“You Have Seen Nothing in Hiroshima, Nothing”: Evidence & Cinematic Image
T.P. Sabitha Alain Resnais’ film, Hiroshima mon amour (1957), makes an audacious claim when the Japanese man makes this remark repeatedly to his French lover when she claims to have “seen” Hiroshima: “Tu n’a rien vu á Hiroshima, rien.” This denial is the possibility of the text of narration that cannot be done with the image. When the camera ‘sees’ something, it cannot be ‘nothing’ that it sees. The image can only assert, not functionally serve as a denial or negation. What is negated is the truth of her claim that she has “seen” Hiroshima: the hospitals and the museum. When she says this, the camera takes on a documenting role, moving through the corridors of the hospital and ‘recording’, almost without a witnessing agent, the exhibited objects at the museum – stones, human skin, human hair, as well as the ‘recreated’ performances of the Hiroshima bombing, the actors apparently on fire, their skin peeling off, the enacted deaths. We see the ‘documented’ people at the hospital often startled by the camera; they look directly at it, thus the cinematic image is made in the convention of the documentary film, moving through spaces and creating a cartography of the ‘real’ that she claims to have seen. However, the man denies that what she has seen is the ‘real’. What she sees is not testimonially adjudicated as Hiroshima, hence we can perhaps think that Hiroshima exceeds this, it is not containable in representation. The representation does not attest to the reality of Hiroshima, with the text of narration breaking down and negating the ‘reality’ of what is shown. What we see here, through these images, is not Hiroshima. Compare for a moment, Renè Magritte’s painting “This is not a pipe”, with the image of a pipe and the text that denies that it is a pipe. On the one hand, it is quite obvious that it is not a pipe, but the picture of a pipe. On the other it is a radical pictorial statement (since the writing in cursive hand is within the picture) about the limits of attestation or the impossibility of re-presenting the ‘real’, about the inherent fictionality of pictorial art, and perhaps too, on the function of art which is not to re-“present” anything outside of itself. This is what Michel Foucault writes about the scrawled text “This is not a pipe” within the painting: “Yet perhaps the sentence refers precisely to the disproportionate, floating, ideal pipe – simple notion or fantasy of a pipe. Then we should have to read, ‘Do not look overhead for a true pipe. That is a pipe dream. It is the drawing within the painting, firmly and rigourously outlined, that must be accepted as a manifested truth’” (This is not a Pipe. Pp. 16-17.) Resnais does something similar here, while showing us images of Hiroshima, the narration denies that it is Hiroshima that we are seeing. Hiroshima here signifies an absence that the cinematic image cannot show us, a manifestation outside of itself. It can, though, show us Hiroshima from his point of view, Hiroshima as his recollection-image. However, the Hiroshima that must exist vis-à-vis that which is not Hiroshima, is not shown in the film. That is perhaps the ideal, the ideational Hiroshima that cannot be actualised, through what Gilles Deleuze calls the “false piety” of the image of “actualitè”, the documenting image that bears a certain reverence for the evidence of the “real” (Cinema 2, Pp. 122). But Hiroshima as an experienced event in time is never shown in the film. The question “if this is not Hiroshima, then what/when/where is Hiroshima?” is never answered. The only fictionalising of the Hiroshima bombing is what she and the camera see in the hospitals and museums, the re-creation, the re-collection, the re-gathering perhaps, of the event. The fiction of documentary is also seen in the reference to the “Peace Film” to act in which the French woman has come to Hiroshima. Marguerite Duras’s script says of the Peace Film: “It is not necessarily a ridiculous film; merely an enlightening one” (HMA, 39). We never see that “Peace Film” within Hiroshima mon amour. All we see are sets being dismantled and carried away and she removing her makeup. The sets and the makeup emphasise the ‘falseness’ of the documentary film, its fictiveness. The referential and signifying linkage between image and text is broken when, just as we are shown images of the Hiroshima that she has seen, he negates it and we are told we have seen nothing of Hiroshima. Is there a possibility of thinking that nomination (‘Hiroshima’) is impossible as an effect of the visual? The two protagonists too, significantly, are not named in the film, until the end when they call each other by the names of cities/sites of a sight that is not attested to in the film. Can the image attest to/ name anything by itself? The ‘real’ in the documentary is ascribed as the ‘real’ by a certain usage of technique or visual grammar. Resnais seems to deny what Carl Plantinga calls “Asserted Veridical Representation” while discussing the ‘documenting’ status of the documentary film. (“What a Documentary Is, After All”). Resnais denies this assertion, the ability of the image to nominate what it shows, and instead fictionalises her recollection-image, a powerful sequence of the ‘false’, her story that is actualised in this fiction film. The Hiroshima that she has seen and he denies as being Hiroshima, is partly the fiction of Hiroshima through documentary images and hyper-real museums; Resnais inserts some newsreel footages into the images of what she has “seen” in Hiroshima that, fast-edited, almost work as a parodic pastiche. However this ‘false’ Hiroshima is acknowledged as capable of affective power when she says: “The reconstructions have been made as authentically as possible. The films have been made as authentically as possible. The illusion, it’s quite simple, the illusion is so perfect that the tourists cry”. The fiction of the ‘authentic’, the ‘actual’, is