Important Movies

"I think that in a few years, in ten, twenty, or thirty years, we will know whether Hiroshima mon amour was the most important film since the war, the first modern film of sound cinema" - Eric Rohmer

"It’s difficult to quantify the breadth of Hiroshima’s impact. It remains one of the most influential films in the short history of the medium, first of all because it liberated moviemakers from linear construction. Without Hiroshima, many films thereafter would have been unthinkable, from I Fidanzati to The Pawnbroker to Point Blank to Petulia to Don’t Look Now (and almost every other Nicolas Roeg movie) to Out of Sight and The Limey... But Hiroshima has also had another kind of impact, one less easy to trace. In laying out the particulars of this wholly new film and its relationship to the “nouveau roman,” Rivette made a very important point. He compared Resnais to novelist Pierre Klossowski : “For Klossowski and for Resnais,” he said, “the problem is to give the readers or the viewers the sensation that what they are going to read or see is not an author’s creation but an element of the real world.” This is, once again, a postwar aspiration, completely in keeping with Adorno’s dictum, which ran through all the arts. In the postwar era, beginning with neorealism, certain key filmmakers worked so that reality might maintain its integrity and declare its presence without having to blend into an artificially constructed fiction. Godard took the road staked out by Roberto Rossellini, dissolving the barriers between film time and real time, fictional space and real space, stories and documentaries. But Resnais worked in a vein more reminiscent of Sergei Eisenstein, erecting a complex, rhythmically precise fictional construction in which pieces of reality are caught and allowed to retain their essential strangeness and ominous neutrality. Resnais has always been recognized as an innovator, but the term has a hollow ring. As a morally responsible artist committed to catching pieces of unaltered reality in a carefully constructed net of fiction, he has paved the way for many filmmakers, from the Francesco Rosi of Salvatore Giuliano to the Dusan Makavejev of WR to the Scorsese of Goodfellas and Casino to the Terrence Malick of The Thin Red Line." - Kent Jones, Editor-at-Large of Film Comment