Transience of Memory

As I write this I read a post-it stuck on my soft board. It says ‘Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers it in order to recount it’ & on my shelf is the book ‘The Memory Police’ by Yoko Ogawa. Our memory in many ways determines our current day, our reactions to what we speak & share with friends & family. 

The transience of memory is a central theme of Alain Resnais's french movie ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’ of love and horror in Hiroshima.. The movies was made in 1959 14 years after the bombing which was carried out on 6th and 9th August 1945 in Hiroshima & Nagasaki. We are in November 20 22 - 77 years after the bombing nuclear war rhetorics are again in media with multiple conflicts spreading across the world. 

I saw the movie more as a cinema buff and found it not only a poetic & a beautiful love story but a masterclass in cinematography, music, acting and story telling - hitting you with a striking message on the impact of the bombing. What the civilians went thru, for the first 30 mnts it’s almost like a documentary where it shows the effect of Hiroshima but intertwines beautifully  with the voiceover of Emmanuelle as she is talking to her Japanese lover - telling her what she has seen in Hiroshima.

I would love to see it again without reading subtitles - since now I understand the story just to admire the photography. The parallel drawn between the memory of Hiroshima & the love story of Emmanuelle (the lady) is beautifully told. In a way as we see in the concluding scenes the love story equals the place where it takes place i.e. Nevers in France. So, the story is of Nevers and Hiroshima and what happened.

When we love someone or something and it gets taken away - initially the brutality of it hits you so hard that it knocks you off in the movie it makes her mad (almost) but over a long period of time you forget the memory of what happened the actual images or the scene which played out in front of you. At moments, you hate yourself for forgetting this memory. You question yourself - How can I forget the memory of a person who was my life or played an important role in making me what I am. That triggers a rage which sometimes self destructs you or spoils the current relationship. That is the essence of the movie.

While love is a personal memory. Hiroshima is a collective memory like partition in India’s case. Many of us may not be there but even now there are books which put a lens on what happened during partition. A recent book - Remnants of partition talks about objects which people carried back to India and the story behind it. 

Do places have a memory? This thought stuck me when I was in my return journey from Delhi, As I was emptying the divans, and double beds of quilts (i prefer rajai), dolls  with which I played 50 years back, photographs, shirts I had gifted but not worn…objects almost each of them had a story. As the taxi moved from various lanes of Vikaspuri so many memories got triggered from things as mundane as a place where I made my specs or puja shopping or ram leela ground and places from where I used to take the bus for my college. So many trips and so many memories of love and grief which faded away long back but now comes back as the flight takes off from Delhi. I settle down for a movie in my head 

‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’ is a slow languid movie alternating between love and grief imitating life. See it and you will feel your story come alive after the credit rolls. 

Postscript:

Read about the movie here: In the below note I liked the fact that the movie was made on a brief

Scores on Screen. The Obvious Necessity for Memory: Music and Memory in "Hiroshima, mon amour" on Notebook | MUBI (it was a seminal movie for those interested google endlessly but mubi and criterion has the best articles) 

Read about the bombing here: It made me realise how history is depicted as a rational and factual note, that’s the way we have read history books. This education or history completely overlooks the human side of it & that is why non of us could relate to it. It was just memory of dates and events.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki