Film Argument Night and Fog 1955 and Hiroshima My Love 1959 by Alain Resnais France Term Paper

Film Argument- Night and Fog (1955) and Hiroshima My Love (1959) by Alain Resnais (France)

In the films Night and Fog (1955) and Hiroshima My Love (1959), both directed by the French film director Alain Resnais, the filmmaker attempts to speak the unspoken through the silent language of film. In other words, Resnais attempts to create a sense of the unaccountable horrors of war, even though he cannot directly convey through spoken language or any singular image the impact of the felt, lived experience of wartime Europe.

In comparing the opening scenes of both films, one sees that the director first attempts to do so with juxtapositions of beauty and horror.Night and Fog first begins with a panoramic shot of the bucolic Polish countryside, followed with images of what it contained hidden amongst its beauty, namely the death camps. Hiroshima My Love begins with shots of a lover's embrace in close-up, followed by images of the atomic bomb survivors of Hiroshima. Life and beauty goes on, horror results, and there is no answer, even the inceptions of these cinematic narratives suggest, to the viewer.

The horror of war and the inability of art to translate this into effective images or words is further reinforced in Hiroshima My Love, in the scene where the….....