Hiroshima mon amour opens with a close-up of body. Two sets of body images alternate, with
one about victims of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima and the other about a Japanese architect
and a French actress in the act of love-making. The French woman shared with the Japanese man
the memory of how she was brutalized by the death of her first lover, a German soldier of the
occupying force stationed at her home town, Nevers, and by the townspeople’s retaliatory act of
shaving her hair and her parents keeping her in a basement. Set fourteen years after the end of
World War II, Hiroshima mon amour reveals the frequent shift between what Deleuze calls
“peaks of present” and “sheets of past” in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, allowing the war
memories and images of atomic bombing victims to interpenetrate, and the virtual past and the
actualized present to alternate. This paper uses the images of this film to delve into the ethical
view of body. As Deleuze states in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, “every body extends
its power as far as it can” (269). Based on this ethical issue, the paper will explore a key
dimension of the politics of affect, that “we live cut off from ‘what we can do’” (269). Combining
Deleuze’s film studies and his views on body and affect, this paper will explore Deleuze’s
relevance to the emerging debates among philosophy, science, and art as embodied by Hiroshima
mon amour.
關聯:
Fifth International Deleuze Studies Conference, Deterritorializing Deleuze.
