Hiroshima, Mon Amour

1959, France, Alain Resnais, 91 min.

Introduced by physicist Dr. John J. Sakon.

What began as a documentary about the nuclear bomb dropping on Hiroshima evolved into a masterpiece of French cinema once director Alain Resnais introduced fictional elements into the plot. Emmanuelle Riva plays a woman who has an affair in Hiroshima with Eiki Okada, a Japanese man who lost his family during the bombing. Despite their tender tryst, the lovers’ attachment has a fleeting sense of impermanence and disorientation as they move forward into an uncertain future. The film is one of Steven Schneider’s 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die.

About the Speaker

John J. Sakon graduated with a BS in physics from the College of William and Mary in 2005 and a PhD in physics from North Carolina State University in 2010. His work includes the first detection of the folding state of an individual protein in a live cell using a technique called single molecule FRET. He started as a postdoctoral fellow in Wendy Suzuki’s lab at New York University in 2011, where he uses electrophysiological techniques to study how our brain separates similar memories and encodes contextual events in time.

About Cabaret Cinema: Emotions/Emoticons

As a companion to the Brainwave series, Cabaret Cinema will screen nine classic films that are driven by nine emotions. Notable introducers will help the audience to understand the importance of the given emotion to the film’s narrative.

Emotion: Anger