H Story Nabuhiro SUWA
A filmmaker Nobuhiro Suwa decides to film his hometown , Hiroshima, to the remake of another film, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Alain RENAIS. That Beatrice DALLE chosen to play the role played by Emmanuelle RIVA. In this remake, an experimental film comes very dense in its design and content, which reveals both a lot about modern cinema and how to capture not only the history but in general the history of cinema in particular, on how to film the scene, bodies and faces. In fact a remake, the director gives a very personal tone to his film. Because it is more of a remake of Hiroshima Mon Amour, but to film a filmmaker and his actors doing the remake of this film. The filming process and device of staging, shooting, directing actors, are the subject of diegetic film.
In fact, the entire film takes us into a kind of vertigo of staging, where different devices are entangled, stand out, multiply indefinitely, putting us in front of a palimpsest composed of different scripts in the film. First is the real scene remake of Hiroshima mon amour, those where we see Dallas and other major player repeat the same scenes RENAIS on dialogues of Marguerite Duras. Then there is the real film sets, shooting scenes false (false because the director makes us believe that this is a true making off without staging, so that only the staging of a fake making off) the real scenes SLAB playing herself and another actor walking the streets of Hiroshima, false scenes of crisis within team, etc.. Adjectives true and false draw here a line of boundary between the artificiality of fiction and over-artificiality of filming fiction. They put the viewer in front of an interlocking staggering staging, different diegetic levels, which seem to build up and reduce the perception of reality and the filmed subject of the film, that is to say Hiroshima itself. But the brilliance of the staging is not just an exercise in style, because by interposing between the subject of the film and the audience the device of cinema, the filmmaker joins the truth or reality in another way, many stronger and more poignant.
It is also true to the spirit of the original film. RENAIS because no method other than by a diversion of the gaze. The sentence punctuated Hiroshima mon amour, "You saw nothing in Hiroshima", meant the inability to actually see the horror that defies classification, the character and put the viewer in front of this aporia of view and therefore make sense, trying to maintain healthy distance between horror and perception, not to transform it into a spectacle. Only through love and singular focus on two bodies that can penetrate the meaning of what happened in Hiroshima is possible. Because the two bodies so alive, so beautiful Emmanuelle Riva and her lover of Japan, the grain of their skin that fills the screen from the first frame of film can only refer to all other hollow body disappeared, all beings buried under the dust radioactive, all the flesh burned in one fatal moment. The dialogues and purified by Marguerite Duras obsessive also allowed to lead the viewer into a bewitching rhythm, a kind of litany of memory and pain, a kind of magical incantation where every word uttered, whispered in the privacy of love opposing the prevailing discourse of lamentation and commemoration. Hiroshima, Nevers, the names of these two cities strangely mark the viewer's memory, because it does not mean only the geography of the horror but the topography of the intimate unhappiness. Both cities made face-to-face through cinema, with no hierarchy between them except that of telescoping of memory and personal experience of human tragedy.
face of this diversion of the gaze and to shift the direction established by CGS and RENAIS, SUWA had to invent his own method to capture a reality overused and even more elusive than 40 years passed between the two films. In my opinion, he did brilliantly in marrying also the aesthetics of postmodern cinema. If the modern cinema, including Hiroshima Mon Amour was one of the key moments, was characterized by the de-framing, deconstruction, the willingness to fight the perception of reality too directly by shifts aesthetic, postmodern cinema is characterized by about -frames, the interlocking levels of staging, setting abyss of the cinema by the revelation of the shooting device. Abbas Kiarostami is one of the leaders of this trend. From Close Up to Ten, it has continued to develop its own abyss movie by revealing its mechanisms, by blurring the lines between the false and true shooting, by putting himself on stage. In the case of SUWA, this surcadrage, this staging in the staging, the true-false film that is more of a remake is in fact a reflection film of saturation of meaning and images of modern Hiroshima and beyond, all the wars and the abomination that they generate. In a beautiful scene of the film, the actress Beatrice DALLE (Dalle I say the actress when she plays the role of film actress Dalle H Story and Dalle's character when she plays the role of Emmanuelle Riva in Hiroshima mon love) a visit modern museum housing works on Hiroshima. While the museum guide explains the companion SLAB meaning of these abstract works, kind of fitting geometric scholar and superfluous, SLAB turns and walks away into the depth of field. Purified in a single sequence, the filmmaker refuses any talk of Hiroshima, any direct attempt to seize it by means of art or worse, the discourse on art. He prefers to put the viewer in front of vertigo staging, in which the names of Hiroshima, is rarely spoken yet ubiquitous. Because we constantly ask: Where is Hiroshima what do we see this city once battered, what happens to its people? Only in the last scenes of the film we see another actor SLAB and wander the streets of this modern city, which seems to bear no trace of the massacre. Instead, many young people play music, a band of merry thieves will celebrate life, this city might be New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sao Paolo ... So, between this story so remote in time, the city who survives him and the audience, the filmmaker's body interposed Beatrice DALLE and his own body (as SUWA is also a character in the film). If the film has resonance with a distant history Hiroshima, it helps to consider the issue of representation in cinema, through the acting, light, sounds and movements. By overflow of fireworks, he takes us into the essence of cinema which is neither a treaty in history, nor a photo story, or a sociological analysis of a drama. Suwa does indeed offer no alternative definition, but its editing, its slow tracking shots through the corridors of the hotel where the team filmed the remake, some care in the filming which is far from a pose, stylization extreme scenes, reveals negative in a proposed film, a concentrated essence of modern reality it reveals the presence of things that depicts, and often it is the body that operates presence. By putting the body of Beatrice DALLE the center of his filming, the director has bet on the alchemy that occurs between the body and actual film, he gambled that SLAB reveal superimposed another thing that showed Emmanuelle Riva. Gamble taken as something else absorbs SLAB, reflects light in a different way. Tattoo on his right shoulder blade, its angular body and its presence both sensual and unsettling, the way he put his large eyes on a person, a reality, the languor of his speech, his actions and intense, are the subject of the film, give it its power and its beauty. But beyond its purely physical characteristic is his very being as the filmmaker confronts his film. Vampire filmmaker, he makes a recording of that power to him specifically, a catchment so strong that it seems out of the bloodless shooting.
