who is bobby dylan wrote:If memory serves me well, Kael's objection is not to mixing the footage, but to the fact that she felt we were supposed to accept the fake footage as being real, when it is clearly fake. Whether this was Resnais intent I cannot say.
Not to dredge up an old debate, but I just watched this tonight, and not only is it obvious that Resnais intended to incorporate staged footage in the opening, but it's explicitly mentioned in the woman's monologue. That whole opening is about the (im)possibility of understanding from a distance, and the distancing of stagings and recreations is one aspect of that -- again, explicitly mentioned in voiceover. But this opening also makes the point that even documentary cannot really facilitate true understanding -- this woman, like all of us, is trapped by her own perspective, and any efforts to achieve an alternate perspective will necessarily fall ludicrously short of incomplete. Which is not to say that Resnais is advocating in this film that we not make the attempt -- merely that we understand just how limited our capacity for understanding other perspectives really is.
Anyway, what a phenomenal film. After the remarkable first 15 minutes, which really feels like a continuation of
Night & Fog, the rest of the film subsumes its dialogue on Hiroshima and war to a secondary level, where the aftermath of the war exists primarily as metaphor within the love story. Actually, there are two love stories here, one told in flashback, and both exploring the nature of love, of relationships between nations, and the personalization of history to the level of individual lives. For this woman, World War II was not the Holocaust or the atom bomb or the battles fought throughout Europe -- it was simply a love affair that ended with bloodshed and madness. At the same time, if the war indirectly ended one affair for her, it also brought her a second one.
Resnais' film encompasses a wealth of ideas, though it's all done very poetically and elliptically, so that it also hits very hard on an emotional level. It's about the horrors of the nuclear age, and the ways in which political animosities are refracted in individuals, and the difficulty of understanding the effects of political forces on the international level. And it's also, despite its complexities, incredibly anti-polemical, except perhaps on the subject of atomic weapons (and if you can't be polemical about that...). Eric Rohmer says, in the Cahiers roundtable, that this is "a film about which you can say everything," and this seems very true of this complex, enigmatic film. Really a masterpiece.
