The Impact of Photographs in Hiroshima mon amour

Alain Resnais embeds a series of photographs within Hiroshima mon amour that reflect central considerations of the film such as memory, commemoration, and fragmentation. The majority of the photographs found here show the bomb and its effects on human beings, bridging the personal and the political. Their presence also sets up a subtle contrast between film and still photography that resonates with a number of central contrasts within Hiroshima mon amour: between past and present, between a public cataclysm and a personal tragedy, between forgetting and remembering, and motion and stillness.