at the turn of the Sixties was also to a certain extent the
concern with the world of things in which we live, which we look at critically but also love.
Moreover, Arendt‟s critique of how hyper-specialization makes the public discussion of
technological matters difficult recalls similar concerns of the paradoxical communities at the turn
of the Sixties. Le 14 juillet, for example, was highly invested in the criticism of how the rise of
technocracy had led to de-politicization. Benayoun‟s essay on Resnais‟ films for this antiGaullist journal targeted the announced nuclear test in the Algerian Sahara as the most evident
example of how a series of technocratic choices had taken over important matters of French
politics without democratic discussion. In fact, the peaceful and military use of nuclear
technology had been going on for years without any democratic control in France. The bomb that
was going to be tested at Reggane was the by-product of the peaceful production of atomic
energy that had since the beginning been geared also toward possible military implications.
Kristeva‟s reading of the language of madness in Hiroshima mon amour has certainly the
merit of stressing the parallel madness that invests history and private life. Her politics of
aimance shows that the private is necessarily political and that Duras‟ writing testimonies of the
language of madness that shatters stable identities and that made the horror of Hiroshima
possible. However, her reading of “reification” as a negative fixation that has to be overcome
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does not capture Arendt‟s concern with the stability of the world that nuclear energy threatens to
undermine, both in its military and civilian uses.
In this sense, Kristeva represents the culmination of the semiological reading of
Hiroshima mon amour that prefigures the more recent scholarship on trauma. But she also joins
Deleuze‟s tendency to undervalue how judgment and common sense can participate in the
preservation of the world of things that make the natality of Arendt‟s politics possible. In the
next section, I consider the implications of Kristeva‟s stance in the reading that her friend
Philippe Forest gave of Hiroshima mon amour in the occasion of a public controversy
concerning the resumption of the French nuclear tests in 1995.
The Forgetting of Past Commitment in Forest‟s Commitment for
the Present
The French novelist Philippe Forest has multifaceted interests that he combines with an
engagement in the public sphere against the nuclear bomb (and more recently, in part, against the
peaceful use of atomic energy). He is an academic who has found in Japanese literature the
strength to overcome the death of his child. He was a regular collaborator in Kristeva‟s journal
L’Infini, the continuation of Tel Quel after the fall of the Berlin wall and the passage to the
publishing house Seuil. He also wrote an “intimate” history of Tel Quel that stresses how
Kristeva‟s proximity to the literary avant-garde illuminates her thought on intertextuality (Forest
1995, p. 258). Forest briefly evokes Hiroshima mon amour in two essays that he wrote at the
middle of the Nineties and that appear in his collection on Japanese literature La Beauté du
contresens. Both essays raise the question of the resumption of the French nuclear tests.
“Quelques fleurs pour Tamiki Hara” appeared originally in L’Infini in the spring of
1996. Forest criticizes the superficial way in which the French television remembered the Fiftieth
anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. The different channels competed in presenting images
of horror. However, their rhetorical choices attempted to contain the non-representable through a
well balanced account of pro and con arguments. Experts and witnesses followed each other in a
313
way that confiscated in advance the possibility of expressing a political criticism. In this way, “le
martyre des victimes ne servit jamais de préambule à un débat portant sur la reprise des essais
nucléaires français” (Forest 2005, p. 38).44 The programming of Hiroshima mon amour in this
context was part of this strategy of containment:
Que désirons nous savoir de l‟horreur? Bien évidemment rien.
Pour un Français, Hiroshima est d‟abord le nom d‟une émouvante idylle
cinématographique, immanquablement programmée par la télévision
comme s‟il s‟agissait là de l‟œuvre la plus juste et la plus forte jamais
suscitée par l‟holocauste atomique. (p. 39)45
Duras was careful to state in her synopsis that it was impossible to talk about Hiroshima.
However, certain images of the film were too eloquent in connecting the sexual pleasure of the
couple with the mutilated bodies of the victims. The repeated screening of the film had also
attenuated the first scandalous feeling of this juxtaposition that had inspired Georges Sadoul‟s
essay on the universe and the dew. The sacrilege has turned into a vague sense of disgust for the
way in which the death of the others increases the sentimentality of the idyll. The disaster of
Hiroshima, in fact, “alimente avec d‟exotiques images d‟horreur le souvenir complaisant d‟une
histoire bien française” (p. 39).46 Forest turns off the television and mentally offers some
flowers to the poet Hara Tamiki who was a survivor of the bomb, fought for hibakusha‟s rights,
and committed suicide in the face of the possible use of nuclear weapons during the Korean War.
He does not write more than what the Japanese-American archives had censored for years, but
his narration in the first person testimonies that the horror of Hiroshima can never be known and
mastered. It can never be justified.
44 “The martyrdom of the victims never introduced a debate concerning the resumption of French
nuclear tests.”
45 “What do we want to know about horror? Evidently nothing. For a Frenchman, Hiroshima is
first of all the name of a moving cinematographic idyll, unfailingly programmed by television as if it
were the most rightful and powerful work ever inspired by the atomic holocaust.”
46 “It nourishes with exotic images of horror the obliging memory of a very French history.”
314
The second essay was not published in the Nineties, even if it might have been read in
some conferences. It expresses Forest‟s position concerning the polemics that opposed two
Nobel-prize winners, the Japanese Ōe Kenzaburō and the French Claude Simon. In fact, Simon
had written an open letter to Ōe in the French newspaper Le Monde of September 21, 1995. He
stated his love for Japanese calligraphy and customs, but harshly criticized Ōe‟s decision not to
attend a conference in France in order to protest against the resumption of French nuclear tests in
the Pacific. Forest sides with Ōe, whom he greatly admires as the author of Hiroshima Notes.
The title of Forest‟s essay is “Les écrivains français n‟ont rien vu à Hiroshima” (p. 41).47 It is a
clear reference to the words that Lui opposes to Elle‟s account of her visits to the museum and
the hospital in Hiroshima at the beginning of the film.
Forest opens the essay with the statement that this debate requires the attention of all
those who in France are interested both in literature and in politics. He then summarizes Simon‟s
position. Simon argued that no Japanese writer could criticize France, when Japanese
intellectuals were still silent in relation to the Japanese legacy of colonial atrocities during the
war. In this light, Ōe‟s embrace of the anti-nuclear fight appeared as superficial. Forest replies
that Ōe has been placing the massacre of Hiroshima at the center of his work since the Sixties
and he has always been in the front line in asking that Japan should recognize its responsibilities.
Simon defends the French right to test the bomb with the argument that pacifism in the Thirties
had led to the victory of Nazism and to the demise of French democracy. Forest retorts, however,
that the comparison is deceiving. The imperative of non-proliferation, in fact, has become more
important than improving the bomb in the face of new menaces such as terrorism and fanaticism.
Forest then refers to Hiroshima mon amour as an artsy film that has become a classic, but
in which Elle is more concerned with the memory of her love story with the German soldier than
with the memory of Hiroshima:
47 “French writers have seen nothing in Hiroshima.”
315
Dans un film devenu l‟un des classiques du cinéma d‟art et d‟essai
français, un remarquable acteur japonais, récemment disparu, répétait à
l‟intention de sa partenaire: „Tu n‟a rien vu à Hiroshima!‟ Il est vrai que la
jeune femme à qui il s‟adressait était troublée moins par les horreurs de
l‟holocauste atomique que par le souvenir de sa liaison avec un soldat
allemand durant l‟occupation. Le désastre d‟Hiroshima s‟effaçait derrière
le désastre d‟une idylle nivernaise tout comme, dans la conscience
française, compte moins le bombardement atomique que la débâcle de mai
1940. (p. 45-46)48
In the same way, Forest argues that French writers have long forgotten that the clock of
History had stopped on August 6, 1945. Therefore, they have seen nothing in the “œuvres
exotiques” of Hara Tamiki and Ōe (p. 46).49 The same was true for Bernard-Henri Levy. The
intellectual, in fact, had joined the debate commending Claude Simon for supporting the French
nuclear tests, after his commitment in the Resistance and for Algeria. His choice showed a new
direction for French culture. According to Forest, however, Simon‟s stance showed mostly the
provincialism of French writers who are not ashamed of becoming the mouthpieces of
patriotism. This demise contrasted with the critical function that Ōe defended in all his works
and that he addressed particularly against the discriminations of minorities in the name of
Japanese nationalism.
Forest‟s essays come at a time in which the memory of the bomb started to fade, also due
to the death or the old age of several survivors. It was also a time when a greater awareness of
extent of the collaboration in favor of Vichy had been shattering the myth of a united country in
the face of the foreign invader. His support of Ōe is sincere and commendable, and it is a good
example of the rebirth of commitment among French literati and academics. His politics of
aimance recalls Firk for the personal bases of his political commitment. In fact, the loss of his
daughter led him to his interest in Ōe, who started to write about Hiroshima also to ease the
48 “In a film that has become one of the classics of the French cinema d’art et d’essai, a
remarkable Japanese actor recently dead, repeated to his partner: „You have seen nothing in Hiroshima!‟
It is true that the young woman to whom he addressed these words was less troubled by the horrors of the
atomic holocaust than by the memory of her relation with a German soldier during the Occupation. The
disaster of Hiroshima disappeared behind the disaster of an idyll in the Nièvre in the same way as—in the
French conscience—the atomic bombing counts less than the defeat of May 1940.”
49 “Exotic works.”
316
suffering for his disabled child. However, only one thing is missing. Forest does not remember
that Hiroshima mon amour is not only a film d’essai, but it was also a film that was particularly
troubling for French patriotism at the turn of the Sixties, both in the Gaullist and “National
Communist” sense.
Most importantly, Resnais‟ film was also conceived as a protest against the first French
atomic test in Algeria. It was read as a criticism of French technocracy. Forest‟s forgetting
rejoins here the eternal sunshine of the spotless French mind. In fact, few people remember how
the development of the peaceful use of nuclear technology after the war was geared also toward
the production of the first French bomb in 1960. By contrast, examples of forgetting abound. The
historian of technology Gabrielle Hecht noticed “a rhetorical erasure of the original French
system” even among nuclear technicians. In Hecht‟s words, “in 1996 an employee of EDF‟s own
archives insisted to me that there had been no nuclear program before 1970!” (1998, p. 329).
The famous sociologist Alain Touraine is another example of this forgetting. In fact, he
was one of the participants of the debate on technology in the early Sixties. He also studied the
anti-nuclear protests at the turn of the Seventies as a continuation of 1968 in their ability to
articulate different political issues beyond party control and to develop new forms of
engagement. However, his book on the anti-nuclear movement postdates the beginning of the
French peaceful nuclear program to after the explosion of the first French nuclear test in the
Sahara. “This programme had begun slowly in the sixties, in France as elsewhere, because
electricity from nuclear power could not compete with the low price of oil” (Touraine, Hegedus,
Dubet, Wieviorka 1983, p. 18).
These widespread memory voids must guide us in our evaluation of Forest‟s essays.
Forest is certainly right in asking to listen to the Japanese authors who can help us to remember
Hiroshima. He is also right in asking us to think about actual historical circumstances and
concrete political choices rather than to base the criticism or the approval of Japanese authors on
a vague appreciation of the beauty of their culture. However, his forgetting of French history
limits the range and the effectiveness of his argument against the atomic tests that could have
317
also started a deeper discussion about the technocratic connection between peaceful and military
use of nuclear technology in France. An historical awareness of the committed meaning of
Hiroshima mon amour—beyond the vague appreciation of its role as a classic—could have
helped him in this direction.
In this final chapter, I have shown how Forest‟s interpretation of Resnais‟ film as a
fundamentally disengaged classic comes at the end of a long line of forgetting that started with
the filmological neutrality of the Brussels seminar and increased with the semiological turn of
film criticism. The question of technology and of political commitment fell outside the
acceptable borders of what made sense in an academic language that attempted to develop its
competence. Film Studies had to compete with Literature in developing nuanced critical tools for
narrative analysis. The post-structuralist return of commitment in some major French authors of
the Eighties offered a possibility to correct this trend. Forest is close to Kristeva in his strong
awareness that History has presented itself in Hiroshima with a madness that no political or
mediated justification can contain. His politics of aimance sees the parallel between his personal
sufferance and the madness of the modern world. However, the loss of an ontological outlook
did not enable him to fully recuperate the concern with the world of things that surrounds us and
with the judgment that can allow us to protect it.
318
AFTERWORD
This book followed two different speeds. The argument required the reader to fly by
Concorde over several decades of criticism of Hiroshima mon amour. I have shown that political
commitment—articulated around the themes of love and technology—was a strong component
in the early readings of Hiroshima mon amour. It partly disappeared along the way, due to the
simultaneous influence of the academization of Film Studies and to the rise of narrative
semiology. It finally returned front scene through the mediation of semiological linguistic
concerns. However, this return was internally troubled with a forgetting of the immediate
political and aesthetic context within which the film was made. In fact, the focus on conflicting
temporalities and on the language of madness had clouded the concern with judgment and with
empowering the audience toward a commitment in the world of things that an ontological view
of cinema still allowed.
The concrete texture of the book, however, is the fruit of another temporality. I asked the
audience to grasp the geological structure and the unexpected hillocks of the criticism of
Hiroshima mon amour step by step, slowly hiking on a tortuous mountain path. I followed the
detours, the fractures, and the convergences of the discourses of love and technology through
their successive transformations. I started from the militant resurgence of Surrealism in the
Fifties and crossed the glacier of semiology where commitment finds its way through the
abstraction of information technology in a fragmented world. The torches that guided me from
afar were Derrida’s twin conceptions of the politics of the peut-être and the politics of aimance.
Through them love and technology appeared as strictly connected to the successive elaborations
of new forms of commitment. As in every mountain path, I stopped to greet different hikers
whom I met along the way. I paused and listened closely to the stories of some of them—the
warmest, the kindest, and the most interesting. In this Dante-like scenario, I interrogated their
ethoi that stood out over the crises of their times, but that were also strictly linked to them. I
found echoes and debates in their words that reverberated through the whole field of film
319
criticism and resonated in various directions of cinematic theory. This education in listening is
for me the most important part of my study. It is also my idea of what a rhetorical study should
be.
I am not only indebted to Walter Benjamin for this contrast between the bird’s-eye view
from a plane and the attentive strolling on a tortuous mountain path. His “pearl diving” has also
been a major methodological choice in my study. It has guided my selection of the texts to
examine and of the themes on which I have focused. “Pearl diving” enables selecting moments
that present in a visible form the concretion of the dialectical tensions of a particular time. It also
enables us to see how art works change through time in their meaning, because the articulation of
those tensions is understood in a different way. My choice to focus on “pearls” of love and
technology has helped me to insert Hiroshima mon amour into the trajectory of the paradoxical
communities of the peut-être at the turn of the Sixties.
But it has also allowed me to read how the articulation of love and technology continues
to work in different ways in the most interesting critical reception of the film even after the
paradigm shift of semiology. Finally, the concern with the forgetting that goes hand in hand with
dialectical progression is itself a Benjaminian theme that has helped me in writing this study. In
fact, poststructuralist thought enables us to envision a different conception of commitment in
which the questions of love and technology are connected to the way in which language controls
us. Commitment can be achieved only through language, through interruptions of nets of
knowledge/power or accepting to bear witness to its always possible madness. However, the
undervaluing of judgment and the forgetting of the circumstances that the film originally
addressed signal a disempowering of the audience that my study has attempted to correct.
A concern with the rhetorical situation guided my research and informed both its interest
and its limitation. The problem with any study of context is—of course—that it is potentially
infinite. Therefore, my stylistic problem was how to find a balance between the convincing
impetuosity of the muddy torrent full of debris that characterized Giovanni Battista Vico’s
rhetorical writing of History according to Benedetto Croce and the “writing with the eraser” of
320
Resnais’ film. I have found a partial solution to the problem in adopting Barbara Biesecker’s
view of the rhetorical situation that enables focusing mostly on the articulations between
different issues that bring a new political identity to the fore. Still, it was an arduous and almost
impossible task. It is for the reader to judge if I have succeeded. The American audience that
might not be extremely familiar with the rhetorical situation of France at the turn of the Sixties
might find Chapter Three difficult to follow, for its high degree of condensation. In fact, I
present various faces of the discourse of technology in their different relation with politics
without hiding the situated complexity of this articulation. I trust that the other parts of the work
should not be so challenging even for readers with different interests and specializations.
The invaluable chance that the rhetorical situation provides is double. On the one hand, as
a tool developed in the framework of Rhetorical Studies, the “rhetorical situation” has never
been applied to a classic of cinema d’art et d’essai like Hiroshima mon amour. Since its
inception the “rhetorical situation” presented a certain embarrassment in dealing with the atemporality that the true work of art is thought to reach. Also Biesecker’s dialectical reframing of
the concept did not really address the problem. Consequently, the examples of situated speech
acts that rhetoricians tended to analyze were always less challenging in this sense. By contrast,
my analysis of the criticism of Hiroshima mon amour provided me with the opportunity to mark
a step forward into the rhetorical interpretation of an artistic product, even if at the second
degree. I read it, in fact, through the eyes of the critics who either recognized it as a
representative creation of their times or who looked back to it for suggestions on how to address
the crisis of commitment that faced them.
On the other hand, my rhetorical study intends to be a stimulus toward a more nuanced
understanding of the context also on the part of film studies scholars. It undermines two myths
that have hitherto hindered this fruitful development. The first is the univocal representation of
the French Communist critic Georges Sadoul as a sort of “Zhdanovist villain” who is supposed
to show the degenerations to which a content-based, directly political approach to cinema
criticism can arrive. I strongly reject this narrow interpretation of Sadoul’s personality and work.
321
His criticism of Hiroshima mon amour is multilayered and extremely interesting if the cultural
background of the reader is rich enough to fully reinsert it in its situation of crisis and personal
reinvention. Therefore, my study is a claim for film studies scholars to raise their level in the
analysis of the terrain that their discipline claims and to avoid the trap of reductionist shortcuts.
Rhetoric can offer its help in providing the tools that enable listening more closely to the political
implications of cinematic criticism and theory.
The second myth that my book challenges is the uncontested prevalence of a decontextualized conception of the auteur in Les Cahiers du Cinéma in the decades between
Bazin’s death in 1958 and the development of film studies as an academic discipline in America
in the Eighties. My analysis of the Cahiers’ roundtable on Hiroshima mon amour in 1959
reduces this belief to its true proportions. I show that at the turn of the Sixties the articulation
between the auteur and the discourse of modern technology had already challenged Rohmer’s
classical conception of the auteur on which this a-historical myth is probably based. This
discovery undermines the narrative according to which American film studies originally derived
its de-contextualized approach from the Cahiers. If they did, it was a reactive development that
systematically silenced the most important aspects of the vital relation of the Cahiers with their
times that was the key of the journal’s transformations and success. Also in this case, the humble
mole of rhetoric provides film studies with the chance to revisit its own past and to find in it
more porous and fertile grounds on which to construct their future in collaboration with other
disciplines.
My study focuses particularly on the French reception of the film, with some brief
excursions into other countries such as Belgium and the United States. As in Resnais’
documentary on the French National Library, I bring my fragment of truth to the concert of other
scholars who can complement it with their work. One of the directions that I could not develop is
the careful and comprehensive study of the essays and book chapters that have been published on
Hiroshima mon amour in America. My brief reading of the contributions of Janice Etzkowitz
and Debbie Glassman is far from having surveyed the terrain of what American scholars brought
322
to our understanding of Hiroshima mon amour through their studies. Therefore, I wish that some
other scholars could carry on the task to research how the reception of Hiroshima mon amour
influenced the construction of film studies as a discipline in the United States.
Another direction that would be worth exploring is the relation between cinema and
rhetoric. I could suggest two trajectories that appeared through my study but that I could not
fully develop in this book due to its close focus on the criticism of Hiroshima mon amour. The
first is the line that goes from Gilbert Cohen-Séat’s conception of the filmic-fact in terms of
Aristotle’s rhetoric as persuasion, through Edgar Morin’s magical projections and identifications,
to Pasolini’s “unwritten language of reality.” The personal connections of this line can help us to
illuminate the rhetorical influence over Deleuze’s theory of cinema. The second line goes from
the Situationists’ view of how the self-destruction of the spectacle of cinema leads to daily life to
Julia Kristeva, through the influence of Guy Debord on Tel Quel and Henri Lefebvre’s presence
on Kristeva’s dissertation committee. They might both become the subject of future research.
Finally, one last remark can help the reader to understand the rhetorical situation of my
study. After a long preparation, it has been written mostly in the month that followed the
earthquake and the tsunami in Japan that has raised again the threat of irradiation of the civilian
population. My study has been successful if I could show that Hiroshima mon amour and the
history of its criticism help us to address these concerns of the present.
323
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