Hiroshima, Mon Amour

[This is not the most thorough reading. . . and my understanding of Deleuze has yet to be worked out. . .]

Resnais' Hiroshima, Mon Amour explores a new cinematic approach to the progression and integration of dispersive elements in space and time. The film itself speaks at once of the differential and unifying elements that compose our spirit. Resnais evokes the spirit in two different, but convergent ways. In one way, it seems, Resnais works with what Deleuze would call "liquid perception," and in a second sense, sometimes separately and others simultaneously, with a maximum quantity of movement. A film so radical as this does not necessarily seem to invoke the same systems or perceptions that would come from the "French school," but it nonetheless uses these two characteristic modes in its own way. The film claims these elements in order to speak of the subjects’ (i.e., the events of Hiroshima and the event of loss in the face of love) unjustifiable and unachievable reclamations. It is impossible to realistically form an image or narrative that embodies the essence of these issues/events. What one can do is attempt to recognize these events in abstract, artificial, and poetic terms. This, if anything, extracts from these events a sense that we can consider these experiences, yet at the same time, we can never accurately describe their realities. The truth is that both of these events (Hiroshima and the woman's loss) work in more reconstructive terms. For Hiroshima is a blank slate, the events are not rendered first hand, they are secondary, just as the story is secondary, it is artificial; and, the woman's account of the events is secondary, it is in relation to artifacts and news/broadcast reels. For the woman is also a part of this blank plate. Her inability to move beyond her bereavement tends to leave her at a loss, an emptiness. This is a gap that she fills with the things of the world around her. She replaces her (past and present) understandings with "remembrances," with objects and locations, with acting (becoming someone else). She claims that she knows Hiroshima through the objects she has seen (presumably at the museum, and other monuments or spaces in the city); the man however denies this. She does not know Hiroshima, she knows the artifacts of Hiroshima. Her tendency to engulf these objects, and further, to be swallowed by these objects and images is expressed in the cinematography of the film. Here the idea of liquid perception comes into play. When she says "I am afraid everywhere," Resnais cuts to shots (close-ups) of objects and spaces around her. There, we move "to a liquid state, where the molecules move about and merge into one another," and where her fears are embodied in these objects, the entire experience gains this auratic spiritual element. Deleuze says of liquid perception, that "by putting the center of reference itself into movement, the movement of the parts [is] raised to the set (ensemble); that of the relative to the absolute; that of succession to simultaneism" -- this is precisely what her character embodies, a movement toward simultaneism. She is the blank center, and yet, as abovementioned, everything she encounters she engulfs (and vice versa), she becomes; it is this characteristic that ties her blankness to the image; it is a tendency toward simultaneity, even as she becomes her “remembrance-images,” -- she is simultaneously past, present, and imagined past -- she is objects, and she is space. In addition to that, we experience this simultaneity all the more when we encounter a maximum quantity of movement in the image. Resnais maximizes the slowness, the fastness, and the “direction-ness” (max. friction) of the image. Think about the scene where they are walking through the Hiroshima memorial parade (which is a scene in the film within the film), this movement swallows the two characters into the elements that oppose their direction. Or, there are the scenes where the present (of the film) is nuanced by a slowness of objects (and models) to a maximum capacity so that we feel this slowness (emptiness). It is also a maximum slowness (emptiness) that exists in order to maximize a fullness of the image. This opposition creates a sort of rupture of the image. I am thinking here of the scene where the woman is sitting on the bed and she screams to forget. Her scream shatters the fragility of the successive images of slowness that came before it, those images which quantitatively added up in order to build this qualitative fragility, all of course in order to present this rupture; because if she would have screamed without the existence of these nuanced subtleties (the slowness) such an event would not have created a rupture, it would have been a stand alone scream, an impotent wail. This rupture in turn unifies these “maximum” elements because of their reciprocity for one another; and furthermore, because of her reflexive stillness (in the image of her), she is inscribed by the (quantitative) movements and the images around her, which unifies her presence, and the story, in this movement toward simultaneity (and reciprocity). It is much like the (fragmented) embrace that entangles the two in the beginning, fragments come together in an abstracted unification...

[Edit - More thoughts:]
Also, there seems to be an occasional move toward a gaseous perception. The best example is when Resnais cuts between images of (locations in) Hiroshima and images of Nevers. These city elements cut in and connect any-space-whatevers, which allow us to freely associate one image with the next at any-point-whatever...

Furthermore, when Deleuze speaks of any-space-whatevers he speaks of the post-war condition of "deconnected or emptied spaces," saying, independent of the cinema there was "the post-war situation with its towns demolished or being reconstructed, its waste grounds, its shanty towns, and even in places where the war had not penetrated, with its undifferentiated urban tissue. . ."

And in post-war cinema there is "a crisis of the action-image: [where] the characters were found less and less in sensory-motor 'motivating' situations, but rather in a state of strolling, of sauntering or of rambling which defined pure optical and sound situations. The action-image then tended to shatter, whilst the determinate locations were blurred, letting any-spaces-whatever rise up where the modern affects of fear, detachment, but also freshness, extreme speed and interminable waiting were developing. . ."