Hiroshima, Mon Amour

Hiroshima, Mon Amour is a film about the futility of the struggle to see the other side of the same coin, the inevitable destruction resulting from this narrow point of view, the rebirth of new hope, and finally the knowing that this cycle will repeat itself.

The scene opens with Emmanuelle and Eiji, in Hiroshima, symbolically coming to life on the screen, survivors of a death many years earlier brought about by our inability to see the destructive nature of our willingness to bend others to our cause no matter what the consequences.

In Emmanuelle's case it was the illicit love of a German soldier during the second World War in her home town of Nevers when she was still a young girl. Her subsequent humiliation and imprisonment in her parent's celler so embittered her, the people of Nevers assumed her mad.

Despite her promise to never forget her lover's caress, years later, she knows her struggle has been futile; that the nature of things is to forget, and for cycles to repeat. Her lover is she dreams of the most (unconsciously), but thinks about the least (consciously).

Her visits to the museum in Hiroshima, like her struggles to remember, mean little to those who visit. For the tourist, the destruction of 200,000 people are viscerel at best, eliciting tears but perhaps little else. What the they walk away with are but souvineers or trinkets, and never the sense of the enormity of the constant struggle it would take on their part to prevent another Hiroshima. For most of us Hirsohima and its lesson have been long forgotten.

Even if we could understand the enormity and join the struggle, the natural cycle would overwhelm them all. Other Hiroshimas will occur. No matter the effort