Texas A&M University - Commerce

An Actress, a Knight, and a Woodcutter Walk Into a Postwar Society

Memory and the International Postwar Art Film in Hiroshima Mon Amour, The Seventh Seal, and Rashomon

Austin King

Honors Thesis

Dr. Gerald Duchovnay, Advisor

14 April 2016

Table of Contents

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………1

The Trauma of Memory: Flashback and Human Connection

in Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour………………………………………………………..8

Memory’s Ensnarement: Memory’s Effect in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal………...…22

Walking into the Woods to Lie: The Condemnation of Audience

Memory in Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon……………………………………………………….36

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………….50

Bibliography and Works Cited

“It would seem there is no predictable pattern to human memory.” -Data, “Violations,” Star Trek: The Next Generation

                Lieutenant Commander Data, an android who constantly investigates and attempts to emulate humans in the TV Series Star Trek: The Next Generation, and his confusion about the human processes of memory constitute a more human experience than he realizes. While every person in the world spends an incredible amount of time remembering and relaying memories to others, no one seems to fully understand how people remember and why they remember details someone else in the same situation will forget. For example, I can remember the time I met Hercules at Walt Disney World at four years old but cannot remember the name of the person I sat next to in my Political Science class last semester. Memory becomes even more complicated when certain feelings resurface at the moment of remembrance. People may laugh randomly remembering a joke someone told them last week or be unable to sleep because of the shame, embarrassment, or guilt they associate with a memory from years past.

Memory seems to defy explanation or logical sense, as Data accurately points out when considering the idea, and yet memory affects every single person every single day. Even more powerfully, the emotions, feelings, and sensations we associate with those memories can have a very real impact on present day actions or feelings. Remembering a sad event from a decade ago can still bring us to tears, just as the memory of a very good meal can make one’s mouth water from anticipation. It seems impossible to represent memory accurately and fully within any medium, yet because of its impact on everyday life it seems necessary to make the attempt. Films that have attempted to depict this complex process are nothing new, but some films, of course, are more successful than others. For this thesis I will analyze three different films that depict and examine memory and its impact on the individual: Hiroshima Mon Amour, The Seventh Seal, and Rashomon. Using flashback, character, and a variety of techniques I will explicate in this project, I will examine how these films use memory and its relationship to war to comment on their postwar culture.

Filmmakers have used a variety of techniques and narratives to depict memory and the ways it informs people’s lives, and seem no closer than any other medium to fully reflecting and representing the entire process of memory. When discussing the difficulty of representing memory in films, Lisa Starks claims that “[m]emory is imperfect, thwarted by gaps and discontinuities” and it might appear “the new technology of moving pictures seemed to compensate” when first introduced (184). Of course, this same author expresses the difficulty in expressing memory because “experience cannot be known directly or retained in its entirety” and therefore remains untranslatable to any true medium (Starks 184). However, this does not discount the attempts and successes filmmakers have found in portraying memory in their works. Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, a film almost universally praised and critically adored, presents the life of the titular character through the memories of the people who knew him. The construction of a person’s life comes from the main character’s acquaintances, and this makes an interesting statement about legacy and one relationship to other people. With numerous filmic representation of memory, questions of the ethicality, practicality, and reality of depicting memory seem to warrant discussion when considering their effect on a cultural consciousness.

Depictions of memory, especially of historical events, has come into international discussion. When discussing Holocaust cinema, Lynn Rapaport asks her reader to consider the ethical and historical questions in creating a Holocaust film:

How does one create a film based on the Holocaust, and make it both morally just and marketable? More generally, what is the role of popular culture in political and social life, and how does it serve the interests of Holocaust education? Is it a legitimate avenue to express a representation of the Holocaust, or do commercial interests and mass appeal trivialize the sacredness of this event? Does artistic license affect the distinction between fiction and history?” (55)

By asking audiences to consider historical representations and film, Rapaport invites people to see past their own perceptions of events or history and the way film has shaped perceptions of historical events. Allan Stoekl, in another analysis of Holocaust film, believes the purest form of delivery of a memory or historical event comes from a filmed delivery of a person’s individual memory. Stoekl acknowledges the advantages in taking a “more distant” film approach as he terms it, leading to the limits “the fragmentation that characterizes the form and the content, or the vessel and the world that encompasses” an individual testimony (78). Witness stories limit the scope and possibility for expressing an event as, by definition, a witness can only attest to their individual experience. With this limitation placed on testimony, and Stoekl assertion that witnesses provide the most accurate portrayal of events, should film about the past or historical events be considered fair or accurate? Stefanie Strathaus proposes that seeing film as a depiction of the past or the memory of an event does not wholly reflect the film experience. Strathaus maintains that film represents “not only remnants or witnesses of another time, but also an experience in the present tense, in the moment of their perception” (4). This critic proposes that the experience of a film creates its own memory around fictionalized events. While viewers may mistake this for objective reality, Strathaus maintains significance still presents itself “in the moment of their viewing” and cannot be discounted (4).

While Stoekl and Rapaport specifically focus their comments on Holocaust cinema, Strathaus speaks about films surrounding memory and history more broadly. The Holocaust, as one of the most damning and tragic events in history, incurs passionate feelings and discourse around its representation and depiction to moviegoers. Strathaus’ article mentions Holocaust cinema but does not confine itself to that particular historical genre. Though Stoekl and Rapaport focus on depictions of the Holocaust, their concerns about accuracy and ethicality in commercial depictions of tragedy or history ring true for films about historical events or memory. Their approach involves Holocaust films, but by no means do their questions remain exclusive to that category. What Strathaus proposes though, involves seeing the film as a production and experience of the present that still offers value to the film’s viewer. In this way, the film itself means something to the audience and the opportunity for connection and empathy can only come from viewing a film. All of these analyses of film and their construction of history and memory anticipate Russell Kilbourn’s concerns about memory, history and film:

Far from bearing out the argument that ‘cinematic representations’ as ‘memory bank’ have ‘superseded’ a more authentic realm of being or identity, I begin with the counter-argument that for much of the twentieth and now the twenty-first century what we talk about, glibly and unreflectively, as ‘memory’, is always mediated, whether by physically external, ‘prosthetic’ technologies of inscription or storage, or by internalized, naturalized ‘technologies’ of memory, where the latter are framed in comparably, quasi-metaphorical, quasi-literal, terms, derived from the former. (2)

Kilbourn uses a lot of big words and ideas in his book, but essentially offers the hypothesis that what people understand as memory in today’s world appears as film, or primarily through film representations, because people consume the medium more than any other form of storytelling. Kilbourn takes the example of Homer’s The Iliad and claims that the Greeks would have remembered the Trojan War as Homer’s epic rather than the actual events. Not only would the Greeks have understood the war as the events as described in Homer’s work but would have also understood much of history and memory through the forms of the work. This does not mean Greeks remembered in the form of epic verse, but their understanding would have been heavily informed by works like that create “an artificial or simulacral double [that] has emerged and developed alongside an ‘authentic’, ‘natural’ memory” (Kilbourn 6). Using this example Kilbourn explains that the way people understand memory now always come from a “a collective, thoroughly ‘artificial’ ‘memory’, constituted, legitimized and ‘naturalized’ through and by means of primarily visual media, most significantly cinema” (6). Film, with its ubiquity and cultural significance, has become our primary medium for interpreting events even though we remain almost completely unaware of its influence over our subconscious processes.

This influence, Kilbourn claims, does not allow people to truly understand history or memory because our memory processes overwrite “an ‘authentic’, ‘natural’ memory” and instead give us “a constellation of interconnected metaphors” that emphasize spatial relationships, like that of a film shot (4, 6). Better stated, if a person remembers an event from the past they would think of this memory as a flashback not a natural memory. Margaret Turim describes a flashback as “an image or a filmic segment that is understood as representing temporal occurrences anterior to those in the images that preceded it” (1). In Kilbourn’s model, people conceive the act of remembrance in filmic terms, in the processes of a flashback as described by Turim who, quite literally, wrote the book on flashback in film. Kilbourn cannot tell the reader what acts as ‘natural’ memory because he too has grown up in a world conceived of through a film lens. In Kilbourn’s model, filmic memory has become so present in everyday life people now conceive all memory in cinematic terms instead of its natural state.

This thesis does not intend to disprove Kilbourn’s premise or attempt to argue for the legitimacy of filmic memory. However, using Kilbourn’s definition of the “international post war art film” and his conceptions about memory in film, this thesis will examine three directors depiction of memory in film: Alain Resnais, Ingmar Bergman, and Akira Kurosawa. Using one of their films, Hiroshima Mon Amour, The Seventh Seal, and Rashomon respectively, this thesis will show how film can also acknowledge the complexities and limitations on memory and film. Kilbourn defines the “international post war art film” in terms of narrative:

The focus is on the conjunction of the subjective level - the representation of an individual’s perception of time, the structural and thematic role of desire, and a reified relation to death - with the objective level of ‘realism’ (both iconic and ideological) epitomized in the modern city in which cinema as the paradigmatic late-modern cultural form finds its ideal setting. The twentieth-century city is the literal ‘city of the dead’ for the modern katabasis narrative; the spatial locus for the journey whose ultimate goal is to ironically ‘redeem’ life by escaping time. (47)

The important parts of Kilbourn’s definition as it applies to this thesis comes from the “individual’s perception of time” and the “ultimate goal [ ] to ironically ‘redeem’ life by escaping time. In Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, the first film discussed, the characters discuss the female character’s memories of World War II and how these impact her life presently. The second film analyzed, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, depicts post-Crusades Europe and the impact of war memory on individual approaches to life. Finally, this thesis examines Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon as depiction of reality construction and memory through the narrative of a court trial. Each of these films uses the filmic space to depict character’s psychological landscapes rather than ‘objective’ reality. These films, all fiction, do not attempt to portray historical fact and do not pretend to present objective history. These films do not ask audiences to see film depictions of history as fact and instead use film to present people impacted by memory and memory construction. In each of these films, memory acts as a source of controversy and does not portray memory as a fixed, objective idea. In the case of Hiroshima Mon Amour, the director specifically presents the limitation in using film to portray history and memory and offers a different formula for film to continually comment on present-day events. The ethicality of presenting history or memory, something all these films do, becomes more centered on the character's reception of the memory than any attempt to depict fact or influence memory of a particular event. Memory becomes a source of enlightenment, of escape, from the guilt that surrounds them. Memory becomes their source of salvation as well as their damnation.

Not content to merely commenting on memory, each of these films reflects on emotions and effects specifically related to memory. Guilt seems to drive most of the action and impact of memory on the primary characters of each film. The guilt in these films comes from the main character in Hiroshima Mon Amour and her feelings over her love affair with a soldier of the enemy, the guilt The Seventh Seal’s protagonists feel for their complicity in The Crusades, and the guilt that drives the crime confessions in Rashomon. The guilt in these films drives character motivations, forces characters to confront their own self-perceptions, and becomes a source of cultural commentary. Within the guilt character’s associate with memory, each film gets the opportunity to examine the process and effect of memory on individual’s and their perceptions. According to Kilbourn the protagonist of an art film’s “‘empowerment’ emerges in [their] engagement with other temporalities and ‘realities’, via fantasy, dream and memory” (56). Each of these film’s present protagonist’s whose memory acts as a recognizable force within the film, qualifying each of these films under Kilbourn’s definition. In his introduction, Kilbourn specifically states that Rashomon “represents the postwar international ‘art film’ alternative to classical style” though he does not elaborate on this categorization, and he does not place The Seventh Seal or Hiroshima Mon Amour under this category (12). The author does specifically analyze other films by the directors of The Seventh Seal and Hiroshima Mon Amour, Ingmar Bergman and Alain Resnais respectively, and elects to focus on how memory becomes a source of self-reflection within each film. While film may not accurately reflect how people actually remember, they can attempt to reflect the effect of film on memory and the effect of memory on an individual. These three international filmmakers use the medium of film to show how memory and guilt remain important topics for filmmakers to consider and then present them to their audience.

The Trauma of Memory: Flashback and Human Connection in Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour

After Alain Resnais’ examined the complexity of responsibility and complicity in the tragedy of the Holocaust in his documentary Nuit et Brouillard [Night and Fog] (1955), the director set out to make a short documentary about the 1945 dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. After multiple false starts and rewritten screenplays, he decided to make a fictional film about “the impossibility of making a documentary about Hiroshima” (Kreidl 54). Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) continues many of the themes the director explores in his short documentary Nuit et Brouillard around guilt and the importance of remembering past tragic events, as well as bringing in new elements about cultural memory and the power of empathy. In his subsequent film, Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Resnais moved away from commentary on international events and those of World War II and focused his fictional narrative on the ways memory informs and alters how people react to a situation. These three films by Resnais, all released within six years of each other, demonstrate the director’s preoccupation with the ways film can interpret and comment on memory. A documentary and two narrative films interrogating how guilt and history impact people demonstrate Resnais’ preoccupation with themes surrounding memory. In an essay on flashback in Hiroshima Mon Amour, Maureen Turim comments “[i]t is paradoxical that the filmmaking of Resnais should represent one of the most consistent explorations of the flashback” even though Resnais is not credited with the script (210). However, it is very probably he had quite a bit of input into the screenplay and its themes and content. Turim’s paradox occurs because Resnais’ films all dealt with similar subjects and yet he did not write them. By exploring not just the flashback, but memory’s effect on an individual and their actions as a whole, Resnais uses film to showcase the advantages and limitations of using film to convey and illustrate human experience and memory. Experience and memory allow the protagonist of Hiroshima Mon Amour to question herself and her motivations while also allowing the director to comment on filmic memory as a whole.

                Hiroshima Mon Amour focuses on the final day of an affair between a French actress and a Japanese architect in the city of Hiroshima a decade after the atomic bomb was dropped on the city. The French woman, wrapping up filming on a documentary about the war’s end, discusses her experiences while filming and opens up to her lover about her life during World War II. Through this exchange, and the architect’s push for more information about her tragedy, the film uses flashbacks and voiceover to help the audience truly understand the tragedy of Hiroshima. Though the woman begins the film insisting she has learned all she can about the event, the man helps her to see the important human element needed to try to grasp the complexities of such a horrific event. This association gives the audience a personal story to use as an attempt to bring forth the same negative feelings a Japanese citizen might feel toward an event most in the West would associate with the end of a long and bloody war. This associative narrative technique via film helps a primarily Western audience process and view the Hiroshima tragedy from a Japanese perspective (Kreidl 57).

To establish this narrative link between the French woman’s memories of World War II and the Japanese experience of the Hiroshima event, Resnais uses flashbacks to demonstrate how thematically similar and relevant the two events tie to each other. The flashbacks establish a parallel between the actress’ memories and a cultural memory of the tragedy of Hiroshima. In the opening scene and flashback, Elle and her current paramour, the Japanese architect, exchange dialogue about documentation of the bombing of Hiroshima as well as the impact of images, giving their relationship a metaphorical existence where their conversations become “representations of lovers” (Turim 211). By giving their relationship an almost mythical context, where characters embody an idea than a person, Hiroshima Mon Amour draws attention to the constructed memory offered by documentaries and museums, examples of cultural constructions. By speaking about and critiquing the ways people remember an event, specifically film, the characters in Resnais’ film clearly parallel their own interactions to that of documentation of the atomic bomb’s use on Hiroshima. The montage of images in this opening -- museums, documentary footage, bodies covered in ash making love, and peace protests -- represent different forms of cultural memory and the ways people choose to memorialize an event. Hiroshima Mon Amour, the film, most directly comments on the film medium. These images represent the way a culture remembers and create a “memoria” or “a figure...which the spectator and, by extension… what a culture retains from a film” (Lefebvre 480). This memoria, as the opening montage suggests, would indicate that film has presented a false reality or memory of Hiroshima. The majority of shots in Resnas’ film come from documentary or pseudo-documentary footage of Hiroshima to directly tie the filmic memory to one of the film’s themes: that cultural memory does not accurately reflect individual experience. This opening demonstrates film’s ability to act as a source and preservation of memory. Kilbourn makes the claim that “what we talk about… as ‘memory,’ is always mediated... [by] naturalized ‘technologies’ of memory” (2). Kilbourn’s pronouncement of film as the major source of twentieth and twenty-first century remembrance fits well with the goals and themes of Hiroshima Mon Amour because of the film’s insistence on the importance of remembering tragic events. Resnais’ film not only looks at what a film can remember but how it can help shape an audience’s memory.

                The film’s opening montage of museums, documentary footage, and historical photographs demonstrates the director’s commitment to exploring the ways which people remember events. In this opening, the actress continues to state, despite her Japanese lover’s protestations to the contrary, that she “knows Hiroshima.” The French woman has viewed and seen cultural reconstructions of the Hiroshima event, but her lover maintains “she can[not] know what she has not experienced either directly or indirectly” (Cardullo 40). This leads the actress to search for the true Hiroshima experience throughout the film. As the montage continues, the actress relates her experience of visiting several places important to the Hiroshima event, including the national museum dedicated to the bombing and a hospital filled with victims of radiation-related complications. The actress claims she “knows Hiroshima” because of her experience at these places, but the film draws attention to the unnaturalness and false knowing these places create. Shots of the architecture and the use of people in these shots highlight the film as a film - a construct designed to shape the way we view something. The shots focusing on the museum’s building “reflects its function: that of formalizing Hiroshima’s nuclear history into a straightforward and orderly unit” (Varsava 113). The film views the museum as an attempt to define an undefinable event. In the hospital shots patients turn away from the camera’s ‘view’ “denying the vision it seeks to record” to further show how a memory construct does not accurately reflect the lived experience of an event (Varsava 113). The people who lived through Hiroshima turn from the film’s gaze because the construct created does not accurately reflect their experience and cannot contain their struggle. Gerd Bayer, in an essay discussing cultural memory, explains that “memorials, museums, and medialized commodifications invariably run the risk of removing if not sublating the actual events to an abstract level” and possibly make historical events “emotionally less powerful and thus less effective” (117). In this essay about two recent Holocaust films, Bayer builds on analysis of Hiroshima Mon Amour, in particular when it comes to her claim that “[t]he possibility of knowing history . . . is . . . raised as a deeply ethical dilemma: the unremitting problem of how not to betray the past” in modern constructions of memory (120). Bayer’s criticism of constructions of cultural memory parallel the way the Japanese architect in Hiroshima Mon Amour maintains that the French woman cannot know the Hiroshima event through mediums such as documentaries and museums.

                The film’s opening montage qualifies as a flashback, albeit an atypical and unstructured flashback. The cuts from the museum, documentary footage, and the actress’ visit comprise a disjointed scene where the line between the French woman's memories and the sources of memory become blurred and distorted. The editing in this sequence melds personal memory with that of documentary footage and museum construction. Perhaps the viewer witnesses the woman’s memory of herself viewing and interpreting the various attempts to capture the Hiroshima event. The dialogue between the actress and her Japanese lover further reinforces the confusion between memory and that memory constructed for an individual by outside sources:

MAN: You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.

WOMAN: I saw everything. I saw the hospital – I’m sure of it. The hospital in Hiroshima exists. How could I not have seen it?

MAN: You didn’t see the hospital in Hiroshima.

For context, this exchange happens while the two characters are having sex -- not very hot if you ask me. The dialogue between the two characters “mixes an abstract exotic exchange with a discussion of the subject matter of the images, the museum, the bombing, the evidence of the damage, the attempts to document the damage” demonstrating the ways in which Hiroshima Mon Amour will bring personal experience into existence with larger, cultural ideas about memory (Turim 211).

The film does not want to separate the woman’s own experiences from those of the people at Hiroshima but neither does it want to claim them as the same. The woman, while people in the shot turn away from the camera’s gaze, repeats that she “saw the hospital at Hiroshima.” Her lover, after a brief shot of their bodies making love, quietly corrects her, “You saw nothing in Hiroshima.” By focusing on these “clips of cinematic reconstruction” Resnais’ film makes the audience “critically consider the complex mediation of all the representations of Hiroshima with which [they] are presented” (Varsava 114). By presenting the problem with representations of historical events, and especially such emotionally-tense ones, at the opening, logic dictates the film must then tell an audience how a film should better act as a cultural document of memory. This representation of memory on film demonstrates Kilbourn’s hypothesis “that cinema… is constitutive of memory in its deepest and most meaningful sense” (183). By opening with these failures in capturing memory, the documentary films and shots of museums, the film can then offer ways in which film can more accurately reflect and represent an event like Hiroshima. In Kilbourn’s definition of the “international postwar art film,” he explains that the protagonist of this type of film has a “journey… that unfolds in the landscape of memory” (48). In this definition, the action and plot of a film comes from the characters analyzing memories and using this as a point of character development. The actress fulfills the role of protagonist by searching and really remembering her war experience to connect with her Japanese lover’s experience of Hiroshima. Memory acts as a source of connection and human empathy and the French woman’s fulfillment of this role cements her as an international post war art protagonist. This type of film is constructed around “the representation of an individual’s perception of time” and an “objective level of ‘realism’... [that is] epitomized in the modern city” (Kilbourn 47). The city of Hiroshima becomes the city that will force the actress’ memories to the surface and use them to connect to the tragedy of the city. Documentary subjects, photographs, and the museums in the opening flashback demonstrate Kilbourn’s contention that these forms and creators believe their medium “constitutive of memory in its deepest and most meaningful sense” (183). By specifically pointing how these constructions fail, Hiroshima Mon Amour embodies Kilbourn’s criticism.

To shape the ways an audience could remember, or more accurately interpret their memory of an event, Resnais’ film uses personal tragedy to give the viewer an understanding of the complicated emotions and effects of Hiroshima’s destruction. The actress believes her experience of Hiroshima is definite and accurate because of her interaction with multiple attempts to reconstruct the event, but her lover knows she cannot truly understand the tragedy. To make the tragedy and emotion clear and present to the character, the film draws a parallel between her personal tragedy in Nevers and the atom bomb’s use on Hiroshima. The Frenchwoman fell in love with a German soldier while the German military occupied France in World War II. The soldier died in the Allies liberation of France, and the townspeople ostracized and stigmatized the woman for sleeping with the enemy. Eventually, the actress’ family hid her in the basement and then quietly smuggled her to Paris, refusing to speak to her once she moved. This tragedy comes from “the conflict between two goods” because the actress fell in love but that love did not support her country (Cardullo 40). As, Cardullo explains, this “conflict between goods” mirrors the Hiroshima event:

The Frenchwoman’s [sic] love affair with the German was tragic, if one defines tragedy as the conflict between two goods. She fell naturally in love with him, yet she should not have carried on a love affair with an enemy of France. To love is good; to support one’s country is also good. Likewise, the Frenchwoman’s fellow citizens naturally punished her for fraternizing with the enemy. Yet they should not have punished her, since she did not collaborate with the Germans against the French--indeed, her boyfriend may have treated the people of Nevers better for his relationship with one of their daughters--and since she was so young and inexperienced. The tragedy of the Frenchwoman’s love is analogous to the tragedy of the atomic bomb. The Americans had to drop the bomb, because the Japanese refused to surrender and a land invasion of Japan would have meant the loss of approximately 50,000 American lives. Yet, they should not have dropped it, because of the unprecedented destruction and long-term suffering it would bring about; because their use of the bomb would stigmatize them in the eyes of the world; and because they would be introducing a weapon that would be copied by other nations and would undergo further development, to become the hydrogen bomb. (40)

                This conflict between two goods becomes the basis for Cardullo’s examination of Hiroshima Mon Amour as a symbolic journey from false consciousness to understanding. The critic’s conclusion that the use of the woman’s narrative of Nevers allows an audience “[to be] distanced sufficiently through him from the actual suffering caused by the bomb” and “compliment and lament the tragedy of the atomic bomb’s creation and use” fits with the assertion that Resnais invites the audience to reexamine their own remembrance of Hiroshima (Cardullo 42). The actress’ narrative becomes a narrative device to both echo the complex feelings of Hiroshima as well as distance the audience from their preconceptions around the event. To accommodate for this commentary, Resnais subtly links Nevers with Hiroshima by having an image of the dead soldier’s hand flash by in the film’s opening montage. In the scene immediately following this one the French woman focuses for an extended period on the hand of her Japanese lover as it lies on the bed of their hotel room in exactly the same fashion as the hand seen in the opening. Though the viewer does not know the significance of the hand at the film’s start, an audience can understand that the architect represents someone from the woman’s past. This foreshadowing of parallels between Japan and France gives the film room to explore how two dissimilar events can evoke similar emotions.

These emotions become more clearly defined in the film’s first extended flashback to the actress’ experience in Nevers. This surge of memory comes after the couple has spent an afternoon in the man’s home having sex. The actress asks about the man’s wife, whose bed they just used. After a brief description of the Japanese man’s marriage, the French woman begins to recount her life throughout the Second World War. Turim explains how, unlike the flashback to come later in the day, this one is “similar in form to a standard flashback” that uses scenes narrated by voiceover “to describe the German lover and the past tense which indicates a distance from these historical events” (212). This depiction of memory fits within standard film uses and would seem to represent the film medium’s typical view of memory as a visual medium realized most accurately through film. Though Resnais will complicate this memory and its use within the narrative further in the film’s running time, at this moment the memory seems more focused on explaining the French woman’s current state of mind and feelings for her Japanese lover. It reinforces Kilbourn’s assertion that filmmakers see “‘history’ in its status as objective standard or measure of ‘truth’” as captured by film perfectly because of history’s status as “omnivoyant eye and collective memory” (179). By not complicating the film’s use of flashback Resnais sets up a standard by which to view film’s depiction of memory though many filmmakers would see this technique as pure historical ‘fact,’ Resnais uses it to lay out the shortcomings of this arrogant and blind approach to film as a preservation of ‘truth.’ However, this first extended flashback to the woman’s life in Nevers throughout German occupation in World War II focuses on revealing the German identity of her former lover and revealing he died, rather than offering commentary on memory or guilt. The narrative treats his introduction as occupier of France, her affair with him, and his death as a single, linear narrative. The woman tells her Japanese lover her former affair was not with a French man but does not reveal he is German. As an audience we see the soldier’s German uniform and have knowledge the architect would appear not to have except his questions to her in this scene seem to indicate he possesses “an extra-narrative knowledge, the knowledge of the text and the author” (Turim 213). This knowledge could have come from a previous conversation but the reservation with which the French woman reveals her backstory suggests she has not told him of her previous lover before. Yet, the Japanese man presses her on the soldier’s identity and asks how he died. This knowledge suggests to the viewer that the architect will act as a catalyst in unlocking a deeper truth within the actress’ memories. Presented in this sequence, the woman sees her past experience in Nevers with a dispassion and logic that also characterizes many film flashback forms. Her experience is chronological, finite and contained within the moment she has recounted.

This flashback to Nevers treats the woman’s recounting of events as accurate and whole, and though no part of her narrative in this scene proves false, her second flashback at a bar reveals the deep emotion and tragedy that surrounded these events. This second flashback proves necessary and led one critic to proclaim this section of the film becomes “that rare movie in which present and past meld in every frame to convey a sense of time obliterated” (Abele). This flashback, and its intrusion on the linear plot of the film reflects the way people remember. Memories do not always come at opportune times and the actress’ need to confess more about the situation she did not fully explain earlier suggests the need for more remembrance to connect with her lover. Margaret Turim accurately summarizes why the second flashback represents a complication on the woman’s first extended flashback to Nevers:

The flashbacks generated by the bar scene are quite different in form; the telling is an acting out. She addresses not the Japanese man, but the German soldier whom he has tacitly agreed to embody for her by acting the part. He questions her in a manner that urges her to continue her story as he adopts the German’s persona. She seems to be in a trance, while her voice-over is in the present tense and addresses the German in the second person. There is none of the emotional distance that we sense in the bed scene flashbacks. (213)

By complicating a flashback already present within the film’s narrative, Resnais suggests the need for a traditional film flashback to represent more human experience. If we accept that the woman’s first retelling of Nevers represents Kilbourn’s charge of cinematic interpretation of memory as fact, than Hiroshima Mon Amour’s complication of that same scene indicates an awareness and need for cinematic memory to mean something different. The flashback in the bar focuses on the woman’s emotions and unresolved feelings toward the soldier and the negative treatment she received from her family and neighbors. The juxtaposition of two very different interpretations of the same flashback seems to represent this conflict in the context of cinematic devices. The first flashback limits itself to ‘facts’ and ‘truth,’ while the second focuses on the actress addressing her former lover via her current lover and how she felt about their affair and his death. Her conflict represents how human history can be conveyed through an impaired cultural memory. By presenting the complex emotions and feelings of the woman Resnais encourages audiences to look past facts as a way to understand tragedy. When the film opens the French woman claims to know Hiroshima and recounts the facts and numbers surrounding the tragedy. She uses this same strategy when explaining her experience in Nevers initially, and until the Japanese man forces her to acknowledge the unresolved feelings she has toward the whole event, she cannot move past it. After the actress has acknowledged her failed memory then she can see why she does not know Hiroshima.

As the flashback ends, the camera shot focuses on the actress’ face as she addresses the soldier and the intense sadness she feels over his death and the guilt she feels making her family feel she betrayed them. As the French woman ends her monologue, she looks directly into the eyes of the Japanese architect and in one moment all the background noise from the bar comes back at once. The viewer, like the actress, is not even aware of the removal of the background noise, so engrossed are they in the woman’s emotions, that their return is the only clue they disappeared. This technique allows the audience to feel the same single-mindedness of the character and grasp the magnitude of how Nevers made the woman feel. This emotional distress and turmoil becomes representative of the feelings the film creates around the Hiroshima event. At the film’s end, the woman renames the Japanese man Hiroshima as he renames her Nevers. The film’s conclusion makes clear their status as representative of larger ideas and as the woman has regained her memories of Nevers, by speaking directly to the Japanese man, so has she begun to grasp the horror of the Hiroshima event. The film does not end with a great epiphany or understanding of the atomic tragedy. Resnais’ film does not claim to encapsulate Hiroshima or its memory, but still insists on its value to help remember Hiroshima. By not offering a definitive end or statement about Hiroshima, the French film shows how film can better present emotion and connection when one person connects with those people who have survived the tragedy. The woman could never have reconciled her past with an understanding of Hiroshima until she met the Japanese architect. Though she acts in a documentary about the event and has reviewed museums surrounding the Hiroshima event, Riva’s character does not truly understand the tragedy until she connects and communicates with the Japanese architect. The power and truth in memory does not come from the cultural constructions like a documentary or museum but from connecting with others.

Bayer comments that films about historical tragedies only succeed when films about trauma or memory focus on how a person can “connect… to others, turning the supposedly solitary act of traumatic reenactment into a dialogic and social act” (130). With this approach, the critic believes the film “transmit[s] personal traumatic memory into cultural memory” (Bayer 130). Kilbourn laments the “thoroughly ‘artificial’ ‘memory’, constituted, legitimized and ‘naturalized’ through and by means of primarily visual media” believing it a simulacra of reality Hiroshima Mon Amour appears to celebrate a filmmaker’s ability to preserve and shape memory. Hiroshima Mon Amour presents the character of the actress, better stated as a cultural, European representative than a fully formed individual, whose life and self refused to remember the painful memory of her love affair with a Nazi officer in the midst of the German occupation of France in World War II. The painful memory does not resurface until the actress begins an affair with a Japanese architect while filming a documentary about the Hiroshima bombing because of the pain and personal grief she associates with the memory. The specific point of view in this film proves necessary for the director’s theme. By having a European begin to empathize with a Japanese tragedy that represented a European victory, Resnais demonstrates how traumatic memory can act as a source of connection with another perspective. In his analysis of historical films Stoekl comments on the power of film to force viewers to empathize with individuals:

The unification of viewpoint of the narrator is always a multiplicity of viewpoints, a series of perspectives without unity, a collection which always threatens a scattering. And out of that comes the question of the truth, the question of our position in relation to crime, our witnessing, along with, and against, the witnessing of the viewpoint that was ‘there.’ (81)

The point of view of the actress becomes a synthesizing of Western attitudes on the use of the atomic bomb. Through this viewpoint, the audience may empathize with the Japanese because of the tragedy with which they view the Hiroshima event. Resnais’ film does not depict the event as it happened, or as a filmic structure would best depict the event and focuses on empathy and overcoming guilt in memory. Resnais uses Nevers to represent the West and Hiroshima to represent Japan. Resnais’ film specifically uses the film medium to draw out the actress’ memory by providing a visual representation. The director does not claim fiml about Hiroshima as historically correct, but does believe in a Hiroshima film’s ability to create empathy in viewers. Nevers cannot remember her past love until Hiroshima draws it out of her through their affair.

The actress empathizes with the people of Japan and begins processing her own memories and trauma in Hiroshima. As Kilbourn notes in the “international postwar art film” film protagonists often use the modern city as “the spatial locus for the journey whose ultimate goal is to ironically ‘redeem’ life by escaping time” (Kilbourn 47). Kilbourn describes the city in the international post war art film as a “city of the dead” and a city rocked by an atomic explosion surely fulfills that requirement (47). For Nevers and Hiroshima, their affair serves as the catalyst for the actress to use her memory to connect with the memory of Hiroshima.

In his other films, Resnais uses film to present memory and guilt in varying contexts. Nuit et Brouillard focuses on the cultural responsibility for a tragedy like the Holocaust and Last Year at Marienbad focuses on the way people remember events and how this creates feeling. These two films deal with memory and its consequences, but Hiroshima Mon Amour suggests the need for people to use memory to connect with others. While Nuit et Brouillard invites empathy for Holocaust victims, it still primarily focuses on the responsibility of a culture. While the characters in Hiroshima Mon Amour embody ideas they are presented as individuals whose trauma invites viewers to find sympathy in their own memories and abilities to understand another’s suffering. Resnais uses Hiroshima Mon Amour to convey human experience as well as an empathetic connection to tragedy and sadness, rather than victory and success.

Memory’s Ensnarement: Memory’s Effect in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal

Well aware of the implications of the apocalyptic imagery in the Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman claimed in his book Bergman on Bergman that his film “is about the fear of death” in a “nuclear catastrophe” and “freed [him] from [his] own fear of death” (117). This quote has fueled much of the discussion and critical analysis of Bergman’s classic film, with emphasis on the film’s commentary on a post-World War II society. Though the film takes place in the Middle Ages, it seemed obvious that Bergman’s 1957 film still had quite a lot to offer about the present. With iconic imagery such as a chess game with death, and numerous references to the film in many popular movies like The Muppet’s Most Wanted (2014) and (500) Days of Summer (2009), Bergman’s film still resonates. However, Bergman’s film as much focuses on the effects of the past as well as looking towards the future. The film’s protagonists, a knight and his squire, approach the world with very different worldviews, and the film uses these to comment on divinity, the point of human existence, and the impact a person can have on others. By juxtaposing such separate worldviews, Bergman’s film demonstrates the effect and power of memory on an individual and his or her life course.

                To present the problem and crises the characters in Bergman’s film will deal with, the director forces his characters to act instead of react. Antonius Block, a knight, spends most of the film considering action and philosophy instead of actually doing something to help others. Jöns, the knight’s squire, believes himself a selfish materialist, but the plights of other characters in the film compel him to intervene to help them. Antonius represents the type of protagonist Deleuze describes in a memory film:

[I]dentification is actually inverted: the character has become a kind of viewer. He shifts, runs and becomes animated in vain, the situation he is in outstrips his motor capacities on all sides, and makes him see and hear what is no longer subject to the rules of a response or an action. He records rather than reacts. He is prey to a vision, pursued by it or pursuing it, rather than engaged in an action. (3)

Antonius becomes a viewer to the events that surround him, as this analysis will explain, and becomes a victim of memory. Antonius proves unable to act because of his memory of The Crusades. The depiction of a character scared to act because of his memories gives the audience a peek into the mind of someone tortured by their actions in a war.

                The viewer first meets the knight, Antonius Block (Max von Sydow), trapped by memory on a rocky beach where he sees a hooded figure, Death, and begins a chess game that will last twenty-four hours. As he makes his way home from The Crusades, Block struggles with questions of faith and the purpose of human existence while meeting up with a variety of people who approach life with different philosophies. While Block sees the world in ideals, his squire Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand) spends his times helping others and satisfying his own physical needs. Eventually the two encounter a young troupe of actors. One of the actors, Jof, claims to have visions of the future, while his wife, a fellow actress, spends the majority of her time taking care of their son, Mikael. While the party travels through a forest in the night, Block understands he cannot escape Death, but he purposely knocks over the pieces of the game to distract Death and allow Jof, Mia, and their son to escape their impending deaths. The knight leads the rest of his party to his castle, where his wife reads passages from the book of Revelations until Death slays them all with the plague. At the film’s conclusion Jof claims to see the knight and his party following Death in a chain up a mountain before he and his family set out in their wagon.

Critics like Gary Giddins have noted how Jöns and Antonius represent two separate views, that of “the questing, idealistic hero… and earthy, practical lackey” (12-13). By forcing these two characters together The Seventh Seal places two opposing and incompatible ideological constructs against each other. This juxtaposition of worldviews informs the way both characters approach situations and interact with the film’s other characters. Jöns’ hedonistic approach does not allow him to feel regret or guilt over past actions but he also helps people, while Antonius’ idealism and desire for faith force him to agonize over his past actions in The Crusades and ignore his fellow man. Unlike Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, the memory of The Crusades permeates Bergman’s film and characters but without the use of flashback. This memory, unseen and unknown to the audience, appears in flashes of dialogue and meetings with people from the past. Memory comes through the character’s actions and interactions with other people. As both Jöns and Antonius have different approaches to life, one might infer that both characters have different memories or different interpretations of memory, in response to their experience in The Crusades. By examining the different ways the two men approach contemporary situations, as well as their own comments on their past, their interpretations of past events, their memories become apparent.

                Antonius’ first encounter with Death could very well represent a metaphorical meeting with death that the viewer must infer never physically occurs. Bergman’s film does not seem to offer any opinion whether the spectre of Death walks around in a heavy, black cloak forcing returning knights into strategy games or if Block merely confronts the philosophical possibility of the end of his life. No matter the particulars of the meeting, the Crusader must confront Death and the film depicts this as a chess game with a pale, imposing figure. Wood comments that The Seventh Seal’s depiction of Death “is just a bit of one-dimensional... fantasy” that “is too clear-cut to give off the multiple resonances of satisfying symbolism” (109). Despite Wood’s critiques of Bergman’s presentation of Death, the critic acknowledges the symbolic context that Death represents in Antonius’ mind and the film’s narrative. This symbol suggests the very thoughtful and real conflict that the knight wrestles with in his life. When Antonius meets either a symbolic or metaphorical representation of Death, the viewer can at least infer that the knight views life in philosophical and heady terms.

                Contrast this view of Death with Jöns’ first encounter with the film’s looming menace. The squire comes across a rotting corpse, a victim of the plague, and Antonius, unaware the figure is dead, asks Jöns if the figure spoke to him. Jöns replies, “He was most eloquent.” For Jöns, seeing a dead person tells him all he needs to know about the area and the circumstances of their arrival. Though Jöns does not verbalize what exactly seeing the corpse tells him, Antonius and Jöns seem aware of the plague’s existence and its place in their home. Jöns’ encounter with Death just after singing a song about the pleasures of prostitution suggests”a stoical acceptance of death and purely materialist values, comfort and discomfort” (Wood 100). Jöns does not work with ideals and symbols, like those of his knight, but depends instead on physical reality and things he can actually see. The critic Michael Pressler sees the different approaches each man takes to their encounter with Death as representative of “the early Christian concept of a debate between the soul and the body” (98). By placing “the squire’s pragmatic skepticism” against Antonius’ “feverish idealism” and forcing the two characters to travel together, Bergman’s film sets up a conflict between their views of the world (Pressler 98).

Both characters’ confrontations with Death seek to establish their worldview as well as demonstrate the ways each character interprets the present. For the squire, events and situations appear as observable, material moments and objects while Antonius sees each moment as a manifestation of abstract and philosophical conflicts and representations. Kilbourn’s examination of the art film describes the classification as a “representation of an individual’s perception of time, the structural and thematic role of desire, and a reified relation to death” that often portrays a character attempt to “‘redeem’ life by escaping time” (47). Kilbourn sees the art film as an attempt to not present time as chronological but a shifting, representational phenomena relying on an individual’s perception. Though The Seventh Seal portrays events in an apparently chronological timeline, the use of metaphorical and representational imagery indicates its preoccupation with the ways characters understand the world. Personifying Death within the film’s context leads me to proclaim some scenes within the film as representational of inner thought or conflict and therefore establish it as an art film.

To Kilbourn the art film cannot “escape time” but attempts to with “narratives of individual desire [and] death” (47). Antonius, by playing chess, attempts to elude death and escape his fate. The party at the center of Bergman’s film does not wish to die, even though their deaths remain inevitable. With Antonius’ identity so strongly tied to a controlling narrative of holiness and righteousness, explaining his actions in The Crusades, much of Bergman’s film finds the character attempting to overcome his “temporally conditioned identity.” Jöns has built his identity on his own personal values, and thus has come to have a conditioned identity built on selfishness and hedonism. However, the character still wishes to help those he meets throughout the film while the knight stays inside his own head having an existential crisis. Jöns’ escape from death involves handling his feelings related to his past, which become represented in one of the film’s characters. Death’s constant and foreboding presence within The Seventh Seal, suggests these characters’ ultimate fate despite their efforts to avoid the spectre at every turn. That the knight and his squire encounter Death in different forms at the film’s beginning does not suggest the possibility of escape or difference in outcome. Jöns and Antonius certainly interpret their first encounters with Death in dramatically different fashions but both will die before the film’s end. This ability to not escape fate, or “not escape time,” allows the film, as Kilbourn’s notes, to examine Death as “a purgatorial or even infernal space within which any redemptive or erotosalvific potential has only an ironic or ambiguous value” (48). Memory in this model of a film becomes a representation of psychological space, privileging the visual, and demonstrating internal spaces rather than realism of environment or scene. In order to present the memories that haunt both Jöns and Antonius, the director will confront them with different vision of similar themes. An audience must interpret the appearance of Death, as a character, as both real as well as probably an allegory. The meetings with Death Antonius has, the visual representations of an internal struggle the knight has with his mortality and what this means for his life. Bergman’s film chooses to demonstrate Death in two different varieties to represent its characters’ internal selves.

The Swedish film does not offer accompanying flashback to understand how each character has come to fully embody their ideal, if any such memory exists, but each character’s dialogue and encounters indicate how past events have shaped their person. Antonius tells Death, when disguised as a priest, his hope that the chess match will give him time to perform “one meaningful act.” In this conversation with Death disguised as a priest. Block describes his actions in the Crusades as “useless” and “sinful,” indicating a deep dissatisfaction and regret over his involvement in the holy war. He further reveals his hope that performing “one meaningful act” will prove the existence of God and the purpose of life. The knight believes that the opportunity to do a good deed will open up understanding about mysteries he hoped would be answered by his time abroad in the holy war. The memory of his actions in The Crusades spurs him to search for a purpose to human action. Ingmar Bergman describes Block as a “fanatic” and then explains that the character represents “[t]hese types [of people] whose whole cast of mind as it were looks beyond mere human beings toward some unknown goal” (Bergman on Bergman, 117). The knight’s fixation on this “unknown goal” comes from his regret of his complicity within the crime of The Crusades. The knight describes the war as “sinful” indicating his regret over his involvement in the war. While a viewer does not know the specifics of what has led Block to declare his action sinful, one can conclude that his memories of the war do not involve any kind of righteousness or holiness. Max von Sydow’s character never offers specifics, but the knight who confesses his desire to see goodness in the world points to the lack of goodness he has seen over the majority of his life. Block plays the game of chess to confirm a higher purpose for human action. The knight allowed himself to believe the Church’s lies, and created his individual identity on based on his complicity with the church, and now the knight acknowledges his complicity in the crime of The Crusades. Later in the film, Jöns will meet up with the seminary student who convinced Block to participate in The Crusades. The squire will explain how this seminarian persuaded the knight of the war’s “holiness” and “goodness,” leading to their participation in the event. This narrative of righteousness has clearly been destroyed by whatever happened in the war. Like the individual identity based on film that Kilbourn describes in his definition of an art film, Antonius’ own identity formation came from a controlled, false narrative that did not provide the truth. However, Bergman’s film presents Block attempting to expiate his sins and give meaning to his existence.

For Kilbourn, memory appears in four different forms, with an emphasis on visual communication of remembrance. Memory’s depiction comes from a “visual-spatial model of memory as vast palace or storehouse” that focuses on portraying memory as a visual interruption of chronological events (51). The Seventh Seal’s scenes do not get interrupted by visual portrayals of the character’s memories and instead get related to the audience through character explanation and present-day visual interruptions - such as a chess game with death. When Antonius does not offer details about his time in the Crusades, he implies a narrative memory not bound to the visual. Unlike Resnais in Hiroshima Mon Amour, Bergman’s film bucks the trend of visual memory in film narrative and instead relies on implication and dialogue to indicate a character's history. This technique also separates Bergman’s film from the stylistic choices explained later in Kurosawa’s Rashomon. Bergman, not visually depicting memory with flashbacks, presents the viewer with a character undergoing a crisis of memory. Susan Suleiman, in her book on war and memory, describes a crisis of memory as “moments that highlight the relations between individual memory and group memory, concerning a past event that is stipulated as important by the group at a given time” (5). Antonius, a character who rejects the narrative given to him when he began his crusade, clearly disagrees with a collective memory surrounding the war. The knight’s individual memories of the war, clearly negative, do not line up with the belief in righteousness his culture seems to hold. Within this crisis of memory, Antonius finds himself unable to act because his memories of war and violence have convinced him that he must perform “one meaningful act” before he dies. In the knight’s discussion with the priest, he lays out how he sees The Crusades as sinful and now wishes for redemption before death. Unfortunately, this concern with goodness and righteousness makes the character afraid to act, paralyzed by his complicitness on a so-called righteous action before this. Antonius’ memory of this false consciousness of justice leads him to question all actions. In this state, the knight spends more time questioning action than actually performing it.

This use of memory in characterization offers a less concrete setting than that of a visual flashback. In this manner, The Seventh Seal does not focus on Antonius’ memory and instead places emphasis on the effect his memory has on his present sense of self. The knight the audience meets in Bergman’s film has lost his individual identity, the one constructed by Crusade narratives and experiences of war. Guilt over his actions in the holy war and his complicity with the lies his Church fed him has forced Antonius to spend his remaining day on Earth searching for an answer and an identity. “[T]he depths of human bestiality he has witnessed” forces Antonius into the position of a “modern man” whose life has brought despair and “meaninglessness” in the face of human cruelty and action  (Donner 137). Donner explains how Antonius’ plight mirrors that of humanity in a post-World War II society. As the world had plunged itself into international conflict for the second time in less than thirty years, art began to ask the very real question of humanity’s purpose and ultimate nature, good or evil, in a world where so much violence had occurred. Antonius comes to symbolize these concerns by questioning his actions in war and his desire to perform “a meaningful action” before his death. His memories of war have pushed him into existential despair and the director does not offer a complete resolution to these questions.

It would not appear that Antonius overcomes these feelings of guilt and regret, but a moment two-thirds of the way through the film indicates he has begun to discover a solution to his constant introspection and concern with the divine and human higher purpose. The knight meets Mia, the actress, on a sunny hill and the two characters engage in a conversation about how Antonius considers himself “dull company.” Mia agrees she sometimes feels the same and then Jof joins the two. Soon, Jöns shows up with a woman he saved from a murderer earlier in his travels, and the characters eat strawberries and drink milk. In a monologue to himself, Antonius comments that this moment reminds him of the times before the Crusades when he lived at home with his wife and their castle was “full of life.” Sydow’s character tells Mia he will remember this moment and keep his “memory like a bowl full of milk” that will “be a sign and source of great satisfaction” in his life. The scene ends with the people at the picnic agreeing to travel together through a foreboding forest.

In this scene, Antonius finds comfort in the present by connecting the moment to a happy memory from his distant past. Memory becomes a source of healing, no longer guilt, as Antonius finds tranquility in eating with Jof, Mia, and Mikael. The “torment of serving the image of a God who stands beyond life” forced him into the Crusades and created happy memories, but Antonius finds true fulfillment in simple, familial pleasures. Though the knight eats with a family not his own, he suddenly remembers the positive feelings he associates with the early days of his marriage. Memory becomes a way to recognize true fulfillment in the same way Sydow’s character feels anguish over his memories of the Crusades. This moment of contentment leads Antonius to lose his chess game with death and allow Jof and his family to escape. The guilt associated with war memories drives the knight to produce “one meaningful act,” but the memory of a happier time leads him to performing an action he believes has real value.

Antonius’ squire, confronted with the same memories of cruelty and false piety of the Crusades as his master, instead takes a very different outlook on life. Just as the church scene allows Antonius to confront his own questioning of ideals and actions, so does Jöns face religion and his past when he meets a former seminary student Raval who convinced Antonius of the holiness of a Crusades expedition. The squire prevents Raval from killing a woman for witnessing him robbing corpses, and Jöns informs the thief he remembers when the former holy man persuaded Antonius to join the crusade. As Jöns has conceptualized his existence in very physical manifestations, like his encounter with the corpse earlier, his meeting with a holy person turned robber complements Antonius’ own struggles with faith and human decency. Though the knight extols ideas and philosophical implications of his past and future actions, Jöns instead focuses his memories through a physical encounter with a figure from his past. Raval becomes a physical representation for the lies fed to the film’s primary characters as well as the memory of their own complicity in that false narrative. This complicity leads Jöns to claim to have distanced himself from all guilt from his actions. In the next scene, Björnstrand’s character casually explains that he stopped raping women because he has lost a taste for its “dryness.” Though Jöns maintains he does not associate his actions or memories with personal guilt, he reserves quite a bit of malice for Raval, a human representation of his own failings and past.

Raval becomes an embodiment of his memories and mistakes and worthy of violence and death. Jöns tells the former student his thievery makes sense in acknowledgement of the pointlessness of religion but the squire still holds the graverobber responsible for Antonius’ decision to pursue a decade-long lie. Though Jöns may not consciously acknowledge his own guilt, his treatment of Raval indicates his need to project moral failings and punishments on physical manifestations of his memory. The director described Jöns as “a man of the here-and-now” who “feels sympathy, hatred, and scorn” while his knight spends time contemplating ideas and salvation (Bergman on Bergman 117). Since the squire needs the present to offer meaning, instead of the past, Björnstrand’s character places any guilt he associates with the past on the shoulders of the man who convinced Antonius to leave. That the same seminary student now spends his time robbing the corpses of plague victims and killing people who see him doing so, only confirms Jöns’ disgust for the man. Just as Jöns confronts the specter of death in the corpse of a plague victim, so too must he face his complicity in a narrative of false holiness and unjustified violence. Raval comes as another physical representation of an idea, and The Seventh Seal will force Jöns to meet this symbol of his guilt and memory two more times throughout the film.

Jöns meets with Raval again in a bar. The squire disfigures the man’s face with a knife, as he promised to when they last met, and Björnstrand’s character does not see the former seminary student until close to the film’s conclusion. Raval, dying of the plague, approaches the group as they travel through a forest and begs them for help. Though one of their party goes to help the man, Jöns holds the woman back and reminds her, “it will do no good.” The thief writhes on the ground in pain for a minute before dying on the spot. Jöns watches the symbol of his guilt and complicity, and the man he blames for encouraging them to embark on a crusade, die in agony. The memory of Jöns’ actions and guilt in the war has passed, and all that is left is for the group to go to their deaths.

Unlike Antonius’ peace at the picnic, Jöns does not appear to find a source of happiness, and a moment of peace from his guilt. The only way Jöns, a materialist, can overcome his memories of complicity, is when he watches a person from his past die painfully. This person from Jöns past, this memory, dies, giving the character some kind of freedom from this recurring reminder of his own complicity in a crusades narrative. Antonius, unable to stop thinking about his guilt, finds peace in remembering familial paradise. Memory becomes a source of the knight’s healing while Jöns simply lets the representation of his past die. At The Seventh Seal’s conclusion, the squire may finally have divorced the concepts of guilt and memory in his mind and can now face death feeling no remorse for his actions in the Crusade. The film’s conclusion seems to confirm this as the squire tells the group moments before their death to “marvel at this moment” where “you can still wiggle your toes.” His master, on the other hand, though performing a meaningful act by letting Jof’s family escape, still feels himself tortured by the existence of God. Antonius cannot come to a conclusion but claims there must be a higher purpose to their actions. Perhaps Bergman’s film simply demonstrates that if we manage to stop associating memory and guilt, as Jöns does, we can truly appreciate the present and our existence while becoming unconcerned with other’s actions. Perhaps regretting the past only fosters indecision and a fear of the unknown, as seen in Antonius, while also driving one to perform incredibly good acts.

These acts of goodness represent Antonius’ freedom from the memories that trap him at the film’s beginning. The Seventh Seal emphasizes that Antonius’ encounter with Death forces him to overcome his memories of The Crusades and focus on helping people in the present day. Jöns, on the other hand, must help people because of his memories of the war. While faced with his own complicity in the Crusades narrative, Jöns cannot help but assist those around him even when he maintains he is only out for himself. Bergman presents two very different responses to memory in The Seventh Seal. With Antonius the director depicts a man unable to act because of his memories, while Jöns must act because of his memories. The director clearly intends to demonstrate that people respond to traumatic memories differently. Like the actress in Hiroshima Mon Amour, Antonius cannot begin connecting with others until he deals with his memories of the past. However, Resnais’ narrative insists on the use of memory to connect with others while Bergman’s knight must put his memories aside to connect with others. Kurosawa’s Rashomon, on the other hand, just invites people to recognize their own bias in memory and to not allow that to stop them from connecting with others. Kurosawa’s approach might have more in common with Jöns’ approach than seems at first glance. Rashomon invites the viewer to recognize how every person must realize an element of truth exists in each memory and that no person remembers reality. After realizing this fact, Kurosawa wants people to then use this knowledge to connect with others. Jöns, because of his complicity in The Crusades, convinces himself he only lives for himself, but continues to help people despite this. Memory becomes a motivating factor, as it does in Rashomon, that compels him to connect and help others. In a post-World War II society, Bergman lays out how people can respond to situations differently and still use their responses to connect with others. Critics like Frank Gado, Robin Wood, and Gary Giddins have noted that Bergman’s film is not really about The Crusades and instead more accurately reflects the Second World War despite taking place in the Middle Ages. Bergman explains that in making the film “what attracted me was the whole idea of people traveling through the downfall of civilization and culture” and still creating songs, as Jöns does, and helping others (Images 232). Despite the pessimism of the topic, the director still maintains an optimistic approach to the world. After a large global conflict, which the director admits played into his creation of The Seventh Seal, the director depicts his characters in the aftermath of a war. The Seventh Seal, while technically taking place in The Crusades, more accurately exists in the aftermath of the Second World War. Bergman wishes to demonstrate that no matter what a person’s memories may drive them to do, whether acting as Jöns does or thinking like Antonius, human connections still matter and remain necessary to performing “a meaningful act.”

Walking into the Woods to Lie: The Condemnation of Audience Memory in Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon

A hat lies on a bush. A trampled pouch is found tossed to the side of a grassy path. Severed, tattered ropes dangle on a rotten tree trunk, revealing the captive once tied to its base. Finally, the foreboding scene reveals its coup-de-grâce: a lifeless body of a samurai, dried blood crusting on the chest, arms grotesquely frozen in the victim’s final act. While this set up would not be out of place in one of the umpteenth procedurals on television today, the scene presents the main conflict within Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 masterpiece Rashomon. The film has attached itself so successfully to the public consciousness, like Catch-22, the “Rashomon Effect” is now used in various homages and parodies throughout pop culture to describe the concept of unreliable narrators, memory, and self-deception’s effect on human understanding (Ebert). The film is often praised for its visual style, and Rashomon’s cinematography was one of the first elements that garnered praise for the work (Ebert).The film, based off two short stories, relies on a unique flashback structure to tell the story of the samurai’s death.

The flashback structure of Rashomon has multiple people tell their version of events surrounding the crime. Each witness provides a very different account of what happened at the crime scene, with the samurai’s death the only common plot point. With this structure, Kurosawa demonstrates how people remember events differently to confirm the way they see themselves. Rashomon highlights one of the biggest concerns when considering memory:

[H]ow can we be sure that our memory will serve us correctly? Might not our memory be forced to serve our desires and needs, even though - indeed because - it is involuntary? Might we not remember the past not as it is, but as we would like it to be? (Ward 16)

This question of how people remember becomes the central question in Kurosawa’s Rashomon. With many people telling very different versions of a singular event, the film expresses the idea that no one remembers objective reality and instead remembers a version of the truth. This technique separates Rashomon from Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, where the director gives the audience one person’s account of memory. The theme surrounding multiple perspectives and rememberances first appears in the short stories used as the basis of Kurosawa’s film. Rashomon is based off two short stories by the Japanese writer Ryonosuke Akutagawa: “In A Grove” and “Rashomon.” In “In A Grove,” a random woodcutter explains how he found the Samurai’s body and then gives a description of the objects he found at the crime scene. The woodcutter’s role in the story sets up the mystery for the audience and this character never shows up again. “In A Grove” is structured around testimonies that explain a samurai’s killing. Told through transcriptions of the witness’ testimonies, the story forces the reader to judge the situation. The audience reads each testimony and decides if they can figure out the killer. The bandit claims to have slain the samurai in one-on-one combat, but the samurai’s wife implies she killed her husband when he looked on her with shame for getting raped. The short story ends with the samurai, through a medium, confessing to killing himself. The film uses this multiple witness perspective that exists in Akutagawa’s short story to convey the majority of the film’s story.

The plot of Kurosawa’s film remains basically the same as “In A Grove”, with each character confessing to the crime, but adds another participant into this mix. Kurosawa’s Rashomon greatly expands the role and purpose of the woodcutter from Akutagawa’s short story and brings him into the action of the samurai’s death within the film. When initially planning the film “it was found to be much too short” and “Kurosawa sat down and introduced two new characters” indicating the director’s specific purpose for them within the film (Anderson and Richie 378). Though added for time, the director clearly added these characters because he thought they contributed to the film’s themes. By adding another participant into the mix, Kurosawa expands the scope and purpose of having so many different versions of a single story. The concept of relative reality and memory becomes complicated with the addition of a fourth witness. Rashomon opens with the woodcutter sitting under the titular gate with a priest while he laments his own lack of understanding. A commoner seeks shelter from the pounding rainstorm with the priest and woodcutter continually exclaiming they “just don’t understand.” After prodding from the commoner, the woodcutter and the priest relate the story of the various testimonies to the incident in the forest. This conversation about each witness’ testimony becomes the framing structure for Rashomon. Between each confession, the priest, commoner, and woodcutter will comment on the ridiculousness of so many different people claiming to have killed the samurai. The priest and woodcutter wonder at the logic in everyone confessing while the commoner claims “men just want to forget the bad stuff, and believe in the made-up good stuff.” This cynical approach becomes increasingly apparent as the priest and woodcutter attempt to fathom the truth of what happened in the grove.

The woodcutter begins the story by explaining how he found the samurai’s body. There is a quick cut to the woodcutter walking through a forest glade. No dialogue is present within the scene, and Kurosawa relies on visuals and music to tell the story. The camera first focuses on the blade of the woodcutter’s axe, then the woodcutter himself. Throughout this sequence the camera moves with the woodcutter. When onscreen the camera follows the woodcutter’s motions as he moves through the forest. When not on screen, the camera focuses on foliage and trees while staying in motion to put the audience in the perspective of the woodcutter. One famous critic claims the silent forest sequence transports the audience “into another realm of reality” (Ebert). The reality Ebert refers to could represent one shaped by human memory, deception, and pride. However, the woodcutter taking the audience into this murky, sunlit cesspool of human degradation proves the characters importance. The director presents the woodcutter’s initial flashback in Rashomon as objective and without bias. The audience has no reason not to trust that the woodcutter offers a complete version of events when he explains how he found the samurai’s body. The woodcutter’s depiction as an objective observer helps the audience to trust his words and his interpretation of events as the viewer has no reason not to trust someone apparently disconnected from the killing. Of the four different stories related to the viewer throughout the film, the woodcutter’s tale has the most unique and inventive camera work to put the audience in the character’s place. The cinematography used in this scene forces the audience to identify with the woodcutter, and in some cases even put themselves in the perspective of the character. The woodcutter literally brings the audience to the scene of the crime and the camera accompanying him on his journey helps put the audience in his place.

Critics have argued “Kurosawa’s rampaging camera” acts as the film’s “fifth witness” and many shots do not seem “to clarify the structure of the film” (Barbarow 146). In this interpretation, the camera acts as a truly objective observer to the events within Rashomon. Critic Donald Richie analyzed the camerawork and decided the camera shots functions as “prisms that reflect and refract reality” (76). In other words, Richie believes the camera reflects the perception a viewer receives with each retelling, placing the camera in a subjective designation. This latter statement seems to make more sense when looking at the use of camera to put the audience in the perspective of the woodcutter. The camera does not reflect the structure or plot of the film but an individual character’s viewpoint. When other characters tell stories the camera focuses on what is most important to the story at that moment (Tyler 156). When the woodcutter enters the forest the character becomes the camera’s focal point. The emphasis on one particular character when compared to the rest of the film’s cinematography suggests the woodcutter has a different purpose in the film than the other characters.

Within Kurosawa’s film, the samurai, bandit, and woman all tell their version of events in an attempt to “redeem the prestige of the moral sense” and confirm their own worldview (Tyler 154). Though it seems especially odd that the characters would each claim responsibility for the crime, Margaret Turim explains the motivation “lies in the codes of honor and behavior each character must follow to uphold his or her reputation within a Japanese historical context” (200). The bandit’s flashback expresses his ingenuity at trapping the samurai, his irresistibility when the woman eventually ‘enjoys’ his rape of her, and his defeat of one of Japan’s great warriors at the end. The woman’s version of events places her as a victim of rape and then further injustice when her husband shames her. When she kills the samurai she has eliminated the source of her feelings of unfounded shame. The samurai, who testifies through a spirit medium, claims the samurai trapped him dishonorably, the woman abandoned him for the bandit, and that he committed suicide to maintain his honor. The witnesses use their story to “salvage their own sense of reality” and present themselves in the best possible light (Tyler 154). Kurosawa uses the example of these witnesses to demonstrate how memory and reality become a construct on which we project our best selves. Otherwise, each character’s confession to the crime makes no sense as it can only work to criminalize them. However, by confessing each character also believes they control the narrative of events within the grove and present reality. Kilbourn claims Kurosawa’s film “represents the postwar international ‘art film’ alternative to classical style” (17). This style, Kilbourn continues, insists on “disjunctive temporalities and alternative versions of a past event, rendering its relative veracity moot” (17). The truth of what happened in the grove does not matter. Each participant does not lie to the court because their memories simply construct the event to reaffirm their worldview.

By understanding the contexts within which the first three flashbacks take place, and their function within each character’s life as well as the film’s narrative, we can begin to see the purpose of the film’s fourth flashback, from the perspective of the woodcutter. After the three principal participants in the crime tell their version of events, the woodcutter claims to have witnessed the killing, contradicting his earlier story, and tells his own account of the crime. When viewing the crime scene through his eyes, the woodcutter never appears on screen. The audience has no dialogue or voiceover from the woodcutter to explain the scene, and only his word that he witnessed the events. The camera in this section acts as our narrator since the woodcutter is not a part of the action, at least visually. Keiko McDonald has explicated in detail the use of camera in the woodcutter’s story, focusing on how it affects our understanding of the bandit, Tajomaru, in the film:

During the battle, as narrated by the woodcutter, Kurosawa pervasively resorts to a medium shot of Tajomaru’s face full of his fear and anxiety. Kurosawa also takes care in the visual alignment of Tajomaru and the samurai. In Tajomaru’s own story, he lets the bandit’s back dominate the screen while placing the samurai at the further end. Conversely, in the woodcutter’s version, a medium shot of Tajomaru and the samurai aligned on a horizontal line across the screen forms the basic composition. This ironic contrast plays down the bandit’s powerfulness and conveys to us the emptiness of his bravado. (125)

McDonald’s focus on the camera’s use in the woodcutter’s depiction of the bandit allows us to see how the story itself informs the composition of each tale. When the woman relates her version of events, the camera follows her from the samurai’s perspective because she believes he looks on her with disgust. The camera in each tale becomes a tool to see how the teller of each storyteller interprets events. When the woodcutter tells his story, the camera consequently portrays the characters in the manner the woodcutter has come to see them. After the various retellings of the samurai’s death which contradict each other, the woodcutter must conclude that only the worst sort of people entered the crime scene and the condemnatory camera confirms this negative perception.

By using the camera to portray the storyteller’s perspective, Kurosawa forces the audience into a first-person view of the crime. When the woodcutter tells his story the spectator may identify with the woodcutter more than any other character because the camera does not put him into frame. In a sense the woodcutter becomes a first-person perspective. This perspective carries on into the scenes at the gate that take place in between each testimony. The conversation at the Rashomon gate between the priest, commoner, and woodcutter is used as a framing narrative to didactically express the film’s visual exchange between Kurosawa and the audience. This interaction becomes symbolized in the conversations between the priest and woodcutter. After the penultimate story has a third person confess to the crime, the woodcutter begins trying to figure out the culprit by searching for truth within the three separate narratives. He says the samurai’s story cannot be true because “there was no dagger,” the man “was killed by a sword.” This attempt to put the accounts together like a puzzle reflects the traditional desire of an audience to gain a definable plot resolution and, like a typical crime film, find the killer. The woodcutter’s character becomes aligned with the audience’s desire for a conclusion to the grove story, reinforcing the bond between the viewer and the woodcutter.

After the woodcutter has stated his version of events, the commoner accuses the woodcutter of lying like the other three witnesses. He guesses the woodcutter stole the woman’s valuable dagger and sold the weapon thinking no one would realize it was missing. The woodcutter looks away in shame, confirming the commoner’s suspicions and causing the priest to react in outrage. After this revelation the audience cannot believe the fourth account of the crime or anything the woodcutter has alleged up to this point (Tyler 149). Within Rashomon false confession becomes a sin, with the samurai, bandit, and woman becoming the worst offenders (Tyler 155). The woodcutter gets drawn into the same self-deception as the other three characters to demonstrate how witnesses reconstruct objective reality to fit their own personal biases and self-perception. With this situation, Kurosawa reproaches the audience for their own renovation of reality to find truth within their past. Not only does each character retell the events to convey their own personal perceptions, each story also demonstrates how “each person’s self-image is radically different from the image he conveys to others” (McDonald 123).   Different perspectives sum up exactly how Rashomon’s core concept comes about, but these memories reveal the various goals and motivations in each storyteller’s narrative. By using the filmmaking to translate these motivations, moments like the one explicated by McDonald above demonstrate the importance of point of view in the film.

Barbarow proposes that the film’s camera represents a “fifth witness” who “observes each of the others as he talks and as he acts in his own version of the desperate, passionate, and violent episode in the forest” (146). If the camera acts as another witness, as Barbarow contends, then why does the camera in the woodcutter’s story not put him into frame? The woodcutter’s final narrative does not put him into frame and subsequently signals its separation from the retellings up to this point. Kurosawa intends this narrative to represent something else. As Tadao Sato points out, the fact that the woodcutter does not reveal he has stolen the knife indicates “the humanity of the other three” characters because the woodcutter wishes “to show himself to be honest” (169). The woodcutter claims to have only come across the samurai’s body at first, and then claims he wants to reveal the truth and explain how he witnessed the death. However, in the woodcutter’s attempt to absolve himself and tell the truth, he still cannot help but leave out what happens to the dagger. The woodcutter’s second flashback reveals how each person shapes their narrative and memory to represent their vision of the world. This implicates the witness the audience believed without bias, and implicates himself in the crime of the other grove witnesses. Kurosawa has carefully used the woodcutter as a stand-in for the audience within the film, by using the camera to portray events from his first-person perspective, by using him as an ‘introduction’ to the crime, and by having him search for truth in the various confessions within Rashomon. When Kurosawa shows how the woodcutter lies, he also condemns the audience and their own inability to remember events from an unbiased perspective. The woodcutter does not actively lie about the eventual fate of the dagger. He merely presents the story in a way that does not show him becoming a thief. In this way, the audience must also acknowledge how they have allowed their self-perception to shape how they remember events.

When considering war and memory, Susan Suleiman expresses the idea that “[t]he most intense political conflicts involve areas of contested memory” where each participant remembers “narratives that seem to allow for no negotiation and no commonality” (8). Suleiman, discussing how memory can create a war also expresses the central premise of Rashomon. By taking this understanding of memory and war and viewing Kurosawa’s film, the director clearly believes the war to come from constructed notions of reality rather than objective truth. Coming out of World War II, the director asks audiences to question the existence of a single truth. Events such as the Holocaust, the Japanese subjugation of China, and the use of the atomic bomb have permitted people, and even entire countries, to rationalize past actions with very specific, and Kurosawa would probably argue, false memories. The director wants everyone implicated in the idea that no memory comes without bias and that an element of truth exists in every person’s remembering of events. After the Second World War, people searched for a truth within World War II to explain a perceived universal morality to understand how people could engage in such a bloody struggle. Critics have noted the difficulties and complexities in portraying such large, tragic events in film “and make it both morally just and marketable” (Rapaport 55). Other critics besides Rapaport have noted how film representations of the past “do not embody memory” and instead work to constructing a homogenizing, biased view of history “which we are invited to think, feel, and recognize [as] the past” (Storey 104). In this understanding, people mistake film for the past, instead of viewing a film as one interpretation of past events. Perhaps Kurosawa’s smartest decision in Rashomon comes from his choice to comment on truth, tragedy, and guilt. Kurosawa is intimately aware of reality reconstructions, having worked for the Japanese government in the Second World War as a propaganda filmmaker (Richie). With Rashomon, the director uses the woodcutter as a representation for the audience and then asks them to question their own memories. The woodcutter as a “witness” to the crime becomes drawn into the cycle of memory alteration (Tyler 154). The audience, a “witness” to the events, watching the film, becomes drawn into the affair. Rashomon makes the case for a relative truth dependent on memory and a lack of personal awareness that feeds positive self-images and personal truth.

The bandit, the woman, the samurai, and even the woodcutter lie to themselves to find truth where none exists. By compromising the woodcutter, the audience feels compromised. Kilbourn sees the “international postwar art film” as a “protagonist’s journey [that] often turns into a quest for self-knowledge” and often “unfolds in the landscape of dream or memory” (48). The woodcutter, like the audience, hears the different accounts of the event in the grove at the trial, and claims he witnessed the whole crime where he presents each character in a very negative fashion. One of these memories is false, and the film demonstrates how even an observer cannot help but fall into the same trap as the bandit, the woman, and the samurai. In his search for a narrative or truth in the killing, the woodcutter becomes a stand-in for the audience and their own search for truth.

Kilbourn’s description of the journey of the protagonist closely aligns with that of the woodcutter and by extension, the audience. For Kilbourn, “the primary action” in a postwar art film is “that of looking” (48). The act of remembering in these films constitute the film’s plot and helps the protagonist move forward in life. Memory functions as the narrative itself, and Kurosawa does not leave Rashomon with a privileging narrative of the events in the grove. Instead, the director uses his film to specifically comment on the ways we remember and interpret memory.  Anderson and Richie accurately sum up this point in their analysis of the film’s place in Japan’s cinematic history as, “The audience is left with the feeling of the essential relativity of truth” (224). This relativity of truth is key to understanding Kurosawa’s film. By having the woodcutter, who the audience believes to be objective, revealed as someone who cannot help but allow bias, or an outright lie, to influence his flashback, the viewer cannot help but see how true objectivity remains a myth. With the notion of confession and the lack of a single truth available in any person’s memory, Kurosawa uses his ending to give his audience a ‘solution’ to their inability to see past their own reconstruction of memory.

The solution comes, through the lens of the filmmaker, in the final conversation at the Rashomon gate. After the woodcutter’s compromise, the characters rebuke the commoner for stealing a kimono wrapped around a baby found at the back of the gate. After the commoner has stolen clothes from the baby, the priest holds the child. The priest speaks for Kurosawa in the film; when the woodcutter offers to take the baby home, the priest vehemently refuses. This refusal to trust the woodcutter with the infant expresses Kurosawa’s distrust of humanity (Richie 71). Despite this distrust, Kurosawa “insists upon hope, upon the possibility of gratuitous action” (Richie 71). The priest ultimately allows the woodcutter to take the child after the woodcutter decries his own shame because he doesn’t “even know his own soul.” When the priest gives the baby to the woodcutter, Kurosawa, quite literally, places new life within the audience’s hands. Kurosawa has shown us our self-deception, and now trusts us to bring that understanding to our lives. James F. Davidson’s examination of Rashomon ties this symbol into the future of a postwar Japan:

The old vision of a hopeful future springing from a glorious past is lost, and the way to its recovery lies through a maze of doubtful thoughts about misfortune, guilt, and shame. Yet there is a new Japan which demands love and care, like the abandoned child, not because of its auspicious and legitimate beginnings, but because it is alive and will perish without them. (165)

By applying Kilbourn’s description of the art film protagonist and Davidson’s interpretation of the film’s ending, Japan becomes the searching protagonist attempting to find truth in their memory of war and tragedy.

Whether or not Kurosawa intends for his message to apply exclusively to Japan, Rashomon has remained a touchstone for internationally successful films since its debut. While the setting and characters of Imperial Japan at least might indicate Japan as Kurosawa’s first audience, the worldwide embrace of the film seems to suggest its theme is universal. In her analysis of the film’s flashbacks, Margaret Turim deems “[p]lausibility and identification, if not entirely arbitrary, should remain highly subjective investments on the part of the audience” (201). An audience must not choose one witness to believe as “there is no discernible textual evidence for this” (Turim 201). Turim sees Kurosawa’s work as a modernist film in that “the mode of filmic narration seeks mimetically to represent mental processes, to show the memory flashes and brief disjointed or distorted images which come to a character’s mind” (190). No truth exists in Kurosawa’s narrative, or at least no single truth, and his delivery of this idea comes through the processes of memory of the various characters. When the priest places the baby in the woodcutter’s hands, after admitting the flexibility of individual reality, McDonald concludes Kurosawa’s solution admits “man’s character includes a separation between reason and impulse, but that man is good to the extent that he tries to reduce this separation” (122). Impulse forces one to remember events in a way someone wishes to present themselves, and reason forces someone to acknowledge this same tendency and kernel of truth in someone else. To overcome our self-deception, one must admit the humanity, truth, and struggle of other people. To Kurosawa all accounts contain a certain amount of truth, but seeks to force an audience to acknowledge how memory changes in each person.

In Rashomon, the director emphasizes that personal memory does not convey accuracy or truth. The lack of objective truth in memory contrasts with Alain Resnais’ depiction of memory in Hiroshima Mon Amour. When remembering, Resnais seems to focus on how people, like the actress, forget traumatic experiences. The film emphasizes that when people remember their trauma they can connect with someone else’s memories of trauma to see an event from their perspective. Kurosawa’s film, presents a version of memory where people cannot remember objective reality and their memories shape to each person’s bias.

While both films use a flashback structure, Resnais presents his flashbacks as attempts to get at an accurate reflection of reality, whereas anytime anyone flashbacks in Rashomon, the version of events seen cannot be trusted by viewer. Hiroshima Mon Amour focuses on the way cultural memory can create false constructions of past events, but Kurosawa maintains individual memory changes to reflect one’s worldview. However, both films show how memory can influence present day actions and emphasize that human connections remain valuable. Worldview becomes important in The Seventh Seal, where characters approach situations differently depending on their memories of The Crusades. Kurosawa focuses on how worldview impacts the way people remember, and Bergman shows how memory changes one’s worldview. Looking at these three films as different perceptions of memory, the concept of worldview and and memory becomes a chicken and egg conundrum. Do memories create bias, or does bias alter memory? Perhaps all three directors offer value in their depiction of memory where both memory and worldview influence each other and impact the way people view themselves. Once again, all three directors emphasize that human connections still matter. Memory shapes to personal perceptions, and by recognizing this Resnais, Bergman, and Kurosawa ask their audience to use this knowledge to recognize each person has a certain amount of truth in their memories as well. If the audience takes away this knowledge they are given new ways in which to view other people and the past.

In each of the films discussed, memory acts as a powerful force in the character’s lives. In Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour the memory becomes a source of empathy and connection in the actress’ life. In Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, memory motivates characters to pursue different life goals. In Kurosawa’s Rashomon, memory acts as a tool of self-deception and self-aggrandizement that demonstrates personal constructions of reality. The importance of memory in each of these films, and their themes around guilt and war, signify their importance in a post-World War II society. These films, as demonstrated earlier in this thesis, fall under Kilbourn’s definition of the “post war international art film” meaning they represent “an individual’s perception of time, the structural and thematic role of desire, and a reified relation to death” (47). So why does this matter? If they fall under this definition, what does this tell us about their concerns and themes surrounding memory? Each of these films depict memory and use this to comment on the state of the world in a post- World War II existence.

                When considering the importance of memory in film and war Susan Suleiman claims any “memory of World War II , while nationally specific, transcends national boundaries” (2). With this understanding, we might also make the assumption that any film about the memory of World War II also extends to an international audience. Within this international memory, and its representation in film, concerns over ethics and representation make complete sense. As Gerd Bayer points out in an essay about war and memory, “[t]he possibility of knowing history . . . is . . . raised as a deeply ethical dilemma: the unremitting problem of how not to betray the past” (120). How can one represent the past and keep integrity and truth present in its depiction? These presentations of the past, represent a memory industry that “produce representations (‘cultural memorials’), with which we are invited to think, feel, and recognize [as] the past” as described in John Storey’s essay on cultural memory and war. Storey’s article explains how examples of cultural memory play into cultural constructions of memory around war, an idea Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour specifically addresses. In this way, memory becomes “a political force, a form of subjugated knowledge that can function as a site of potential opposition and resistance, but that is also vulnerable to containment and ‘reprogramming’” (Grainge 2). These critics fear that memory and war in film become a socializing force that causes a homogenization of cultural memory that privileges one particular cultural narrative, the one with the access to filmmaking. As Marita Sturken succinctly states in her essay on film depictions of the Vietnam War, “[c]ultural memory is a field of cultural negotiation through which different stories vie for a place in history” (1). This cultural memory allows one particular version of events to take precedence in history and gives particular filmmakers the ability to define how society remembers. However, the ability to shape cultural memory also gives films the opportunity to construct a memory film that benefits people and their interactions.

                Not all critics specifically critique the film medium for its monopoly of construction of memory and response to war. Carmen Guarini expresses her belief that “[t]he filmmaking process has the potential to unpredictably awaken memories” and the advantage of film comes from the medium’s ability to present “certain elements of memory that cannot be provoked or explained with words” (“Film as Social Memory”). Though Bayer critiques how film can shape memory, the critic also acknowledges the advantages of a film medium in its ability to connect viewers to others. The critic explains that an effective memory film, a label she gives to Hiroshima Mon Amour, depicts a protagonist “presented in situations that connect them to others, turning the supposedly solitary act of traumatic reenactment into a dialogic and social act, thereby transmitting their personal traumatic memory into cultural memory” (Bayer 130). While Bayer focuses on this relationship in the protagonist of memory films, her analysis extends to how an audience can shift in perspective. While fictional characters may use memory journeys to connect with others, the audience accompanies them throughout their films. A film about memory can connect its characters, and its audience, to one another to speak about how memory should give us the ability to empathize with others. Each of the films in this thesis do not attempt to document or depict history suggesting their use of memory does not wish to construct a vision of World War II. Instead of attempting to present one overarching, and controlling narrative, about life and memory, the directors of Hiroshima Mon Amour, The Seventh Seal, and Rashomon depict memory’s effect on an individual and then use this memory presentation to encourage human empathy and connection.

                In Resnais’ film, the director stresses that using traumatic memory to connect with another person can help someone understand the pain of someone else. Though the actress in Hiroshima Mon Amour can never live through the Hiroshima bombing, she can use her own memory of tragedy in World War II to begin to grasp the feelings of those who lived in Japan on August 6, 1945. The knight and squire at the center of Ingmar Bergman’s work gets confronted with their memories of the Crusades and their complicity in the false narrative of the war as righteous. The knight in The Seventh Seal, driven to search for good in the world after his role in the war, saves a young family from the plague, while his squire spends the entire film saving people in the present moment, as a consequence of his materialist nature. The squire specifically comments on the uselessness of his action in a war he describes as “so foolish only a true idealist could have thought it up.” However, with both these approaches, the characters find salvation and hope in helping others, relating to the need for connection with other human beings. Kurosawa’s cynical film explores the way people’s memories alter and conform to reaffirm the version of themselves they wish to present to the world. Three different people tell versions of the same crime, and each one confesses to the killing. In this narrative, the director demonstrates how memory changes to confirm one’s worldview. However, in the film’s conclusion the director offers hope in the form of a newborn placed in the hands of a common person. This moment, according to one critic, represents the idea “ that however uncertain the world is, human connections still matter” (Handlen).

                The argument that people need to connect with others does not seem all that unique. Asking individuals to connect with others comes across as cliché and ludicrously idealistic, but these films focus on memory and war starts to show how each offers a unique perspective on the subject. Multiple narrative exist within each film and shape how characters respond to certain events. In Resnais’ film, the actress must overcome her culturally constructed memory of Hiroshima to see the person in front of her and his pain surrounding the Hiroshima tragedy. Resnais’ asks his viewer to see past their own memory of a traumatic event and use personal trauma to connect with another’s pain. I selected Hiroshima Mon Amour because of its insistence on the need for individual connection and distrust of culturally constructed narratives. As a starting point for this thesis, it deals explicitly with memory and World War II, two ideas I wanted to explore, and offers a perspective sympathetic to the Japanese. Growing up I had seen the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as justice against a nation that had unnecessarily provoked the United States. How I feel about the event has shifted with my experiences in college as well as with my viewing of this film. Hiroshima Mon Amour holds significance for me because it asks a viewer to reconsider their preconceptions about events. Part of Resnais’ power comes from his insistence on the importance of emotional pain. Alain Resnais does not ask his viewer to discard their own memory or personal trauma, but he does ask a viewer to see that just as much pain and hurt can also appear in someone else, even someone cast as an enemy. In the aftermath of World War II, the director makes a film about how personal memory can offer a connection to another person. The film sees war, most fully represented in the film’s preoccupation with the atomic bomb, as a destructive act. War destroys the city of Hiroshima just as the war destroys the life of the French woman’s lover. To heal from this destructive act, the film depicts how a French woman and a Japanese man, enemies, can use their personal memories to understand the pain of war. In Hiroshima Mon Amour the only source of salvation, if any such remains, comes from two individuals from different sides of a war coming together to remember and empathize.

                In addition to Alain Resnais’ French perspective, another European director, Ingmar Bergman, looks at the issue of memory and war from a different context, one in which two people have very different reactions to their memory of war. The Seventh Seal, electing not to depict memory visually, like Hiroshima Mon Amour, instead focuses on the effect of memories of war. The knight and squire at the center of the film’s plot approach life in very different methods because of their memories of The Crusades. This particular film wishes to remind an audience that people who should have the same memory do not always interpret the past in the same way. The squire turns to a materialist approach that focuses on helping others while a knight, torn by indecision, refuses to act. Where Resnais uses memory as a path to human connection, Bergman uses the character of Antonius Block to show how reactions to memory can limit human connection. Bergman finds that a negative memory, when caught by an idealist like the knight, can become an obstacle. However, the squire, motivated by his memories of The Crusades, must help people. Where Resnais uses memory as the method of human connection, Bergman depicts memory as a catalyst or agonist in human connection. I selected The Seventh Seal for this project because of its themes surrounding memory and war, the fact that the director does not use the flashback method to depict memory, and, if I absolutly had to choose, this is my favorite film of all time. The film’s insistence on showing th effect of one’s memories gives this film a different perspective than the other two in this project. By having two films focus on memory and memory construction, one film can instead show the effect of memory. All of these films show effect of memory to an extent, but The Seventh Seal spends the most time with characters whose actions are influenced by their memories of war. This perspective seemed necessary when examining memory in the international postwar art film.

                Instead of an obstacle to progress, memory in Rashomon becomes a tool for self-deception. Within Kurosawa’s film, character’s memories change to fit the version of their self they wish to present to the world. In Rashomon, memory does not record objective fact but shows how people’s memories construct a reality that confirms their own self-perceptions. The director, who depicts four different versions of the same crime, does not give an indication one narrative conveys more truth than another. Rashomon does not give one answer to the event in the grove because each character has an element of truth that gives them a motivation and self they wish to present to the world. Ultimately, the director conveys the idea that everyone’s memories construct a version of themselves and recognizing this in others at least gives you the opportunity to see that other people have truth in their own personal memories as well..

The selection of Rashomon comes because it synthesizes what The Seventh Seal and Hiroshima Mon Amour say about memory. To recognize that each person’s memory has an element of truth gives you the ability to see each person as a fully realized person who has desires, goals, and self-deceptions just like yourself. Memory, as in Hiroshima Mon Amour becomes the path to human connection. However, the director of Rashomon also focuses on how the effect of memory can change your memories and reactions, just like the characters in The Seventh Seal. Rashomon shows how memory can offer the opportunity for connection as well as impede it. Coming out of World War II, Kurosawa asks his audience to consider how their memories have stopped them from understanding that each person behaves according to their memory of an event.

Each of these directors, and their respective films, all use memory and war to show that the only response to international conflict is to move past your own perceptions and accept that each person has a truth they work to fulfill. Memory in each of these films takes place in a postwar society. Though all these films deal with memory and war, none of the films explicitly depict war. Massive armed conflict does not appear on screen. Each of these directors place their films in the aftermath of conflict. In Resnais’ film, the bomb has dropped and the people of Japan have rebuilt their lives. The Seventh Seal depicts two men on the return journey after participating in a lengthy war. The actual existence of Rashomon’s action takes place after the samurai’s death, with flashbacks to the killing the only depiction of battle. The film’s fighting, if it occurred at all, has ended, and Rashomon takes place as two people relate the story of the trial surrounding the crime. Each director seems to take more interest in the aftermath of conflict rather than the conflict itself.

These films, released in the fifteen years after the end of the war, clearly have something to comment on a postwar society. The insistence on the importance of human connection in a post war society indicates the need for a more global society. In Hiroshima Mon Amour, a Westerner uses memory to see the Hiroshima event from a Japanese perspective. In The Seventh Seal, two returning soldiers help strangers in the midst of their journey home, doing their best to assist others. Rashomon demonstrates to viewers how self-perception and memory work to create false constructions of reality, and the film’s conclusion invites the viewer to overcome this false sense of reality. In the post-conflict worlds of each of these films, memory becomes the journey to human connection. None of these films wish to comment on the war, and instead want to look at how people should react to the war. None of these films can go back in time and stop World War II, but the directors wish to shape how people deal with and react to their memories of the conflict. In a postwar society, the solution to preventing future conflict does not come from firmly entrenching yourself in a position of correctness and moral self-righteousness but to see how others also have a version of truth that shapes their actions. These directors, all from different countries, speaking different languages, and placing their films in different centuries maintain the need for memory to be used as a way to connect and not to remain convinced of your own infallibility.

If this project has taught me anything, it is the idea that memory remains undefinable and difficult to depict. When war gets thrown into the mix, a large-scale, world-shattering conflict like World War II, then memory becomes even more complicated and mediated by methods of delivery. Film is not the perfect way to convey history or memory, though no other medium appears to be either, and it continues to be important to question memory and war’s depiction in film. Accurately depicting how war has a multitude of perspectives and truths becomes difficult in a constrained running time and when made by people who have personal biases and perspectives. However, when film’s focus on how memory is personal to each individual, film becomes an important medium for helping people to see past their own constructions of history. Throughout this project my opinion has changed on the best depiction of memory, the best film for this project, and the way World War II should be depicted. I went into this project hoping to nail down how film’s effectively communicate the multitude of human experience and memory in response to massive conflicts. The only response to war, as seen in these films, is to accept that each person’s memory is unique and true to an individual. Even a memory of a war is still individual and interpreted differently depending on who remembers it and the way they remember an event.

These films mean a lot to me because they don’t claim to offer the definitive version of the Second World War but depict individuals attempting to cope with the trauma of a war. This struggle to deal with the memory of a war remains impossible to an individual. To prevent future tragedy and to deal with the past, people must work to connect with others, even those they have been taught to view as the enemy. These films, beautifully constructed, put a massive event, a world war, in the hands of individuals. These films find a human cost and personal story in the thousands killed by atomic bombs, the millions who died in World War II, the genocide attempted in the Holocaust, and the rape of Nanking by not showing World War II at all. An individual experience remains the most important among these huge numbers of dead because not seeing someone else as a person, whose memories remain valid and true, leads to dehumanization and the numbers of dead seen in the Second World War. The journey of the international post war art film goes through memory to achieve human connection. The films in this thesis depict the memory journey, but do not depict much of the aftermath when gaining the ability to connect with others. In the time after World War II, and perhaps continuing to this very day, people have not overcome their memories and have not reached the breadth of human connection these films encourage. While idealistic, these films depict a happier world where we learn to empathize with others, instead of staying trapped in or by memory. These directors, all from different countries and backgrounds come to similar conclusions, and maybe if we worked to do the same we could do the same.

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