Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima!

Brussels: Centre national de sociologie du travail, 1962. First edition. 8vo (24×16,5cm), grey cardboard in unclipped dust jacket. 308pp. Text in French. Dust jacket with moderate edge wear and rubbing to front cover and spine-ends and edges. 1cm closed tear on top edge of spine, fixed with repair tape. Contents clean and unmarked. Fine in about very good dust jacket.

Following the international success of the film Hiroshima, mon amour, written by Marguerite Duras and directed by Alain Resnais, a group of scholars analyzed the film over a period of six months. It took place under the direction of Raymond Ravar at the Institut de Sociologie of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and was later published by the Centre national de sociologie du travail in 1962. The film seminar of the Institut de Sociologie initially understood its role as an exploration of the possibilities of research and study on topics that were rarely considered from this angle in Belgium.

The incredible dense book Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima! approaches topics on the creation of the film, its industrial and commercial environment, and an analysis of the press and the public. It also takes the aesthetic process into consideration and deals with the dialectics of memory and oblivion, and love and death.

The role of Emmanuelle Riva in Hiroshima, mon amour was quite unusual at the time. The chapters: La femme – Un nouveau type féminin [the woman – a new female type]; L’image de la femme à travers le cinéma [the image of women through cinema]; L’héroine d’Hiroshima: une femme moderne [Hiroshima’s heroine: a modern woman], deal with the representation of different images of women in cinema.

It also includes an interview with Alain Resnais, followed by an incredible time-table in which the entire film is reconstructed scene by scene, with description of the shots, duration, camera movements, dialogues and music.

A truly fantastic and extensive analysis of a milestone of the Nouvelle Vague.