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Critical Summary
The article discusses Alain Renais’ classical European film titled “Memory by Analogy: Hiroshima, mon amour.” The protagonists in the film, Elle and Lui, are obsessed with memories of traumatic incidences they have respectively undergone during the course of the lifetime (Wood 185).
However, upon critical analysis, the author notes that the major focus of the film is not to compare the traumatic events experienced by the two main protagonists; rather, it attempts to demonstrate the common devastating relation to a memory of catastrophe that the two have bravely experienced until their erotic encounter (Wood 189).
The film generates an uneasy predisposition in viewers, largely due to the kind of analogy it is able to develop between the personal memories of Elle and Lui. On her part, Elle suffered from ‘une femme tondue’, implying that her head was shorn due to her ‘unusual’ sexual relationship with a German soldier considered to be an enemy of the French liberators (Wood 187). Her German boyfriend was killed in the most inhuman conditions at Nevers, and it is these dull images that continued to torment Elle for a very long time.
The other protagonist in the film, Lui, had an intimate encounter with the specter of death through a nuclear conflagration in Hiroshima (Wood 189). These experiences, which seem different yet connected by similar cases involving traumatic and painful events, set the stage for the development of the analogy experienced in the film.
Indeed, the author of the article acknowledges that it is in the catastrophic association to historical events that the symbolic homology between Nevers (site of killing of Elle’s boyfriend) and Hiroshima (site of the nuclear bomb) resides (Wood 191-192).
Critical Reflection
Although a good film by any standards, especially that it attempts to demonstrate how survivors of historical injustices extricated themselves from the tyranny of their respective traumatic experiences through the illustrious deployment of analogy, it brings into limelight a very dark history of the French officialdom – stripping and parading women in the streets, as well as cutting their hair short due to suspected liaisons with the German occupying force.
While the original intentions of the filmmaker were definitely not to soil the reputation of France, such exposures, in my view, have worked to tarnish the national memories of the Liberation.
Additionally, it is correct to suggest that the film is able to generate a lot of anxiety in viewers due to the kind of analogy it develops between the personal memories and experiences of the main protagonists. However, it is unclear why the filmmaker chose to link these two events through the medium of memory, and the type of analogy that could be used to understand their intentions considering the fact that we have logical as well as biological usage of the concept of analogy.
It may be that the protagonists were reasoning together due to their similar past (logical analogy), but the view that their experiences may have been a resemblance of function between individuals who are essentially different (biological analogy), could still be true. The author of the article should have taken more time and detail to provide a clarification.
Lastly, the article can be criticized for using complex language that is beyond comprehension for general readers. Terms are also loosely defined and, towards the end of the article, one is unsure about what interpretation of the film’s analogical approach is most befitting.
Works Cited
Wood, Nancy. Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe, New York, NY: Berg, 1999. Print.
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