By Allan Appel
As one of the few Japanese students in his high school in New Hampshire back in 2004, Yoshitaka Yamamato felt a social pressure to fit in. So during a history class debate, he took the position that the U.S. was justified in dropping the atomic bomb on Japan to end World War II.
Two decades later, now a professor of East Asian Studies at Yale, Yamamato feels differently, and not a little embarrassed by his youthful position.
That memory emerged during a spirited discussion of Hiroshima Mon Amour, the classic French New Wave anti-war film that was screened Thursday night at the Ives Main Branch Library.
Twenty people gathered in the community room in a program sponsored by the New Haven Free Public Library, the City of New Haven Peace Commission, and the Greater New Haven Peace Council to mark the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan by the United States.
These groups, as they do every year, convened a memorial vigil by the flagpole on the Green Wednesday to mark the Aug. 6, 1945, bombing of Hiroshima.
This Saturday, Aug. 9, people concerned about the persistent presence of nuclear weapons in the world are invited to gather at 10:45 a.m. at the Amistad statue by City Hall to mark the precise hour the atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki.
Yamamoto’s opinion today — that ultimately the bombing was not justified and that the question is complex on both sides — was hardly the only take on Alain Resnais’ tone poem of a movie (with a haunting script by novelist Marguerite Duras) in a discussion led by library staffers Catherine Egan and Seth Godfrey.
Using documentary footage of a Japanese filmmaker, Resnais’ 1959 film (following his own heart-wrenching documentary of the World War II concentration camps, Night and Fog, in 1956) was the first feature to show the horrific damage to human bodies and the extent of the destruction, as a backdrop to what is, nevertheless, primarily an obsessive love story.
The love story has a French actress, played by Emmanuelle Riva, on location filming an anti-nuclear war movie in Hiroshima while she tries with hopeless frenzy both to forget yet also to re-experience her own wrenching affair with an occupying German soldier in her native Nevers at the end of the war.
Disgraced by her liaison with the enemy, with hair shaven, she arrives, by bicycle, in Paris on the day the Hiroshima bombing is reported in the press (and the hair of the women of Hiroshima begins to fall out).
The film portrays a later 24-hour affair between the French actress and a Japanese architect, whose family was killed in the bombing of Hiroshima while he was off fighting in the war. That Resnais sets the film in Hiroshima, a scene of living oblivion, enables him to bring together art’s two greatest hits, so to speak — its major and perennial themes, Love and Death.
All this kind of glancing, parallel, remembered material from 14 years previous is told in artfully managed flashbacks, giving birth to a new kind of cinematic narration so that the arts writer Jason Farago, of The New York Times, wrote that the French New Wave cinema “was reborn, in 1959, from radiation.”
“I like the love story contrasting with Hiroshima [bombing],” said Mary Compton, a Peace Council member. “How people forget everything. You love, you forget … it’s about the effort to suppress memory.”
Julie Brazile, a first-year graduate student in Environmental Studies at Yale with a self-described background in poetry, said she saw the parallel of “the intensity of love and the intensity of war” in the film.
In both cases, she argued, you want to move past, you want to say, in effect, “never again,” but it is again, and again.
Then she broadened her view and said, “It’s happening in Palestine. The cycle is going to keep going.”
Yet another viewer of the film, a therapist, said that Riva, the film’s actress, portrayed a case of clinical madness.
Is war, especially nuclear war, madness by another name?
“The film asks,” Yamamoto said, bringing the discussion to an end, “what does ‘an end of war’ mean? As with the war in Gaza, it asks, ‘Who does it end for when a war ends?’”
Seeing Hiroshima Mon Amour for a second time, he concluded, was “a completely new experience.”
Catherine Egan has curated a small exhibition of photographs and documents pertaining to the bombings that you can view on the first floor of the Ives Main Branch Library.
Click here for more information about Saturday’s Nagasaki vigil.
