Hiroshima mon amour

Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour played in competition at Cannes 1959, alongside Truffaut's The 400 Blows, and the two films together mark the founding moment of the French New Wave; it won the FIPRESCI Prize. The screenplay was by Marguerite Duras, already an established novelist, and it was her first major piece of writing for the cinema. India Song and her own career as a director would follow.

A French actress (Emmanuelle Riva), in Hiroshima to shoot a film about peace, begins a brief, intense affair with a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada). Over two days and two nights of conversation, embraces, walks through the city and visits to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the film moves between the present-day affair and her wartime memories of an earlier love affair in Nevers, France, and between both of those and Hiroshima's memories of itself. Bernard Fresson plays a small role.

Its structure, a sustained dialogue between private romantic memory and collective historical memory carried by Resnais's editing-driven tempo, became the founding reference text for what European art-cinema modernism would attempt over the next two decades. Sacha Vierny's photography of Hiroshima and of the brief Nevers passages set a visual register that European cinema still draws on. Riva's central performance, in her first major film role, launched a career that would last more than half a century.