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Cinematic Free Indirect Style: Represented Memory in Hiroshima mon amour

These opening lines of Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour inaugurate the film’s focus on vision and highlight its distrust of vision as a form of knowledge. She, a French actress, a tourist about to depart, wants to see Hiroshima. She wants to know the city, the remains of its traumatic history; and the monuments it has erected to preserve that history. He, a Japanese architect living in Hiroshima, knows that she cannot “see” the city, cannot know its past through her vision. And so he disputes her vision of Hiroshima; he disputes her knowledge of his city and his past. “From the first moments of Hiroshima mon amour, therefore, the central epistemological question of the film is laid out for us: how and what can we ‘know,’ through the epistemological instrument of the gaze” (Craig 27). Film narrates by “seeing” scenes and images, and it narrates with sound and with editing. Hiroshima mon amour interrogates not just seeing but also cinematic agency and narration, especially narrative representation of memory and history. This film narrates memory, and it narrates history. In the fabric of its narration, however, in its use of cinematic free indirect style, Hiroshima mon amour creates moments of “plural narration,” moments of dual or multi-visioned seeing where narrative agency becomes uncertain, and the film thereby dramatizes the difficulty of capturing history and memory through narrative. Hiroshima mon amour tells the story of the brief love affair between an unnamed Japanese architect played by Eiji Okada and Emmanuelle Riva’s unnamed actress on her final day shooting a film that takes place in Hiroshima. The film opens with a