The Big Screen (53 page)

The first passage ends. The sound level changes, from night to day, from reverie to life. It is the morning after the night of love and talk. She says she is from Paris. And before that, from Nevers, in the Loire region. A little later, the man is sleeping in the hotel bed. She is on the terrace, in the sun, wearing a kimono and drinking a cup of coffee. She comes back into the room and sees his arm, twisted a little oddly the way he is positioned. There is a cut to another arm at a similar angle, long ago, but not so long ago. In the war, when she was younger and had longer hair, in Nevers, she was in love with a German soldier. But he was shot dead,
his
arm was caught, and in her wretchedness she was abused, her hair chopped off, her face marked with dirt, or was it excrement?—the things that were done to collaborators. In Nevers.

In that first glimpse, we are shown only a fragment of Nevers—but we have been trained to watch closely, so we see it, we feel it. But as the war goes on, we get more of the past. We see her riding her bicycle on the wooded country roads hurrying to meet her lover, and there is a tumbling lyric tune on the soundtrack, written by Georges Delerue, quite different from the Fusco piano and the pulsing reed refrain we heard in the night. It's a lovely interlude, like a movie moment. We see her with cropped hair, shut in a cellar as punishment, licking at the walls in her distress.

There was a widespread fear in the late 1950s that came from the state of the cold war and the way in which two great powers were testing larger and larger bombs in what was called the atmosphere. This spoke of dangers to us all that we could not see or measure, but which were poetically delivered in the images of bodies that might be decomposing (or being remembered). Just the use of “Hiroshima” made this a film about war, even if it had no battles. The name Hiroshima is like a placard pushed in our face or a button pressed in our brain. “Auschwitz” is the same. And if the war is rendered as simply the story of two lovers broken apart, one lesson of that is why did anyone think you could make relevant films about war that put all their stress and imperative on courage? Is that an American habit? Other countries think of war in terms of luck.

As
Hiroshima Mon Amour
progresses, the conceit builds that the two characters, Lui and Elle, are really named Hiroshima and Nevers. They are the crises in the woman's life and they are the evidence for an assertion—it seems simple to utter, but it is profound—that human beings can relate such things. They know to scan “now” and “then.” They have names and they live in time. You can still see
Hiroshima Mon Amour
, and Riva and Okada look as young or as perfect as they did when they shot the film (in 1958). But he is dead now—he was in Teshigahara's
Woman in the Dunes
; he died in 1995 of a heart attack. Riva is still alive. She is in her eighties, and perhaps in her way she looks like the old Japanese woman in the film. If you know the picture, you know what I mean. Later on, the lovers pursue each other in the city, and there is a moment when they come to rest on a bench with an old woman sitting between them. They talk. They are filmed. But it is a mystery as to whether the old woman was cast as an eavesdropper—or was she simply there and did Resnais ask her to wait while the scene was filmed? I love the moment because it is not clear whether she is fictional or documentary. But she looks at the actors as if they might be aliens who have elected to intrude on her existence.

It isn't just nostalgia, or a sense of history, that realizes
Hiroshima Mon Amour
is more than fifty years old now. It isn't just that the world has found other things to worry about beyond the half-lives in radioactive fallout. Hiroshima is still a given, less a place than an event, a screen and a scream, thrust into our discourse as something that might deafen us or crush us. The youthfulness of these lovers means more now, now that the actors are leaving us, and their passion can only become more touching as each year passes.

Hiroshima Mon Amour
puts certain matters pertaining to the Second World War in their place, and asserts that in war, people will behave badly, or privately—no matter the moralizing gloom you offer; that they will attend to their own lives and petty affairs and be timid in most things except for being in love. Resnais and Duras came together in a passionate collaboration—without having to be in love with each other—in which they tell us, look, listen, see what film can do. Their discoveries still move us. Yet I am not sure today that anyone could deliver a picture with such cinematic immediacy.

In its insistence that Elle has seen nothing in the city of Hiroshima there is Resnais's admission that documentary can do only so much—then fiction is the last way to answer abiding questions. And it is part of fiction's recovery of our world that two drastic explosions—the shot that killed her German lover and the bomb that achieved ten thousand degrees at ground level—can be passed over and made quiet. Those impacts are no more potent than their signs of loss. But war should not be allowed to bully or intimidate us until we believe its explosions are all-important. In the long passage of memory they are just sound effects, so trivial compared with the way people grow older and sadder.

The 1959 film remains. Its light has not wavered yet, though that may be thanks to the mercy of black and white and the way film emulsion has a life of its own. It looks and sounds as fresh and questioning as ever. Begin the picture, and its haunting night returns you to the underground river that flows between Nevers and Hiroshima. Yes, there was a war once that linked the two places, but the war was only the superficial bond. The more enduring tie was the way lovers touch and the woman remembers. The thing she is most afraid of is not a bigger bomb than Hiroshima but the chance that she may forget. The thing she cannot bear is the thought that life might be without links or significance in the dark.

Sometime in the magic of 1958–59, François Truffaut remembered his friend Jacques Rivette saying to him, “We're going to make films, we all agree, we're all going to make films.” You can guess the exuberance of the moment, the musketeer-like contract. Truffaut was born in Paris in 1932. Once the word
autobiographical
had been applied to his first feature film,
Les Quatre Cents Coups
, it became an axiom of foolish media that Truffaut had had a rough upbringing and that, really, the wolfish young actor he had found, Jean-Pierre Léaud, was playing him. I'm sure such dreams were exchanged, and Truffaut never really abandoned Léaud, even after his limits as an actor had been exposed. But every kid thinks he has a hard time. Not everyone puts it to such use.

Truffaut dropped out of school; he had an adoptive father; he was a semi-vagrant; and in 1946 he met André Bazin (the Spencer Tracy to his Mickey Rooney). Bazin (born in 1918) was a film critic and writer, the organizer of cine clubs, and a benevolent if not saintly figure. He talked to Truffaut; he kept in touch. François entered the army and was imprisoned for desertion. Bazin got the kid released, and he and his wife gave Truffaut lodging. Bazin found him a writing job at
Cahiers
, where Bazin was founder-editor. That's where, in 1954, the young man published his attack on the old guard in French film—and before his own pictures, Truffaut was one of the best critics we have ever had. At
Cahiers
he was part of a gang—Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Luc Moullet, Jean Domarchi, Charles Bitsch—people you haven't heard of. And names you may know, the “we” Rivette referred to: Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Rivette himself.

Cahiers
was founded in 1951. Its essential rival,
Positif
, began in 1952. One fiery magazine must have a rival to say it's talking rubbish. And that contest was sustained by several things that simply did not exist in, say, Los Angeles, the proclaimed capital of moviemaking: a great range of cinemas reviving old films, all of them versions of the Cinémathèque Française, an archive and a theater for the history of film, founded in 1936 by Henri Langlois and Georges Franju, and a hotbed of wartime conspiracy in the effort to keep its treasured prints out of German hands. It had been a private enterprise until 1945 but then it became protected by the state. Why not? If a culture requires the keeping of publications in a library of record, should it not preserve its films? Moreover, since 1943, Paris had had a school, the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques. IDHEC, as it was called, was so lofty it would decline Jean-Luc Godard as a student—so he went to the movies instead.

The school was for filmmakers, of course, if they weren't watching or making films, but it was a measure of a culture that took it for granted that film should be discussed, as theory and practice. It was the case sometimes in 1959–60 that the nouvelle vague was depicted as a sudden flourish of youth. It was, but the youth had been raised in a culture that believed in the cinema. By contrast, as the same French kids reckoned, America had invented the mainstream movie but never taken it seriously or embarked on a proper cultural conversation.

It's not that Truffaut, or any single figure, led the way. The first feature film from the group was Claude Chabrol's
Le Beau Serge
(1958). A year earlier, Chabrol and Eric Rohmer had collaborated to write
Hitchcock
, the first attempt to convey the genius of that director, and one of the earliest critical books on film. Chabrol had two films in 1959,
Les Cousins
and
À Double Tour
. Jean-Luc Godard made short films,
Tous les Garçons S'Appellent Patrick
(1957) and
Charlotte et Son Jules
(1958), which used a young actor, Jean-Paul Belmondo. Rivette had made a short,
Le Coup du Berger
(1956), and he had plans already for a fictional panorama of Paris beset by a paranoia that came from McCarthyism, the blacklist, the Bomb, the Communists and an unshakable belief that the world was like movies, especially Fritz Lang movies. That would be called
Paris Nous Appartient
, but it wasn't done until 1961.

Every pot was bubbling. In 1957, Truffaut made his own short,
Les Mistons
, about a gang of country kids observing a teenage romance with casual cruelty. The young actress Bernadette Lafont was the star, and the first object of Truffaut's habitual, gazing question “Are women magic?” No one really doubted his answer. Truffaut might be the harbinger of the new in media commentary, but he had instincts that came straight out of movie tradition, such as getting involved with most of his actresses.

But in October 1957, Truffaut married Madeleine Morgenstern, the daughter of Ignace Morgenstern, a Hungarian Jew who had come to Paris, survived during the war, and become a respected distributor in French cinema—with most of his work serving the old guard Truffaut had attacked. But he got on with Truffaut and said he would finance a feature film for him to the extent of 400 million old francs. Claude Chabrol's debut film had also relied on family money. Always, the money has to come from somewhere—if you can get it.

Not that Truffaut intended an extravagant film. He wanted to make a movie about a kid (fourteen or so) in Paris, bored with school and on the edge of delinquency, neglected by parents—a slice of life. You could not simply opt to direct a film then, even with a friendly father-in-law. Truffaut had to prove to the unions that he was competent. There had to be a script. For that he enlisted the aid of a novelist and screenwriter he knew, Marcel Moussy, and for his crew he got Henri Decaë, an experienced cameraman (he had shot
Bob le Flambeur
for Jean-Pierre Melville and
Elevator to the Scaffold
for Louis Malle), and Philippe de Broca as assistant director. In June 1958, Truffaut would write to Moussy:

Jean-Pierre Léaud was found as an “unmanageable” kid of fourteen. His screen tests weren't overwhelming, but Truffaut liked the sharp-faced mischief in Léaud and he began to see ways of making the character, Antoine Doinel, more than an imprint of himself. André Bazin died of leukemia in November 1958, just as Truffaut started the shoot. The film would be dedicated to Bazin.

It is a film with new names and faces, but it is conventional, too, full of fondness for an awkward adolescent. That warmth extends to Paris: the New Wave loved their city and helped make a cult of it that includes
Moulin Rouge
,
Inception
, and
Hugo
—as well as
Boudu Sauvé des Eaux.
Decaë managed to shoot in bad light—in winter, at twilight, using fast film stocks that got a viable image (just like
Sweet Smell of Success).
The film quoted from Jean Vigo, Renoir, and even Ingmar Bergman. It was funny, sad, tart, and wry and it had what would become a Truffaut signature: strong sentiments cut short out of shyness or fear. It was another sign of that modern worry: Can the movies really be so moving without turning maudlin or trashy?