Destruction and Reconstruction at The New Hiroshima Hotel: an analysis of Hiroshima, mon amour (1959)

By Anael Jordan Ortiz

The film explores the unrepresentable. When Alain Resnais embarked on the project, he first intended it to be a documentary, but decided that a documentary would be insufficient to capture the unimaginable physical and psychological pain and trauma of the atomic bomb. More importantly, the fiction form allowed Resnais to explore what Hiroshima continues to represent. 

According to scholar Godlieve Mercken-Spaas, it's about “internalizing an eternal discourse, that of the Hiroshima catastrophe (244).” By enlisting French novelist Marguerite Duras as screenwriter, Resnais captured the excruciating process of remembering, and created a piece that explores the limits of filmic representation of that destruction (French, 1). At the heart of the piece, Mercken-Spaas identifies the central themes of destruction and reconstruction, explored through the brief but intense romance between a Japanese architect, played by Eiji Okada, and a French actress working on a film about peace in Hiroshima, played by Emmanuelle Riva. This romance plays out primarily at the New Hiroshima Hotel, a symbol of the reconstruction of the city of which the Japanese architect is directly involved in, and the setting of the psychological destruction of the French actress, referred to as Elle, that leads to liberation from her trauma.

The emergence of the hotel in the modern metropolis

The setting of the hotel for the film’s extramarital encounter is significant in highlighting the theme of destruction and reconstruction of memory and trauma. Here, I contrast the New Hiroshima Hotel in Resnais’s films with author and literary critic Henry James’s analysis of the hotel in American cultural perception, drawing also from literary scholar Frederic Jameson’s observations on the emergence of the metropolitan city, capitalism, and the consequential restructuring of the private and public space. 

For Henry James, the hotel emerged as an urban landmark akin to the museum, library, city hall, and hospital. The organizing of an ever-expanding public space into a metropolitan grid-like structure in a nascent industrialized society pushed the private space into strict confinement. Jameson agrees with Henry James in identifying the reconfiguration of urban spatial boundaries during the emergence of the industrialized metropolitan city as having a deep cultural impact. This impact, or rather process, is what Jameson calls the Bourgois cultural revolution, in which the holy trinity of Modernity (individuality, rationality, and capitalism) spearheaded the dissolution of abstract space (unmapped, unorganized, non urbanized) and birthed a new temporal and spatial realm “of measurability and Cartesian extension, as well as of measurable clock time, a realm of the infinite geometrical grid, of homogeneity and equivalence (Jameson, 373).” 

With this structuring and organizing of urban space came what literary scholar Despotopoulou calls Henry James’s ‘hotel-spirit’, which describes how the hotel reduces subjects to “a current number, like that of the morning paper, a specimen of a type in course of a serialization.” The hotel-spirit enforces conformity, uniformity, and standardization. Yet, the trick to the hotel was to juxtapose this turn-of-the-century’s’ fixation on progress. James’s heroines could “travel extensively for recreation, marriage, and business, hotels (...) simulated domesticity at a high or low price, frequently function as sites of temporary stay and repose or even as permanent albeit precarious homes (502).” Resnais’s heroine, if we can call her that, also seeks refuge in the hotel with her lover, however hers is not a time of repose or recreation, and more an escape from marriage than a negotiation towards it. These things seem remnants of a bygone era in a metropolis that Henry James would recognize. The hotel in the rebuilt Hiroshima is vastly different from that in James’s stories, and it stands sterile and solitary in a metropolis destroyed by perhaps the ultimate end product of Modernity that gave life to the metropolis to begin with. The age of James’s grand hotels is over, and the hollowness of the hotel can only be filled by the memories of those that take refuge in it.  

Imagining the hotel in the postmodern, postatomic city

In Hiroshima, mon amour, the reconstructing of the city weighs heavily on those still reliving past trauma. The hotel exemplifies the very thing the two protagonists desire to escape—what Destopoulou identifies as “an irresolvable conflict between progress and mindless repetition, pluralism and homogenization, mobility and stasis, freedom and captivity (503).” The post-Hiroshima world emerged as one wholly different from Henry James’s: cities were now more precarious than ever before, and so a new interpretation of this new precarious city was required. This new interpretation is what Resnais brought to the table by bringing the theme of memory into it. 

Memory refuses the temporal and spatial realm of the modern world (that birthed the hotel) because it cannot be ordered and mapped (not for lack of trying), as the film proves. A person is at their memory’s mercy, subject to its whims, illusions and intrusions. Above all, memory is transient, and for Elle, its transience leaves her with the fear of simultaneously forgetting and of reliving the past. The hotel is a space imbued in transience, with its wide, white hallways and staircases. As Elle glides through the New Hiroshima Hotel, she regrets telling her Japanese lover, referred only as Lui, or He, that she fell in love with a German soldier who was shot on the day her hometown Neveres was liberated. The regret speaks to the fear of both remembering and reliving the past, as well as the fear of forgetting such a love. The reconstructed city, with the hotel as its symbol provides a space for both the recovered memory and the fear of it to play out, safely encapsulated in a temporary, impersonal space. Transience also characterizes  James’s imagining of the hotel, but in a different way. It was contextualized by external circumstances, nameley, the societal. Resnais’s imagining of the hotel, however, is characterized by the internal circumstance, or the psychological. In the film, the destruction and reconstruction of the societal has already taken place, so what is left is to witness the destruction and reconstruction of the psychological.

Nevers and Hiroshima, the birthplaces of each protagonist, hold much significance as they are also the sites of their respective traumas. Nevers, however, exists only in the past, as part of Elle’s memory, while Hiroshima is in the present. The destruction of Hiroshima precedes the tragedy in Nevers within the narrative, but the film’s narrative reveals Nevers after the destruction and reconstruction of Hiroshima. Indeed, the film jumps back to the events in Nevers, which represent Elle’s personal destruction. It hones in on the idea that trauma is a continuous cycle of destruction-reconstruction-destruction, etc. The films’ traveling through space and time, notes Mercken-Spass, eventually lands the viewer in “a-temporal and a-spatial Hiroshima...an internalized Hiroshima and not [sic] a specific historical event or place (246).” 

Visually, this is aided by the New Hiroshima Hotel, seemingly void of any other guests or staff. Elle goes up and down sanitized stairs and through empty, hollow hallways. The hotel is stylish and quite modern, one of the many buildings recently rebuilt. The bulk of Elle’s recollections occur outside the hotel, or in the hotel lobby. In this way, the hotel becomes a clear representation of how the mind negotiates with memory and trauma: the room is a sanctuary, with a balcony and furniture, and personalized things like watches and half empty coffee cups. A place of comfort and security, where two married lovers meet. The hallways and stairways, on the other hand, are cold and void—a neutralized space where memory is not actively recalled, though it still informs the present events and actions a person takes. The hotel lobby, the most public space in a hotel, is where memory can take free reign and spill over and into the streets. Resnais manages to imagine the hotel in a postmodern, postatomic city by making it a symbol of the psyche instead of society, the way Henry James and his contemporaries did. This correctly does justice to the impact of the atomic bomb in the world’s cultural psyche.

Works Cited

Buys, Anthea. “HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR AND THE NECESSITY OF OBLIVION.” English Studies in Africa, vol. 52, no. 1, May 2009, pp. 50–60, https://doi.org/10.1080/00138390903172526.

A deeper analysis of memory and narrative in the film, through a psychoanalytical lens.

Despotopoulou, Anna. “Monuments of an artless age: Hotels and women’s mobility in the work of Henry James.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 50, no. 4, 2018, pp. 501–522, https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2018.0040.

For an elaboration on Henry James and the 'hotel-spirit'.

Jameson, Fredric. On Signs, John Hopkins University Press, pp. 373–383.

A tough but rewarding read about the organizing of time and space in the 17th-18th centuries.

Mercken-Spass, Godlieve. “Destruction and Reconstruction in Hiroshima Mon Amour.” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 4, 1980, pp. 244–250.

Norelli, Clare Nina. “Scores on Screen. the Obvious Necessity for Memory: Music and Memory in ‘Hiroshima, Mon Amour.’” Notebook Column, MUBI, 9 July 2018, mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/scores-on-screen-the-obvious-necessity-for-memory-music-and-memory-in-hiroshima-mon-amour.