Hiroshima mon amour (1959)

France / Japan, 90 minutes
Director: Alain Resnais
Writer: Marguerite Duras
Photography: Michio Takahashi, Sacha Vierny
Music: Georges Delerue, Giovanni Fusco
Editors: Jasmine Chasney, Henri Colpi, Anne Sarraute
Cast: Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada

From the title and into the early scenes, Hiroshima mon amour, a collaboration of director Alain Resnais and writer Marguerite Duras, gives the impression it's going to be a radically political type of story about nuclear anxiety and/or nuclear guilt. But that is eventually left behind, as the swirling mists of rampant prolific gray arty style slowly give way to two beautiful people talking, and the picture turns into something like an extended therapy session. Therapy not for us but for Elle (Emmanuelle Riva), who has a devastating and psychologically complex past to live with, many of whose issues she is still acting out. Besides, if it was going to be a political movie it probably would have made more sense to call it Nagasaki mon amour.

Here's the breakdown. Elle is a French actress making a film in Hiroshima about peace. Lui (Eiji Okada) is a Japanese architect and native of Hiroshima who missed the bomb (though his family did not) because he was away fighting the war. Lui (a masculine pronoun) is two years older than Elle (a feminine pronoun). (The names are a convenience via IMDb, never used in the movie. Some sources prefer to call them "She" and "He.") They are in their 30s, beautiful, middle-class, and materially comfortable. During the war, when she was 18 and living in the small French city of Nevers, where she was born and raised, Elle had a German boyfriend. Thus, for whatever reasons, maybe even coincidence, we see Elle as drawn (innocently or otherwise) to her nominal and/or former enemies. I should mention that in many ways Hiroshima mon amour doesn't have that much of a narrative presence, so I might already be dwelling too much on it.

Last Year at Marienbad (1961)

L'année dernière à Marienbad, France / Italy, 94 minutes
Director: Alain Resnais
Writer: Alain Robbe-Grillet
Photography: Sacha Vierney
Music: Francis Seyrig
Editors: Jasmine Chasney, Henri Colpi
Cast: Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoeff

It's tempting to fix the blame for the admittedly art-damaged Last Year at Marienbad on Michelangelo Antonioni and L'Avventura, which was released to wide acclaim (and derision too) the year before and which the following year, 1962, would be declared in a Sight & Sound poll of critics to be the second-greatest film of all time ever made. (Cooler heads have since prevailed somewhat and the 2012 version of the poll has L'Avventura at #21.) Both pictures are similarly aimless and pointless, er, I mean, ambiguous and ethereal, but the fact is, for all its artifice, I get a kick out of Last Year at Marienbad, and have so far remained mostly resistant to L'Avventura.

I use the word "artifice"—I'll even extend that to L'Avventura (though it is actually much more naturalistic)—and not the word "pretension," which is the one many may prefer. To be sure, I see the problem. Last Year at Marienbad is full of artfully posed mannequins wearing tuxedos and gowns, floating wanly about a mysterious French chateau with surrealistic geometric gardens, a wheezing cheesy organ providing soundtrack, and with no obvious point or even discernible plot beyond the cover story of a resort vacation: "The servants were mute," we learn from the randomly murmuring and often redundant voiceover narration, which is not always that informative (unreliable narrator, thy name is Last Year at Marienbad). "The games were silent, of course. It was a place for relaxation. No business was carried out, no plots were hatched. No one even discussed any topic that might cause excitement. There were signs everywhere: 'Silence' ... 'Silence.'"

Frankly, that sounds like a nice vacation to me, but for others, particularly of a fashionable European early-1960s Heroic Era of the Art Film bent, I'm sure it signifies a certain existential hell.

Night and Fog (1956)

Nuit et brouillard, France, 32 minutes, documentary
Director/editor: Alain Resnais
Writers: Jean Cayrol, Chris Marker
Photography: Ghislain Cloquet, Sacha Vierny
Music: Hanns Eisler

Made in the mid-'50s, Alain Resnais's documentary often feels strangely inhibited, as if 10 years were still not time enough to think about, or talk about, or show, the evils of Germany's concentration camp system. Even the abbreviated length, just over half an hour, suggests the delicacy, the unwillingness to engage—the sense it is somehow sacrilege even to acknowledge the terrible reality. The visible signs of evil are limited, if blunt, which is part of its point. The footage from the '50s, shot on color film, has the bland look of road trip home movies. The camp sites that it visits have been abandoned to nature. The buildings of the camps still stand but they are crumbling and unused. Grassy nature is reclaiming them, softening the sharp lines. But the memories are still searing. They always will be. Documentary film and photos in black and white alternate with these inoffensive scenes, offering up images of the horrors and humiliations we know, or think we know: corpses in railroad boxcars, lines of naked prisoners standing in roll call formation, mountains of sorted personal effects, decapitated heads in baskets, corpses bulldozed into the ground. Written and narrated by Jean Cayrol, a survivor, the film is at pains to imply more than it says. It's a matter of decorum—what it implies, after all, is unspeakable. It struggles every second to walk the line between dignity and the impulse to pule at atrocity. It is dense with information and allusion, the images playing off the narration and the facts disclosed or shown, reminiscent in that way of Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (Marker a cowriter on Night and Fog), Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle (where the ideas are abstracted), and of course Marcel Ophuls's Sorrow and the Pity. By 1969, when The Sorrow and the Pity came out, the dams were bursting. There was more willingness to consider at length the monstrous events—that documentary is over four hours long. In another 15 years, Shoah would more than double that. Less than 10 years more, Steven Spielberg was up for Oscars for a four-hour narrative treatment, Schindler's List. The enormity of that part of Nazi history, the so-called Final Solution (die Endlösung), has sunk in slowly. Some even deny it altogether. Night and Fog is only incidentally informational—it's intended for people who already know the basic outlines, whose lives were directly affected, whose trauma is evidenced most by the mute countenance. It lives on as an evocative symbol of the difficulty of responding to great wrong: with barbarous yawps of rage, yet restrained down to seething fury by the survivor's impulse not to talk about it at all, not to become the ranting thing they already hate. Civilized man is rational man—we cling to that. The images, particularly toward the end, grow more horrifying, as the world discovers the camps after World War II. Everything in this documentary passes, is soon over, except the unease it produces, which lasts a long time—hopefully, long enough. But frankly I'm as dubious about that as the filmmakers themselves, who are clear in the end. Brutalizing anxiety, and unending skepticism for human capacity to do the right thing, are the legacy of the Nazi regime, and thus necessarily of this short documentary.