Hiroshima Mon Amour Night and Fog

Here are two mid-50s films from French director Alain Resnais, both struggling to come to terms with the deep psychic wounds of World War Two. Hiroshima, a collaboration with French novelist Marguerite Dumas, uses the story of the love affair between a French actress and Japanese architect as jumping-off point to explore grief and survivors’ guilt, and whether love has any meaning in the face of humanity’s growing ability to carry out horrific brutality on a massive scale. The film fractures narrative chronology in a way that was then groundbreaking, in pursuit of depicting the way persistent memory can dominate our perceptions of the present. Like Citizen Kane, if it seems unremarkable today it’s because the techniques it pioneered are now an entrenched part of the language of filmmaking. Also new on DVD is Resnais’ haunting documentary Night and Fog, one of the first to document so starkly the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps and a conscious reaction against the refusal by many involved with the camps—German and otherwise—to accept responsibility.