{"id":30189,"date":"2026-06-06T15:50:15","date_gmt":"2026-06-06T14:50:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=30189"},"modified":"2026-06-06T15:50:15","modified_gmt":"2026-06-06T14:50:15","slug":"a-review-of-the-classic-1959-film-hiroshima-mon-amour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=30189","title":{"rendered":"A review of the classic 1959 film &#8220;Hiroshima, Mon Amour&#8221;\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It took me many decades to catch this French-language film set largely in the Japanese city that was the first to suffer the atomic bomb and, by then, I&#8217;d visited Hiroshima and its Peace Museum twice, so the work had a special resonance for me.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This was the first feature film by Alain Resnais, previously a documentary film maker, and indeed it started out as a documentary and uses documentary footage from the 1945 nuclear attack. But, at heart, the is a romance, short but passionate, between a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Elji Okada), both with their own traumatic memories of the war &#8211; in her case, shown in repeated flashbacks &#8211; and both now ostensively in happy marriages. The power of this haunting work comes from the contrast between horrific events of the end of the war and the tenderness of this ill-fated relationship. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There is a lot of dialogue and, in the woman&#8217;s case, monologue and it is not surprising that it was a woman who wrote the screenplay, Marguerite Duras, and that she received an Academy Award nomination for her work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It took me many decades to catch this French-language film set largely in the Japanese city that was the first to suffer the atomic bomb and, by then, I&#8217;d visited Hiroshima and its Peace Museum twice, so the work had a special resonance for me.&nbsp; This was the first feature film by Alain Resnais, previously [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30189"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30190,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30189\/revisions\/30190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}