Shaoyi Wang FINAL PAPER FREN50 Prof. Jones Past memories and Present life The world lives on and leaves the history behind. To people who lived in the certain historical era, those specific events were rather different from what we are told after years, and they were even more different from how they feel when they look back themselves nowadays. Without the historical fiction films, we won't be able to have a chance to face the deviation which is either subtle or vivid. With such a purpose, documentary films will not work as well as fictional arrangement, because they are – although there isn't such terms as “abslolutely truthful” or “completely realistic” - too real to be analysised emotionally. When people are installed into a fictional film, they mostly ignore the fact that it is fictional. Films that have been rearranged and processed sometimes can be more life-like than real events, because it has the purpose. According to the two films that we'll expound, “Au Revoir Les Enfants” is a mimetic fiction film which tries to make artificial stories realistic, while “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” was considered more as avant-garde. When they appears to be totally different in narrative sequence and style, they also share a common purpose which is tending to be close enough to a person's nature. As the history to this world and the memory to our people, World War II is the biggest wound of last century. There's a large amount of fiction films that represents or relates to WWII, and “Au Revoir Les Enfants” and “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” lead two generally representative fashion of war-ralated filmmaking. The representation of war in fiction films are never easy, sometimes are much more difficult than the arrangement in documentaries. It requires the strict rebuilding of the right emotion by a story which doesn't even exist. Thus, most of the filmmakers prefer their films to be considered as “related to the war” rather than “representing the war”. The trick of a successful fiction film is avoiding the intention of representing. Instead of depicting the historical events or condition purposely, pasting simple pieces of life will do better for people's reception and identification. In “Au Revoir Les Enfants”, the story simply starts with the catholic boarding school life of a group of children in France. At first, without the chatting about the war or the shelter scene, we barely feel that this story has to be related strongely to the WWII. These children talk and act exactly the same as most of the children we know about: Jean is a newcomer, so other students welcome his arrival with the usual mixture of curiosity and nastiness; Everyone looked up to Julien before Jean's arrival which certainly starts their competition; Obviously, living in a catholic boarding school doesn't block Julien's way on his early sexual experience; and that similar classroom scene with the one in “Les 400 coups” ... Putting the war on the side, the smooth and realistic representation of life emphasize the crash of the war. In “Au Revoir Les Enfants”, there isn't any typical tragedy or violent conflict, because everyone knows that it is the cruellest thing to have a war broken out, however, not all of them know how cruel it is by heart. Should the filmmakers just tell people what was going on during the war and how horrible it was? They can definitely do that in documentaries. As we know, each genre has its problem/limitation with the representation, and it's always wise to work on the shortcomings. In fiction films, a piece of ordinary reality is much more valuable than the whole precise fabrication. Such as what happened in “Au Revoir Les Enfants”: it exhibits the connected life of the protagonist and avoids giving any unnecessary details about WWII; It leaves the war as background and tells the story as tranquil as possible. This tranquil style doesn't only contrasts sharply with the WWII situation, but also allow the film to keep a patient exploring on the character's qualities, their relationship's nuances and the plots growth/development which matters the most. Compare to “Au Revoir Les Enfants”, “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” focuses more on personalized visual and experimental styles, with increased depths of feelings and exploration of themes. It concertrates on representing how WWII effects on people's emotion and torments their memories. As the protagonist, Elle goes to Hiroshima – where once was totally ruined by atomic bomb during WWII – to take part in an anti-war film. On her penultimate night in Hiroshima, Elle meets Lui, a Japenese architect, and they return to her hotel together, like what very commonly happens: an ordinary affair and an alloted time. However, “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” is not a common film in such a subject matter. In the first fifteen minutes of “Hiroshima, Mon Amour”, lots of the historical footage is inserted into the sexual rapture between Elle and Lui, and it appears as if Elle is telling her experience in Hiroshima when Lui contradicts her every statement. It's a puzzled opening scene which mingles the historical documentaries, the fictional plot and the preceptual narration. Is there any internal relation among these elements? Or, which one can shorten the distance extensively between life and fiction. First of all, people do agree on that none of them can be missing, secondly, reality comes from reality, but not apparently life-like display. Basically, “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” is film about memories, time, and the dissolution of memories in time. As we know, memories in reality are mostly intermittent and disordered. Thus, from the very beginning, “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” reveals its intention of incarnating people's psychal state by this indistinet scene. It battles the ability of people's perception, and works with an emphasis on emotionalizing the visual representation. Such as: the close-up of hands and bodies is disposed to be blurred and trembling to harmonize the emotion of love-making; the narration which accompanies the original historical footage is intermittent and descriptive, just like what happens when people need to express their feeling in realistic life... In “Hiroshima, Mon Amour”, what tends to be realistic is based on the visual and physical reappearance of people's emotional moments. Although “Au Revoir Les Enfants” and “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” both perform as part of the rebuilding of reality, they concertrates separately on different clue and sequence of events. Generally, the sequence that leads a event will be no other than time, location and emotion. In “Au Revoir Les Enfants” , obviously, it's the time sequence that set the whole story into action. Since the day that new kid Jean arrives at the school, Julien starts his journey on a way of discovering. At the beginning, he was proud, affirmative and all by himself. He has a middle class family, and all the other kids look up to him. According to these, he didn't have to worry about the war, so actually, he knew few things about it. He questioned his older brother once about why the catastrophe on Jews. His brother told him that because they were way smarter, and he indicated that he didn't understand what was going on. As the protagonist, Julien is modeled as the leader of our curiosity to the story. Following his steps, we go through what he does. It's a journey of discovering, and the more he discovers, the more comfused he becomes. In the beginning, Julien didn't even want to talk to Jean, the new kid, and we can say that they had never became real close friends. The whole event surrounds the discovering of Julien, and what he discovers is actually the war and the life, but not just the secret of Jean. In first half of the film, Jean tried to get close to Julien all the time when Julien avoided their talking and meeting all the time, however, following the development of the plots, Julien got on his way of discovering Jean's secret and the “truth” that he didn't even know what about. For couple of times, he looked round at Jean with his eyes wide open, as if he was saying :“ I know something is going on here, but what is it exactly about? “ And by the end of everything, when he found out that it was actually Joseph who betrayed everyone and pushed the whole school into the war, he shaked his head as saying “ I don't believe this”. At such a moment, Julien seemed as if he got all the answers he wanted to get, but he was still, or even more, confused about the war and his life. Moreover, it is interesting for me to feel “Au Revoir Les Enfants” in this way: the school is dropped into the war in the second part of the film, because it followed the life sequence so well that I didn't even feel like necessary to relates it to the war in first half of the movie. However, in “Hiroshima, Mon Amour”, the narrative sequence seems like totally chaotic. It sparkles for following the sequence of a person's memories, or the psychal experience, and tweaking the conventional linear narration with combining past, present and future into one and using flashbacks reconciling time with memories. The strongest link between each scene in “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” is Elle's memory and narration. She described what she saw in hiroshima and what she felt about the war, and for the first time she shared her past love story with Lui. While she was giving the narration, the scene of the story in Nevers was intercut by images, just like the way we memorize the past in our mind. If we assume that “Au Revoir Les Enfants” is a journey of discovering, then, “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” can be considered as a journey of recalling one's past. Thus, when we were infected by the puzzled visual style, we actually experienced Elle's psychal journey of travelling back to her past and expecting foreward to her future. Lui asked her, “ What did Hiroshima mean to you in France?” she connected it to a crippling emotional wound that she suffers, her tragic love with a German soldier in Nevers, and although she tried to bury her past in Nevers deep in her subconsciousness, she started to reveals her secret little by little, piece by piece since the time. As the plots progresses, Elle's memories become more and more precise, more and more urgent, until the night before her departure from Hiroshima, the gate of her memories was burst opened eventually in that bar. Not long ago, Elle went back to her hotel and cleaned herself up in bathroom, at the moment, she realized she finally forgot her dead German lover by leaking their secret love story to a stranger. At that moment, Elle said to herself that she told their story and she already forgot him. The name of a person will gradually fade, and one day, his/her look in our mind will vanish also, is that only memories will remain forever and ever. As the film ends, Elle realized that she would again experience that same desperation and the loneliness of separation with Lui. And this makes “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” not just an artistic war-related film, but also a precise description of combining people's past, present and future on the level of psychology. The joint of historical footage and fictional arrangement does express separately how the whole country and the individuals suffer in a war. The perceptional ability of people is their tools to communicate with the world, and both of the physical concept and the psychal experience are involved. Up to now, a WAR is most prefound event that can be analysised by people. For those fiction films about WWII, the war is realistic when the stories are mostly made up, so what these films are actually responsible for cutting down the distance between the styles of their stories and the real events during the war, but not recreating a non-existent war to suit their stories. Although relying on different representive method and different narrative sequence, both of “Au Revoir Les Enfants” and “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” approach to the same purpose, which is revealing how WWII effects on people internally/externaly . They are both loyal to their precess of representing the reality, and concentrate on using or avoiding the novel editing and visual styles to achieve the final effects of representing the past memories and present life. And like most of the french films, “Au Revoir Les Enfants” and “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” focus on human being, but not just the exist exciting events or the grand battle scene of WWII. They put forth effort on depicting the details inside the realistic life or people's psychal world, and try to explore more and expand on these details. Such a method doesn't only work for war-related fiction films, but also for every film with the subject matter of humanism . The microcosm divulges the universe, and to our wide world, people is what matters the most.
FINAL PAPER
FREN50
Prof. Jones
Past memories and Present life
The world lives on and leaves the history behind. To people who lived in the certain historical era, those specific events were rather different from what we are told after years, and they were even more different from how they feel when they look back themselves nowadays. Without the historical fiction films, we won't be able to have a chance to face the deviation which is either subtle or vivid. With such a purpose, documentary films will not work as well as fictional arrangement, because they are – although there isn't such terms as “abslolutely truthful” or “completely realistic” - too real to be analysised emotionally. When people are installed into a fictional film, they mostly ignore the fact that it is fictional. Films that have been rearranged and processed sometimes can be more life-like than real events, because it has the purpose. According to the two films that we'll expound, “Au Revoir Les Enfants” is a mimetic fiction film which tries to make artificial stories realistic, while “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” was considered more as avant-garde. When they appears to be totally different in narrative sequence and style, they also share a common purpose which is tending to be close enough to a person's nature. As the history to this world and the memory to our people, World War II is the biggest wound of last century. There's a large amount of fiction films that represents or relates to WWII, and “Au Revoir Les Enfants” and “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” lead two generally representative fashion of war-ralated filmmaking.
The representation of war in fiction films are never easy, sometimes are much more difficult than the arrangement in documentaries. It requires the strict rebuilding of the right emotion by a story which doesn't even exist. Thus, most of the filmmakers prefer their films to be considered as “related to the war” rather than “representing the war”. The trick of a successful fiction film is avoiding the intention of representing. Instead of depicting the historical events or condition purposely, pasting simple pieces of life will do better for people's reception and identification. In “Au Revoir Les Enfants”, the story simply starts with the catholic boarding school life of a group of children in France. At first, without the chatting about the war or the shelter scene, we barely feel that this story has to be related strongely to the WWII. These children talk and act exactly the same as most of the children we know about: Jean is a newcomer, so other students welcome his arrival with the usual mixture of curiosity and nastiness; Everyone looked up to Julien before Jean's arrival which certainly starts their competition; Obviously, living in a catholic boarding school doesn't block Julien's way on his early sexual experience; and that similar classroom scene with the one in “Les 400 coups” ... Putting the war on the side, the smooth and realistic representation of life emphasize the crash of the war. In “Au Revoir Les Enfants”, there isn't any typical tragedy or violent conflict, because everyone knows that it is the cruellest thing to have a war broken out, however, not all of them know how cruel it is by heart. Should the filmmakers just tell people what was going on during the war and how horrible it was? They can definitely do that in documentaries. As we know, each genre has its problem/limitation with the representation, and it's always wise to work on the shortcomings. In fiction films, a piece of ordinary reality is much more valuable than the whole precise fabrication. Such as what happened in “Au Revoir Les Enfants”: it exhibits the connected life of the protagonist and avoids giving any unnecessary details about WWII; It leaves the war as background and tells the story as tranquil as possible. This tranquil style doesn't only contrasts sharply with the WWII situation, but also allow the film to keep a patient exploring on the character's qualities, their relationship's nuances and the plots growth/development which matters the most.
Compare to “Au Revoir Les Enfants”, “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” focuses more on personalized visual and experimental styles, with increased depths of feelings and exploration of themes. It concertrates on representing how WWII effects on people's emotion and torments their memories. As the protagonist, Elle goes to Hiroshima – where once was totally ruined by atomic bomb during WWII – to take part in an anti-war film. On her penultimate night in Hiroshima, Elle meets Lui, a Japenese architect, and they return to her hotel together, like what very commonly happens: an ordinary affair and an alloted time. However, “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” is not a common film in such a subject matter. In the first fifteen minutes of “Hiroshima, Mon Amour”, lots of the historical footage is inserted into the sexual rapture between Elle and Lui, and it appears as if Elle is telling her experience in Hiroshima when Lui contradicts her every statement. It's a puzzled opening scene which mingles the historical documentaries, the fictional plot and the preceptual narration. Is there any internal relation among these elements? Or, which one can shorten the distance extensively between life and fiction. First of all, people do agree on that none of them can be missing, secondly, reality comes from reality, but not apparently life-like display. Basically, “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” is film about memories, time, and the dissolution of memories in time. As we know, memories in reality are mostly intermittent and disordered. Thus, from the very beginning, “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” reveals its intention of incarnating people's psychal state by this indistinet scene. It battles the ability of people's perception, and works with an emphasis on emotionalizing the visual representation. Such as: the close-up of hands and bodies is disposed to be blurred and trembling to harmonize the emotion of love-making; the narration which accompanies the original historical footage is intermittent and descriptive, just like what happens when people need to express their feeling in realistic life... In “Hiroshima, Mon Amour”, what tends to be realistic is based on the visual and physical reappearance of people's emotional moments.
Although “Au Revoir Les Enfants” and “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” both perform as part of the rebuilding of reality, they concertrates separately on different clue and sequence of events. Generally, the sequence that leads a event will be no other than time, location and emotion. In “Au Revoir Les Enfants” , obviously, it's the time sequence that set the whole story into action. Since the day that new kid Jean arrives at the school, Julien starts his journey on a way of discovering. At the beginning, he was proud, affirmative and all by himself. He has a middle class family, and all the other kids look up to him. According to these, he didn't have to worry about the war, so actually, he knew few things about it. He questioned his older brother once about why the catastrophe on Jews. His brother told him that because they were way smarter, and he indicated that he didn't understand what was going on. As the protagonist, Julien is modeled as the leader of our curiosity to the story. Following his steps, we go through what he does. It's a journey of discovering, and the more he discovers, the more comfused he becomes. In the beginning, Julien didn't even want to talk to Jean, the new kid, and we can say that they had never became real close friends. The whole event surrounds the discovering of Julien, and what he discovers is actually the war and the life, but not just the secret of Jean. In first half of the film, Jean tried to get close to Julien all the time when Julien avoided their talking and meeting all the time, however, following the development of the plots, Julien got on his way of discovering Jean's secret and the “truth” that he didn't even know what about. For couple of times, he looked round at Jean with his eyes wide open, as if he was saying :“ I know something is going on here, but what is it exactly about? “
And by the end of everything, when he found out that it was actually Joseph who betrayed everyone and pushed the whole school into the war, he shaked his head as saying “ I don't believe this”. At such a moment, Julien seemed as if he got all the answers he wanted to get, but he was still, or even more, confused about the war and his life. Moreover, it is interesting for me to feel “Au Revoir Les Enfants” in this way: the school is dropped into the war in the second part of the film, because it followed the life sequence so well that I didn't even feel like necessary to relates it to the war in first half of the movie.
However, in “Hiroshima, Mon Amour”, the narrative sequence seems like totally chaotic. It sparkles for following the sequence of a person's memories, or the psychal experience, and tweaking the conventional linear narration with combining past, present and future into one and using flashbacks reconciling time with memories. The strongest link between each scene in “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” is Elle's memory and narration. She described what she saw in hiroshima and what she felt about the war, and for the first time she shared her past love story with Lui. While she was giving the narration, the scene of the story in Nevers was intercut by images, just like the way we memorize the past in our mind. If we assume that “Au Revoir Les Enfants” is a journey of discovering, then, “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” can be considered as a journey of recalling one's past. Thus, when we were infected by the puzzled visual style, we actually experienced Elle's psychal journey of travelling back to her past and expecting foreward to her future. Lui asked her, “ What did Hiroshima mean to you in France?” she connected it to a crippling emotional wound that she suffers, her tragic love with a German soldier in Nevers, and although she tried to bury her past in Nevers deep in her subconsciousness, she started to reveals her secret little by little, piece by piece since the time. As the plots progresses, Elle's memories become more and more precise, more and more urgent, until the night before her departure from Hiroshima, the gate of her memories was burst opened eventually in that bar. Not long ago, Elle went back to her hotel and cleaned herself up in bathroom, at the moment, she realized she finally forgot her dead German lover by leaking their secret love story to a stranger. At that moment, Elle said to herself that she told their story and she already forgot him. The name of a person will gradually fade, and one day, his/her look in our mind will vanish also, is that only memories will remain forever and ever. As the film ends, Elle realized that she would again experience that same desperation and the loneliness of separation with Lui. And this makes “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” not just an artistic war-related film, but also a precise description of combining people's past, present and future on the level of psychology. The joint of historical footage and fictional arrangement does express separately how the whole country and the individuals suffer in a war.
The perceptional ability of people is their tools to communicate with the world, and both of the physical concept and the psychal experience are involved. Up to now, a WAR is most prefound event that can be analysised by people. For those fiction films about WWII, the war is realistic when the stories are mostly made up, so what these films are actually responsible for cutting down the distance between the styles of their stories and the real events during the war, but not recreating a non-existent war to suit their stories. Although relying on different representive method and different narrative sequence, both of “Au Revoir Les Enfants” and “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” approach to the same purpose, which is revealing how WWII effects on people internally/externaly . They are both loyal to their precess of representing the reality, and concentrate on using or avoiding the novel editing and visual styles to achieve the final effects of representing the past memories and present life. And like most of the french films, “Au Revoir Les Enfants” and “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” focus on human being, but not just the exist exciting events or the grand battle scene of WWII. They put forth effort on depicting the details inside the realistic life or people's psychal world, and try to explore more and expand on these details. Such a method doesn't only work for war-related fiction films, but also for every film with the subject matter of humanism . The microcosm divulges the universe, and to our wide world, people is what matters the most.
Past memories and Present life
FREN50
Student: Shaoyi Wang
Instructor: Prof. Jones