Hiroshima mon amour

The film opens with a poetic short documentary on the Hiroshima tragedy. It then proceeds to tell the story of the "impossible" love between a Japanese architect and a French actress making a peace film in Hiroshima. In the course of the relationship, she discloses her love affair with a German soldier during World War II, and her subsequent disgrace. A landmark of modernist film narrative, the film examines the relationship between time and memory in the context of nuclear horror, and makes brilliant use of dialogue, editing, cinematography, and music to create dense patterns of repetition and counterpoint; its very form attempts to replicate the workings of consciousness.