The video After Hiroshima Mon Amour by Silvia Kolbowski currently on view at Mala galerija in Ljubljana and based on Resnais/Duras masterpiece is a work about our inability to fully understand and represent the past and present catastrophes.
Originally, it is a story of a French woman and Japanese men who meet in japan twelve years after the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and begin a one-night affair . They are an allegorical couple , standing for two different actors in the war- France and Japan- evoking challenging questions about disobedience, ethics and desire in a time of military conflict.
According to Jalal Toufic the most beautiful cinematic love stories take place against the backdrop of destruction of the city and possibly of the world, such as La jetté for example. Every love of a man and a woman takes place in seclusion from the world: every love of a man and a woman has for horizon the destruction of the world since they can restart the human race (this is one of the ways love is linked to death).
Rather than a reconstruction, this video uses repetition as a strategy where the diference is what matters. The story is re-enacted by ten different actors of ambigious ethnic origin and race, and unstable gender relations. It is contrasted by the found material that usually depicts violence and brutality, often from the point of view of the power.
As the video comes after the original it situates it in a contemporary political frame. We can observe the devastated streets of New Orleans after the hurricane Katrina, where the US government did nothing to secure the poorest population from the outcomes of the catastrophe. The shots problematize the relationship between the filmmaker and the viewer. We suddeenly burst into an apartment in Iraq along with american soldiers and face a man and an old woman screaming as they are confronted with machine guns. Also, we see a street, presumably in a Middle-Eastern city, from a viewpoint of a speeding driver and are placed on the side of watching the suffering of others. An uncomfortable position.
The texts that appear as titles are in fact a collage of Duras's original script for Hiroshima Mon Amour- fragmented and reassembled by Kolbowski- and Duras's written synopsis of the film. The narration oscillates between the third-person voiceover of the synopsis and a fascinating dialogue between the shifters “I” and “you”, which appear in the fragments appropriated from the film's script.
The dialogue between a French woman and Japanese man in the book Hiroshima Mon Amour beginns tellingly with:
“You have seen nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.”
“I've seen all. All.”
In the video, the text doesn't fit the image, while sound, silence and colours appear as active actors that give meaning to the material.
The artist became known for her project an inadequate history of conceptual art for which she invited various individuals to tell her their memories of an exhibition, performance or event of conceptual art without doing further research. She would record the audio and display it in a separate room from a video showing their hands while speaking.
