MYOFNF #16: Hiroshima, Mon Amour (dir. Alain Resnais, 1959)

It's fitting that the first shot of this film is of the entwined bare flesh of two lovers. First of the Holy Trinity of the French New Wave (along with Truffaut's 400 Blows and Godard's Breathless), Alain Resnais' Hiroshima, Mon Amour signaled a shift of emphasis in the film world towards earthy sensuality and personal intimacy. Resnais' film helped usher in an era of naturalistic characters, expressive camera movements, and a "subjective" editing style that reflects the preceptions and memories of the characters. Instead of the traditional role of "building a scene" through editing, the film uses editing to break up continuity, to take the viewer into the mind of the protagonist by cutting abruptly between scenes, jumping back and forth through time, from stock footage to historical reenactments to images from the character's distant past. These sort of tricks are old hat by now, but it's striking to see them used in a film from the fifties, and it serves to highlight the role of the second world war in creating the artistic and psychic headspace of the past sixty years.