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Paris, 1959. The staff of Cahiers du Cinema, the now-legendary French film magazine, convened only its second all-hands-on-deck critics’ round table. The occasion, headlined as “an event which seems important enough to warrant a new discussion,” was the release of the film Hiroshima mon amour, the debut feature film by Alain Resnais. Present at the recording of this proto-podcast were many critics who would go on to become filmmakers, such as Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and ric Rohmer. (The transcript was published in the July 1959 issue, available here.) It was Rohmer who gave the film the perfect pull-quote when he called it “the first modern film of the sound era,” comparing it in importance to Picasso’s “Guernica.” The shocking thing is that this praise still holds up. The film captures the sensations of a brief, intense affair between two nameless lovers who meet randomly in Hiroshima, 15 years after the end of World War II. 65 years later, it’s immediately easy to understand how this movie would have knocked the wind out of a 1950s audience, because even today, it’s emotionally raw, immediate, and timeless.
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