Production Budget Analysis

The production budget for Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) has not been publicly disclosed.

CAST: Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada, Stella Dassas, Pierre Barbaud, Bernard Fresson DIRECTOR: Alain Resnais CINEMATOGRAPHY: Michio Takahashi, Sacha Vierny MUSIC: Giovanni Fusco, Georges Delerue PRODUCTION: Argos films, Como Films, Daiei Film, Pathé Overseas

Box Office Performance

Hiroshima Mon Amour earned $96,439 domestically and $-93,246 internationally, for a worldwide total of $3,193. The film skewed heavily domestic (3020%), suggesting strong North American appeal.

Profitability Assessment

Insufficient publicly available data to assess profitability.

INDUSTRY IMPACT

PRODUCTION NOTES

▸ Production

In 1954, while Alain Resnais was editing Agnès Varda's film La Pointe Courte, he was reluctant to work on it because it was "so nearly the film he wanted to make himself". The film's narrative structure inspired Hiroshima mon amour.

According to James Monaco, Resnais was originally commissioned to make a short documentary about the atomic bomb, but spent several months confused about how to proceed because he did not want to recreate his 1956 Holocaust documentary Night and Fog. He later went to his producer and joked that the film could not be done unless Marguerite Duras was involved in writing the screenplay.

The French scenes were shot in Nevers. However, several scenes from the film located in Nevers were, in fact, filmed in Autun.

Among the film's innovations is the way Resnais intercut very brief flashback sequences into scenes to suggest a brief flash of memory. He later used a similar effect in Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and The War Is Over (1966).

AWARDS & RECOGNITION

Summary: Nominated for 1 Oscar. 7 wins & 7 nominations total

Nominations: ○ Academy Award for Best Writing, Original Screenplay (33rd Academy Awards)

CRITICAL RECEPTION

At the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, where the film was excluded from the official selection because of its sensitive subject matter of nuclear bombs and to avoid upsetting the U.S. government, the film won the FIPRESCI International Critics' Prize, and it won the prestigious Grand Prix from the Belgian Film Critics Association in 1960. For her work on the film, screenwriter Marguerite Duras was nominated for the award for Best Original Screenplay at the 33rd Academy Awards. In 2002, the film was voted by the international contributors of the French film magazine to be one of the top 10 films since 1952, when the magazine was founded.

has been described as "The Birth of a Nation of the French New Wave" by American critic Leonard Maltin. New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard described its inventiveness as "Faulkner plus Stravinsky" and celebrated the film's originality, calling it "the first film without any cinematic references". Filmmaker Eric Rohmer said: "I think that in a few years, in ten, twenty, or thirty years, we will know whether was the most important film since the war, the first modern film of sound cinema".

The film was shown as part of the Cannes Classics section of the 2013 Cannes Film Festival and was screened nine times at the Harvard Film Archive between 28 November and 13 December 2014.

The film holds a rating of 96% from 47 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes with the consensus: "Distinguished by innovative technique and Emmanuelle Riva's arresting performance, Hiroshima Mon Amour is a poignant love story as well as a thoughtful meditation on international trauma."