After a stunning early career as a documentary filmmaker (Night and Fog, his achingly evocative film about Auschwitz, is an acclaimed masterpiece), Frenchman Alain Resnais turned to features. His debut full-length, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), is a stunner, too, a poetic, mesmerizing, maddening exploration of time and memory, love and loss, perception and reality. A love affair ends between a married French actress (Emmanuel Riva) and a married Japanese architect (Eiji Okada). They have met in Hiroshima, and the scars of the past infuse the present until neither He nor She (the characters have no names), or we, are quite sure where they are or what they feel.
The film had an enormous influence upon the French new wave with its use of elegant tracking shots underscored by interior monologues and the precise editing and sound design. Marguerite Duras’s original screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award. Resnais’s film has been called both the first modern movie and the ultimate date-night puzzler. (Actually, that would be his next, Last Year at Marienbad, another time/memory maze.) This pristine digital print is being screened as part of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s Restorations and Revivals series.
7 p.m. Friday and Saturday. 5 p.m. Sunday. 1001 Bissonnet. For information, call 713‑639‑7515 or visit mfah.org. $9.
Fri., Feb. 13, 7 p.m.; Sat., Feb. 14, 7 p.m.; Sun., Feb. 15, 5 p.m., 2015
This article appears in Feb 12-18, 2015.
