[The structure of Hiroshima Mon Amour (HMA) is based on Resnais' concepts of time. The film not only deals with exterior time (the actual length of the film) but interior time (the time of the central action we see). Within Resnais' use of interior time, the series of dramatic entities have meaning contingent on the sequence in which they are presented. Each sequence of happenings might be called a specific time, a fraction of the interior one. They compose the continuum of action, the story of the film.]

These specific times, the circumstantial components of the interior continuum, are in HMA subdivided into two categories:

(a) One is le temps réel, the time in which the action in the city of Hiroshima takes place. Le temps réel is, then, the time in which the love story between the Japanese architect and the French actress develops.

(b) The other category is le temps psychologique—or even le temps proustien, for obvious reasons. This temps psychologique comprises the memories of and their effect within the temps réel on both hero and heroine. For him the memories are, primarily, concentric, that is to say: revolve around the complex of what Hiroshima as a historical fact means today, what the city's moment of destruction was like. Secondarily, his memories are excentric, in so far as they participate in her memories. For her, the memories of le temps psychologique are, primarily, concentric around her experience in Nevers. Secondarily, they are excentric in so far as they participate in his memories of Hiroshima.

Two things have to be mentioned here. First, that le temps réel and le temps psychologique interact…. [The] matter Alain Resnais set out to mold into a work of art, is the interaction between past and present. The spiritual effect of his work is to make us aware of the importance this interaction has on human behavior. This might be called the cathartic effect of the film, which does not, however, arise out of any climax, but out of the total, the accumulative impression the film makes: it is an epic film.

Here is one example of how complicated this interaction can become: Part of the story is the fact that the heroine, a French actress, has come to Hiroshima in order to do a picture about Hiroshima. Resnais' film also is about Hiroshima. We see, at the beginning, how a film-company shoots a picture about Hiroshima (the historical fact) in which the heroine acts. The people caught in the act of filming are Resnais' own people: Resnais thus films himself filming a film about Hiroshima. This is not so gratuitous as it may seem, for this procedure reminds one of Proust who also wrote seven volumes [À la Recherche du temps perdu] about how Marcel came to write seven volumes about how he came to write seven volumes. In both cases, with Resnais and with Proust, we find the creator describing how he created or came to create (often a topic of modern art). With Resnais the cause of the creation and the creation itself are the psychological complex of Hiroshima and what it represents in the history of mankind. (p. 301)

[Resnais and Duras] use what I should like to label time perspectives…. These time-perspectives are like aids for placing the story in, as it were, sudden temporal dimensions, for heightening some element of the story, making us fathom the invisible depths of the images visible on the screen….

What then are some of these perspectives of time? According to their emphasis, the following are worth mentioning:

The film opens with images that immediately call to mind some sort of Urschöpfung, some cosmic creative process: the heaving of crude, raw, unformed masses, convulsions, it seems, of matter in the process of evolution. As the images become clearer and refine themselves, as words spoken by human beings become audible, we realize that those Urmassen in movement are nothing but the bodies of a man and a woman engaged in the sexual act…. What he evidently wishes to express by the gradual transformation of convulsing masses into recognizable human forms is that the sexual act, the physical symbol of human love, is something "eternal" and perhaps redemptive…. The perspective we are meant to glimpse is that of man and woman in love across mankind's, possibly life's, existence—in spite and because of Hiroshima. (p. 303)

[Directing] the audience's associations through the memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki towards their immediate consequences in human destruction, visible here and now, before us, Resnais states another of the Leitmotive of his film: namely, that hearing of H-bombs and A-bombs and similar products of human genius, of their destructive power, and of all the horror that legend has accumulated since 1945 around the mere mention of them, is and has become so much of an everyday experience for us that we no longer associate it with its real consequences, of which burnt, shrinking, and stinking human flesh is one infinitesimally small part.

That the initial sequence, which reveals the present in its aspect of eternity by associating Urmassen in movement with the sexual act, is not an accidental time-perspective, can now clearly be seen. For, placing present events (love-making) in the perspective of the past (Urmassen) is as much a Leitmotiv in this film as bringing the viewer face to face with the atomic age in terms that he can understand and shudder at—in terms of what it can do to him. (pp. 303-04)

Knowing that life is not a handful of clearly and cleverly separate, separable, definable, or defined strands of Leitmotive, it can be assumed that those mentioned up till now will sooner or later be fused or recur in other constellations, constantly forming new patterns. Indeed, they do, revealing always other facets of Resnais' and Duras' "messages." One of the facets—and it is interesting to note its proximity to Proust's preocupations in À la Recherche du temps perdu …—is: No matter how intense a human experience is, it is always situated in time and therefore subject to oblivion, both by man as a historical continuum and by the individual as its manifestation in the present. In fact, this is one of Resnais' universalia. It teaches that forgetting is as necessary as living—which, among other things, consists precisely of experiences that seem unforgettable—is inevitable for man. (p. 304)

[A] rather interesting aspect of the film [is] the strangely neglected ethical problem that one would expect to arise immediately out of its love-story, namely that both protagonists are married. Their married life belongs to le temps psychologique, to the plane of memories. Its implications hardly ever manifest themselves in le temps réel…. This harsh suppression of an ethically highly explosive fact and its strange absence in the rest of the film are, of course, not due to any absented-mindedness of Mlle. Duras or M. Alain Resnais. They are intended. They are meant to reveal another Leitmotiv of the film:

I have said that both protagonists' état civil belongs to their memories. But so does the heroine's love affair with the German. Why then should the German lover be so intensely present in the temps-réel action, and the French husband, who waits for the heroine in Paris, so very little? I believe the answer is the following: their état civil is an integral part of their ordinary life. Not so their present love affair which is part of an extra-ordinary life. They are both different people. (pp. 304-05)

Resnais is less concerned with particular manifestations of routine—as would be the état civil of both protagonists—than with the general expression of routine, such as forgetting…. [In the Leitmotives of "love" and "oblivion"], Resnais brings together what ultimately are the basic factors of history: progressivism and conservatism. Resnais has made the bodies and the spirits of his protagonists the receptacles of time; the bodies, because through them love is experienced; the spirit, because through it the implications of this love are revealed and created: the memories. Love is history, memory also. Love, because it must needs be progressive; memory, because it must needs be resistant to love. From the struggle of the two results the development of the love-story on the plane of the temps réel. Leaving out the fact that both hero and heroine are married causes us to become aware of the ramifications that are contained in the juxtaposition between ordinary and extraordinary situations.

[Resnais] must make his protagonists' love "timeless," untroubled by the mediocrity of their married life, because he wants to achieve an effect that permits him to progress on to another of his Leitmotive:

Time asserting its rights: If we observe closely the "timelessness" of his protagonists, we notice that there is one way in which their past and their future (i.e., routine) may be permitted to intrude on it: paradoxically enough, through intensity, i.e., where earlier intense experiences equal or surpass their present intensity in le temps réel: her first love affair; his experience of the atomic explosion. This intrusion of intensities from the realm of le temps psychologique into that of le temps réel serves a very definite purpose. Resnais wishes to demonstrate that there exists a sort of cohesion of situations extrèmes across ordinary time. Again we enter the terrain of Proust, who also, in his novel, meant to save certain intensely experienced moments from the corrosion caused by the flux of time. (p. 306)

In HMA, action (on the temps-réel level) and flashbacks (onto the temps-psychologique plane) are not essentially independent of each other. There could be no action if there were no flashbacks, because the latter cause the former and the former cause the latter. Past and present are a sort of emulsion, little drops of past time being suspended in the present, and vice versa…. The method by which this effect of a perceptual present is achieved may best be circumscribed as a "flattening" of past and future into an even present. Undoubtedly, this denotes mankind's—or its antennae, the artists'—constant endeavor to fight against its becoming past and, by implication, to hold at a distance the approaching future, including, for them, that of Hiroshima's past. (p. 308)

Resnais' flashbacks are so organized and interwoven with the narration in the temps réel as to annul the normal time perspective and to create an effect of simultaneity. We are immediately reminded of Cubism which also dismantles the object, even destroys it, in order to permit us to see it in a new perspective, from different points of view at the same time, by recomposing it according to a new law. Resnais dismantles and mounts anew the traditional reality in order to create a new concept of time which is to traditional reality what the new love, in its intense moments (Nevers and Hiroshima), is to the traditional love in the protagonists' état civil. (pp. 309-10)

But could all this preoccupation with time not simply be overlooked? No. For, if we do, we do not understand the film: Time and its manifestations in man, forgetting, are the very theme of the film, as they were to be again in L'année…. In HMA, Resnais investigates above all the phenomenon of oblivion. In scene after scene he circles around this so essentially "timely" element of human life: forgetfulness—and its ethical implications. The film, it is true, does not have as its message "Thou shalt not forget!" Nor does it dictate "Thou shalt forget!" It simply does research on the subject of time as it becomes petrified in oblivion. The film, just as Proust, is à la recherche du temps qu'on a perdu …, and shows how with this loss also the lessons are lost that human experience has drawn and draws each day, incessantly, only to forget them. Resnais' film, in this light, represents a statement about man's attitude towards his history: history is the concrete record of all the lessons drawn from the experience of mankind, lessons whose usefulness for the present has been forgotten. In short, Resnais implies that it is wrong to say that history teaches anything. It never does, it never has. History only explains. The only "lesson" we can draw from this insight is that we never heed the lessons we have "learned."

To exemplify this, HMA has to interweave past and present, must show how the past affects the present and how the present even affects the past. Nowhere can this better be seen than in the famous restaurant scene. The heroine threatens to become mad again the very moment when past and present touch each other, when her memories become so strong that she confounds past and present. The Japanese architect slaps her! This is, theoretically, the most important movement of the film, for here Resnais leaves Proust behind, or at least goes farther than he…. [The] evocation of an impression of the past by events in the present, is, so to say, brusquely short-circuited: by slapping the heroine, the Japanese lover becomes the executor of Resnais' ultimate statement about time and man. The empirical order of things—i.e., past belongs to the past and present to the present—is reestablished, must be reestablished, else we become unfit for life—mad.

The order of things as we understand them asserts itself and its rights by all means: either we accept it and thus become capable of meeting life on our terms, or we refuse it and become insane, as the heroine did after the death of her first lover. (p. 310)

Forgetfulness, then, its necessity and its tragedy, are what the story of the film is about. In it Resnais and Mlle. Duras see an aspect of la condition humaine. In HMA, they decline the word "forgetfulness" in the forms of human grammar, exemplifying a universal quality in particular lives. That is why their film is a great work of art….

If the heroine loves the Japanese and resigns herself to relegating her first lover to the gallery of inoperant memories, does she not also, implicitly and in the future, depreciate her present love? For, if in face of her present love she comes to renounce or to neutralize her earlier love, does this not imply the ephemeralness of love in general, no matter how strongly it may be felt? Again we are reminded of Proust: his hero's hopeless love for Gilberte.

But Resnais does not come to a halt there. He draws the conclusion on a universal level: if the heroine of the film can forget her first lover and, by implication, one day will surely forget her second, is this not proof that one day mankind, the Japanese nation, the people of the city of Hiroshima itself, will forget the disaster that befell them?

Applying this conclusion to the question of time, we come to the insight that, in accepting the power of the present we admit also the right of the future to become present. One might say: a sorrow (the heroine's forgetting of her first lover) and a joy (her acceptance of the present one) make for the reestablishment of the universal order of time and thus of history. This may be considered as Resnais' most memorable comment on modern time-consciousness. (p. 311)

[Everything] in this film, in one way or another, complements everything else and … from these complementary elements arise two important formal principles of HMA.

First, on the active side, the atomic explosion is symbolically equalled with the heroine's love for the German and the consequences of this love: insanity.

Second, on the passive side, her first love was a forbidden love, forbidden by the society she lived in. As in Greek tragedy the gods, so here, in Nevers, society reestablished its rights and its order by killing the German and thus driving the young girl to insanity. Only time heals her, i.e. forgetting. Hiroshima, i.e. Japan also did something the society of countries she lives in considered forbidden: it waged a war. Therefore, Japan, too, is punished by the society of other nations. And Japan, too, recuperates through time, as the last sequences of the film clearly indicate.

In conclusion, it seems advisable to point out the difference between Proust and Resnais in relation to their common subject, time.

Proust puts the emphasis on the change in people wrought by time. This change he records and saves from oblivion by remembering. Resnais cannot put the accent on the same elements—although he certainly shows his awareness of them—because he portrays a love-story. Lovers cannot live or love in the consciousness of forgetting. From this arises the film's problem. Proust's two main themes are, first, the time that destroys; second, the memory that conserves. Resnais treats these themes, too, but the other way round: first, for his protagonists, memory destroys; second, time restores. Proust is interested in memory. Resnais studies forgetting. In Proust, memories cause joy—the madeleine. In Resnais' film, memories cause sorrow and even terror…. In both artists the raw material of their works is the same: the tensions between past and present. But Resnais investigates two things: that which is being forgotten and why it is forgotten. Proust mainly studies that which has been forgotten. Besides, Resnais has a socio-political dimension in his film. Proust concentrates on the sociological dimension. (pp. 311-12)

Resnais does not wish the past to reside in the present, he pushes it back into its own realm. Proust celebrates the past, searches it, makes it into the present, and lives in it: Le temps retrouvé is the title of his last book….

Proust, although he knew of course as well as Resnais that the past cannot be revived except in memories, prefers the memories and finds his redemption in them. Resnais believes one can keep on living only by forgetting, no matter how important is that which we have experienced and are going to forget—sooner or later. (p. 312)