Word: hiroshima
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...Shawn who persuaded a skeptical Ross to introduce the magazine's excellent World War II coverage, and to devote an entire issue to John Hersey's report on Hiroshima. Shawn is now handicapped by the fact that most of the writers (Thurber, E. B. White, Wolcott Gibbs, Clifton Fadiman, Joel Sayre, Alva Johnston, et al.) and cartoonists (Peter Arno, Helen Hokinson, O. Soglow, Gardner Rea, et al.) who made The New Yorker famous have either died, wandered off to the exurbs, or become infrequent contributors. E. B. White's civilized despair and gentle celebration of nature...
...Hiroshima, Mon Amour (Zenith International), the work of Alain Resnais, a 37-year-old director of documentary films (Van Gogh, Night and Fog), is the acknowledged masterpiece of the New Wave of Gallic moviemakers (TIME, Nov. 16). The picture won a special prize at the Cannes Film Festival last spring and has been acclaimed in France as "a thousand films in one": an atomic horror movie, a pacifist tract, a Proustian exercise in recollection, a radioactive Romeo and Juliet. As a matter of fact, it is all these things and more-an intense, original and ambitious piece of cinema...
...film begins with a vivid metaphor of love and death. A man and a woman lie in each other's arms in Hiroshima. Their bodies fill the screen in a luminous abstract of desire. But into this image of life burst images of death-recorded by Japanese cameramen who moved into Hiroshima the day after the bomb fell. Director Resnais permits himself no sensationalism, but the merest glimpses of the horror that was Hiroshima-acres of charred and moaning humanity-remind the audience with cruel force that the man and woman are making love in a mass grave...
Suddenly the lovers burst out laughing. They laugh with sheer delight in life, as if to say: Even in Hiroshima life goes on and life is good. And the woman murmurs musingly: "How could I have suspected that this city was made in the image of love...
With this paradox, made startling by the context. Director Resnais introduces the theme of his film: Hiroshima, like God, is love. It is the Calvary of the Atomic Age. It died for man's sins. It descended into hell and rose again. "[On] the fifteenth day Hiroshima was covered with flowers . . . cornflowers and wild iris, bearbine and day lilies reborn from the ashes with a vigor never known before." And from the hell of Hiroshima, out of the death and transfiguration she finds there, the heroine also is reborn, revived by love...