How to evaluate the film Love in Hiroshima?

Love in Hiroshima, written by marguerite duras and directed by Allan Ray Nye, is an outstanding representative of "Left Shore School" movies, and also occupies an important position in the world movies. It is known as "an exploded spiritual atomic bomb" and "a milestone in the transformation of western movies from classical times to modern times". This achievement is largely attributed to his "stream of consciousness" style, which explores people's inner world in a staggered way of time and space.

What is worth discussing is how the creator uses the lens to transform the deep memory, imagination and all kinds of subconsciousness into movies, which makes us impressed on the screen.

First of all, we should start with the script, which is also a major feature of later generations' comments on "Left Bank School" movies, namely "literariness". Duras, the screenwriter of this film, is a woman with great personality and a controversial writer. Her writing style is peculiar and changeable, gorgeous and beautiful, and it has been coiled for a long time like an aria. At that time, she was 45 years old, divorced, lost a son and was expelled by law. The feelings forged by these experiences naturally dissolve into the text and become the background color of the content. Specifically, although Love in Hiroshima is limited by the genre of "script" and does not have a large number of delicate psychological descriptions like Lover and Dam Facing the Pacific Ocean, it still shows the complex, contradictory and subtle psychological state of the characters, especially the heroine, through its stage instructions and ambiguous dialogue.

For example, when talking about her hometown, she said, "Neville is such a place that I dream the most at night and think the least during the day." There is an old saying in China, "I think about it day and night". Where you dream the most at night, how can you miss it during the day? But she said no, she may be suppressing her feelings and choosing the latter among memory and forgetting. A short sentence brilliantly illustrates the heroine's contradictory attitude towards Neville.

Such sentences can be seen everywhere. Duras completed the transformation from psychological language to written language with women's sensitive and unique words, and what we are going to see next is how written language became the film language, as Spike Lee wrote in the shooting diary of "Follow One's inclinations": "It is interesting how this script evolved into a film about race relations."

The original script was divided into five parts. In order to facilitate narration and understanding, on this basis, I divided the film into the following scenes:

1. Indoor bed, mainly for sex and Hiroshima.

2. Balcony, dressing table, etc

3. Outdoor, corridor and street

4. Mass drama

5. Study room

6. Cafe

7. The hotel where the woman stayed

8. Station-Another Cafe

9. ladies' room

With the deepening of their communication, the heroine's feelings generally went through such a process: curiosity and pity for Hiroshima, indifference to Japanese men-gradually recalling the past, sadness and anger, beginning to fall in love with the hero-a lot of memories and even hysteria, attachment to the hero-inner peace, hesitation about whether to be with the hero. Separately, there are two main lines: the previous memories and the change of Japanese attitude towards men in Hiroshima. Originally it was very clear, but it was a bit obscure because it was mixed with a lot of non-narrative content. But when it comes to this, it is still very easy to understand.

The cruelty of war, the humanitarian concern for life and the praise of love have appeared in many movies, but in the scene of 1, the director combined the shooting experience of guernica and Night and Fog (the former used a lot of fade-in techniques to create a dreamy feeling; The latter uses parallel montage to compare the past and the present), which can be said to be an unprecedented cross-editing of sex scenes and postwar Hiroshima scenes, and it lasted for 13 minutes, resulting in another stronger audio-visual effect.

Of the five scenes described in the opening, three fade-in and fade-out scenes are used, and the music is slow and the rhythm is slow. As the dialogue unfolded, the camera immediately switched to the scene of a building in Hiroshima. In the following dialogue and lens, we know that this is a hospital in Hiroshima. The first appearance of "flash cut" here will give people a very abrupt and wrong feeling. However, this is only the beginning of the director's training for the audience. In order to make the audience understand, he also explained it with dialogue. After many such "flash cuts", when the viewer is already familiar with this method, he will even omit the narration. The most classic example is scene 2, where a woman enters the room from the balcony with coffee and sees a man's hand. At this moment, the picture suddenly switches to another place, the other hand. (As shown on the left) Although we don't know whether the latter is a part of Hiroshima refugees or something else, at least we are used to it. This is still very important for a film that is not very popular.

In the scene of 1, when the camera began to turn to Hiroshima, the documentary-style camera moved faster and faster, and the camera jumped more and more. Hospitals, museums, ruins, and squares have reached the narrative climax when they "parade". Then, the rhythm slowed down and entered the heroine's dream of "forgetting". Later, in the "OTA River" section, seven faded shots were used as the opening echo. The last four long motion shots (especially the first one, which lasts for more than 30 seconds) pass through alleys and streets, and the shots drift, and the shooting rhythm and editing rhythm are accelerated, which is definitely different from the smooth, beautiful and quiet visual experience in the fifth scene of "Girl on a Bicycle". The former seems to lead the audience to appreciate the pleasure and the desire to gradually penetrate into a mysterious world, while the latter makes us feel the urgency and happiness of a first-love girl to go to her lover's appointment. People who have experience in watching movies can also infer from the front that we are going to enter the heroine's heart, because in the previous dialogue, the questions were basically male, and her answers were very long, and those lines were ambiguous and difficult to understand.

Sure enough, next, the two started a relatively "normal" conversation, and the man tried to find out "personal information" such as her identity and origin. Neville, who is of special significance to women, also appeared here for the first time. The director gave her a close-up of her face for about a minute. At this time, the use of eye lamps and desk lamps has not been given anything else, and it is not easy for us to read anything else from her faint smile. What the audience sees at this time is still a very general scene.

By the second scene, we had fully understood the identity of the hero and heroine and their current situation, but we were as curious about this French beauty as men and wanted to know more. In the following conversation, "Neville" appeared for the second time, which started the first time that women were unhappy. In this way, the story has a gimmick to continue reading. In addition to being a lover, men have always played a more important role in "reminding". He kept asking questions, which brought back memories of all women.

As shown in the above two pictures, we can see that the man always has his back to the audience, and he can't see his expression. The light is very dim, which makes him leave the impression of "neutrality" and "objectivity". Women, on the other hand, occupy most of the picture, and it is clear at a glance that the director intends to guide the audience to see the key points. In this way, we know her as well as this man.

Later, in the fifth class, with the deepening of memories, the woman began to fall into the quagmire of reality and illusion, and entered an almost psychedelic state. The director also used a lot of dissolving shots here. If my statistics are correct, it should be five. It's worth mentioning that when the camera turned from reality to the past, it all switched neatly and went straight back to Neville. When they moved from Neville to Hiroshima, except for one shot, the rest used the method of fading in and out, which shows that this woman seems to have exhausted her strength and slowly returned to this world from her memory.

The climax of the heroine's memory appeared in the sixth scene. She talked about the death of her German lover and began to cry, which was the only time in this movie. Duras's original text is "She is nostalgic for the past. This time he meditated alone and couldn't hold her. " "She became delirious and stopped looking at him." In this scene, the woman's psychology is extremely painful and can't tolerate others. The director used the technique of "separation" on the stage of drama. The hero and heroine sat opposite each other, and a beam of light overhead came obliquely. Therefore, men are completely hidden in the dark, as if the whole coffee shop is the stage for this woman to tell her past. When she came to me, she even hid herself in the dark. (as shown on the right)

Let's take a look at how the camera shows the change of women's attitude towards men. 1 At the scene, the man begged her to stay, but because she didn't take it seriously, she didn't agree. She just flatly refused and said she would leave tomorrow. At this time, the woman dominated, and the director gave her an upward shot. For the man who is at a disadvantage in their relationship, this is a downward shot. One is superior, and the other is a little artificial. The contrast between the two is outstanding and it is easy to distinguish.

With the development of their relationship, the woman felt more and more lonely and helpless. She began to fall in love with this Japanese man, and her previous determination to return to France gradually wavered. In the fifth scene, the woman went back to the hotel, washed her face, and then went out into the street, curled up in a corner like a homeless child. At this moment, the man came. He stood looking down at her. This shot is an expensive shot, and the man looks down at the scarred woman like a god. But his attitude towards her is sincere, and there is no difference between the advantages and disadvantages just now, so he has a slightly fatalistic feeling.

Finally, after a long time of thinking, the woman gradually recovered her reason and began to calm down, so at this time the two were basically equal. "This time he went to her-for the last time-but kept a distance. From then on, she was inviolable, "the script wrote. Let's look at the picture again: two people standing under the same roof, the left and right space is very balanced, and the light is sufficient. You can't see that they are deliberately biased to that side. The whole structure is uniform, except for the gap caused by height.

These are just a few obvious examples. There are many other scenes and scenes with charm in the film, so I won't list them one by one.

In addition, in the film "Love in Hiroshima", the beautiful and beautiful soundtrack also played a considerable role. One thing to mention briefly, this film is composed of seven theme songs, and the author is too shallow to delve into it. However, its music is flexible, and it can switch freely between pictures and dialogues, or use music to set off feelings, or make sound transition, all of which are well done. There are also two superb actors, which also add a lot of color to this film.

But I also think that this film, as Duras said, is "a novel recorded on film". Its literary significance exceeds the film itself to some extent, and the influence of words on readers is greater than that of lens performance. Some critics say "a movie that is extremely boring, grandiose and full of the most disgusting literature". Although the language is mean, it makes sense. Moreover, because "the time switch is too abrupt and the sense of fracture is too strong".

However, despite its shortcomings, Love in Hiroshima still reached the rarest peak in realistic works with its obvious political stance and strange and novel form, which may also mark a turning point in the history of movies. (georges sadoul in French movies)