Watched Hiroshima Mon Amour (Hiroshima, My Love) for the first time; it broke my heart.
Without form, technique; content cannot be adequately conveyed in art. Without content of course, it all becomes an exercise in style; pretty and glossy but hollow. Without form (and this does not mean only style), content becomes a high minded bore, tedious even if worthy.
Resnais' film with its exceptional framing, exquisite sincerity, commitment to justice; and the marriage of an extremely unique dialogue/literary process together with the possibilities of cinema blew convention apart. Even though we are nearly 50 years, or 60 years after this film premiered; its form seems shocking even now. Perhaps especially now when cinema seems to have stagnated.
Thematically, the film explored obliquely (and therefore all the more powerfully), the desire to destruct, the equally powerful thread of sexuality intertwined with that destruction, the impossibility of comprehending what is essentially unimaginable even to those to whom it has happened, and the audacity in comparing another's tragedy with one's own minute tragedy. Not making it equal in the process, but understanding that in its most absolute essence, true suffering is shattering wherever it is.
And finally, grief and memory and memory and grief; locked in an interminable cycle. Stunning.
Without form, technique; content cannot be adequately conveyed in art. Without content of course, it all becomes an exercise in style; pretty and glossy but hollow. Without form (and this does not mean only style), content becomes a high minded bore, tedious even if worthy.
Resnais' film with its exceptional framing, exquisite sincerity, commitment to justice; and the marriage of an extremely unique dialogue/literary process together with the possibilities of cinema blew convention apart. Even though we are nearly 50 years, or 60 years after this film premiered; its form seems shocking even now. Perhaps especially now when cinema seems to have stagnated.
Thematically, the film explored obliquely (and therefore all the more powerfully), the desire to destruct, the equally powerful thread of sexuality intertwined with that destruction, the impossibility of comprehending what is essentially unimaginable even to those to whom it has happened, and the audacity in comparing another's tragedy with one's own minute tragedy. Not making it equal in the process, but understanding that in its most absolute essence, true suffering is shattering wherever it is.
And finally, grief and memory and memory and grief; locked in an interminable cycle. Stunning.
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