The award-winning screenplay for the classic film the New York Post hailed as “overwhelming . . . a motion picture landmark.” One of the most influential works in the history of cinema, Alain Renais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour gathered international acclaim upon its release in 1959 and was awarded the International Critics’ Prize at the Cannes Film festival and the New York Film Critics’ Award. Ostensibly the story of a love affair between a Japanese architect and a French actress visiting Japan to make a film on peace, Hiroshima Mon Amour is a stunning exploration of the influence of war on both Japanese and French culture and the conflict between love and inhumanity.

Audacious and genre-defying, Black and Blue is steeped in melancholy, in the feeling of being blue, or, rather, black and blue, with all the literality of bruised flesh. Roland Barthes and Marcel Proust are inspirations for and subjects of Carol Mavor's exquisite, image-filled rumination on efforts to capture fleeting moments and to comprehend the incomprehensible. At the book's heart are one book and three films—Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, Chris Marker's La Jetée and Sans soleil, and Marguerite Duras's and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour—postwar French works that register disturbing truths about loss and regret, and violence and history, through aesthetic refinement. Personal recollections punctuate Mavor's dazzling interpretations of these and many other works of art and criticism. Childhood memories become Proust's "small-scale contrivances," tiny sensations that open onto panoramas. Mavor's mother lost her memory to Alzheimer's, and Black and Blue is framed by the author's memories of her mother and effort to understand what it means to not be recognized by one to whom you were once so known.

Hiroshima is the story of six people—a clerk, a widowed seamstress, a physician, a Methodist minister, a young surgeon, and a German Catholic priest—who lived through the greatest single manmade disaster in history. In vivid and indelible prose, Pulitzer Prize–winner John Hersey traces the stories of these half-dozen individuals from 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, when Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb ever dropped on a city, through the hours and days that followed. Almost four decades after the original publication of this celebrated book, Hersey went back to Hiroshima in search of the people whose stories he had told, and his account of what he discovered is now the eloquent and moving final chapter of Hiroshima.

Jacket description/back: One of the most influential works in the history of cinema, Alain Renais's Hiroshima Mon Amour gathered international acclaim upon its release in 1959 and was awarded the International Critics' Prize at the Cannes Film festival and the New York Film Critics' Award. Ostensibly the story of a love affair between a Japanese architect and a French actress visiting Japan to make a film on peace, Hiroshima Mon Amour is a stunning exploration of the influence of war on both Japanese and French culture and the conflict between love and humanity.

Released in 1959, Alain Renais's film, Hiroshima Mon Amour, was awarded the International Critics' Prize at the Cannes Film festival and the New York Film Critics' Award. The story of a love affair between a Japanese architect and a French actress visiting Japan to make a film on peace, Hiroshima Mon Amour is also an exploration of the influence of war on both Japanese and French culture and the conflict between love and humanity. This book contains the complete script of the film, as well as Miss Duras' original synopsis and notes.