Emmanuelle Riva glows with deep sorrow and incandescent beauty as a young woman gripped by a past that finds a strange new echo in the scarred city of Hiroshima."I was so young once!" cries the unnamed woman played by Riva in Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour. More than a half century later, the octogenarian Riva first appears in Michael Haneke's Amour as a corpse, ceremoniously laid out on a bed in her Paris apartment in a long, dark dress, her head wreathed with desiccated flower petals. In tribute to the late Emanuelle Riva, we present a double-bill of films made at opposite ends of her long life.

Hiroshima Mon Amour
Alain Resnais
1959 | 90 min | B/W | Digital

A cornerstone of the French New Wave, the first feature from Alain Resnais is one of the most influential films of all time. A French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) engage in a brief, intense affair in postwar Hiroshima, their consuming mutual fascination impelling them to exorcise their own scarred memories of love and suffering. With an innovative flashback structure and an Academy Award–nominated screenplay by novelist Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour is a moody masterwork that delicately weaves past and present, personal pain and public anguish.

"An unexpected, fleeting encounter between a French actress and a Japanese architect gives way to a deeply effecting mediation on love, memory and the dark legacies of World War II in Alain Resnais’ remarkable debut feature. One of the first expressions of the nouvelle vague, Hiroshima Mon Amour remains startling for its bending of time and memory and for the haunting beauty and incantatory rhythm of Marguerite Duras' extraordinary script. Emmanuelle Riva (of Michael Haneke’s Amour) glows with deep sorrow and incandescent beauty as a young woman gripped by a past that finds a strange new echo in the scarred city of Hiroshima. The film’s avant-garde score, co-authored by Georges Delerue and Giovanni Fusco, and its intermingling of raw documentary imagery with Sachy Vierny lustrous, glidingcinematography helped define Hiroshima Mon Amour as a pioneering and formally daring film like none other seen thus far in the French cinema." – Haden Guest

Amour
Michael Haneke
2012 | 127 min |  Colour | 35mm

""I was so young once!" cries the unnamed woman played by Emmanuelle Riva in Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour. More than a half century later, the octogenarian Riva first appears in Michael Haneke's Amour as a corpse, ceremoniously laid out on a bed in her Paris apartment in a long, dark dress, her head wreathed with desiccated flower petals. Her body has, apparently, remained in the sealed room for days, the smell of decay repelling the pompiers who force the door in the film's cataclysmic opening shot. Violent incursion into domestic sanctum has long been a trope in Haneke's cinema, but the trespass that initiates Amour differs from the invasions the Austrian master has previously manufactured as metaphors for an ever-threatening universe. Here the intruders breach asylum not as harbingers of torture, but as witnesses to the end of a protracted tragedy." – James Quandt