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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...
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 female protagonist tells…
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 female protagonist tells the male protagonist about her lost love, a German soldier, in the hotel the New Hiroshima. Terror is a constant in this world, the narrative suggests but it is so omnipresent it has become banal, just like the lived experience of the main characters that exists in the constant presence of the reminders of greater horrors. Memory is repressed, but the truth remains. This is perhaps even more powerfully suggested in the earlier film, when a boy is killed, yet the killer is unseen. The death is real, and the pain is real, but the actual accountability does not come to the victim. Because the living killer cannot express and refuses to face the consequences of his actions, the killer's face in the film is not literally revealed. He cannot, any more than the lovers take note of the name of the hotel The New Hiroshima, although in the latter case the camera does at least register its name. At least in the later film there is some hope. Even though the protagonists cannot see the death around them, at least the filmed narrative can encompass it, while in the film about the Holocaust, Night and Fog, the cinema cannot truly render justice in the form of accountability, of seeing a killer during a killing.
Hiroshima Bombing The Manhattan Project When I was asked to work on the Manhattan project during the late 1930's, I was delighted to be included in work of such magnitude. Not only would I work with the most prominent scientists in the world; I would also make a substantial contribution to the United States Government and its effort to keep the country safe. Recently however I have begun experiencing considerable ambivalence regarding the
The reverend did hard work during the after math of the bombing and was dedicated to help the survivors. He later on became a peace activist and traveled to the U.S. To give speeches and have TV appearances and raised money for the surviving victim's treatments. Mr. Tanimoto is a more complex and complicated person in this novel and shows that he has ties to the U.S. He is acting
bombing of Hiroshima raises some significant ethical issues. From a military perspective, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki served as the catalyst for bringing about Japanese surrender, thereby ending the war in the Pacific. However, these attacks on civilian targets were among the most horrific in the history of wartime. Such attacks would be outlawed today under the Fourth Geneva Convention, which was enacted in 1949 partly as a
This new warfare had psychological as well as purely physical aspects of battle. The will of the Japanese people themselves had to be annihilated by snuffing out the lives of sufficient hundreds of thousands of them. The old weapons were simply not sufficient anymore for the effect. Ironically, this most savage warfare is conceived and carried out by the most rational of scientists, senior military men and politicians who coat
Indeed, there is no moral argument to justify the use of weapons against possible civilians. The nuclear bomb lacks any precision in targeting solely military targets without causing casualties. Although its use cannot be justified from a moral perspective, it can be seen as a means to put an end to a war that had taken millions of lives up to 1945. The impact the attacks had on Japan
Dropping the Atom Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki During World War II, a mid-20th-century conflict that involved several nations, the United States military dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Wikipedia, 2005). The first atomic bomb was exploded over Hiroshima on August 5, 1945; the second was detonated over Nagasaki four days later. The bombs killed more than 120,000 people immediately and about twice as many over