Hiroshima mon amour Reading Order

Hiroshima mon amour (1960) by Marguerite Duras is the text of the film directed by Alain Resnais — published as a ciné-roman, a screenplay with directions for reading rather than filming. The film, and Duras's text, follows two characters known only as 'Elle' (a French actress filming a peace film in Hiroshima) and 'Lui' (a Japanese architect) over a single night and day in 1957. Their present encounter becomes inseparable from their remembered pasts: she remembers her wartime love affair with a German soldier in Nevers, his death, her humiliation at the Liberation; he connects her memory to the destruction of Hiroshima, which he survived. The famous opening — 'Tu n'as rien vu à Hiroshima' / 'J'ai tout vu à Hiroshima' — establishes the film's central argument: that memory and forgetting are inseparable, that to say 'I have seen' is also to say 'I am already forgetting,' and that the experience of loss (the dead German lover, the bombed city) cannot be transmitted but can only be circled, repeated, mourned. Hiroshima mon amour is one of the most important works of the French New Wave in its collision of private memory with public historical catastrophe, and Duras's text — read without the images — has a spare, ritualistic beauty that stands entirely on its own.