Destiny in Hiroshima Mon Amour and Before
Uploaded by spootyhead on Feb 19, 2007
Destiny and Choice in "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and "Before the Rain"
The passing of time and life’s events have always posed man with deep questions. How do yesterday’s moments help set what happens today, and how does the actual transition in time occur? Drawing lines between past, present and future help us to do this just as distinguishing between the individual and society makes us all different. These two separate examples merge together as life is a continuum rather than blocks of events, and individuals act separately from society, however, what each individual does on their own is what makes up society. In the end, all the actions we take personally and socially and the events that occur comprise our lives and fill the ongoing movement of time. In the two films, Hiroshima Mon Amour and Before the Rain, we get a very good portrayal of these ideas. We see how events and decisions can alter lives over time, and how they can show repeated lessons and themes. We see how each individual part is a key to society and what happens on the global level is in part determined by the actions of individuals. Through the visual worlds and structures of experience in both of these films, we get two views of how the lifecycle passes with time, repeats itself, and puts each of us into our own place in society. As is written on a wall in London in Before the Rain, “Time never dies; the circle is not round.”
Both films start by establishing visual worlds to give us a context for each story. Hiroshima Mon Amour opens with a love scene between Elle, the Parisian actress who is in Hiroshima shooting a film about peace, and Lui, a Japanese architect who is rare in Japan in that he speaks French. We go from shots of them to shots of the city and the surrounding scenery. The camera pans over war imagery as well, which sets a tone for the movie. These visuals suggest the film will show us how symbolically the scenery and the war find some type of median. During the camera shots, the viewer is engaged in a very repetitious dialogue of “you saw nothing in Hiroshima, which is mentally captivating to us, but also very psychological to the characters. It also gives us a different time perspective to what we are seeing. Other background worlds...