A French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) making an anti-war film in the once devastated, but now rebuilt city of Hiroshima, begins a brief but intense affair with a Japanese architect (Eiji Okado). Confronted by images of the war, and encouraged by her lover to reveal the secrets of her past, she recounts the story of her first tragic love with a German soldier during the Nazi occupation of France.

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Alain Resnais’ celebrated first feature is often cited as one of the most influential films ever made. Its fractured structure, mixing past and present in a way previously only attempted in literature, it’s mature and complex treatment of character, its poetic dialogue and subjective use of sound, its deliberate blurring of the line between fantasy and reality, expanded the frontiers of cinema and inspired many filmmakers both at the time and in the years since. Its significance was immediately recognised by Cahiers du Cinéma who described it as the first truly “modern film.” Indeed, the critical acclamation was universal; review after review praised the film’s sophistication, with some comparing it favourably to Citizen Kane. Perhaps most surprisingly it was a major international success with audiences, playing for six months in Paris, London and New York, and becoming synonymous in the public mind with the groundbreaking new wave of cinema coming out of France.

Originally Resnais had been commissioned to make a documentary about the atomic bomb in the style of Night and Fog, his acclaimed film about the holocaust. However, after watching a number of films on the subject, the director became increasingly frustrated by the difficulty of producing a factual film on such a disquieting topic. Instead he decided to make a fictional film that would reflect the fact that “planes with atomic bombs were circling the earth all the time but everyone seemed oblivious.” It would be a classic love story in which the atomic bomb would be more in the background. The novelist Marguerite Duras was engaged to write the screenplay and came up with the simple story of a brief affair between a Japanese man and a French woman on the eve of her return from Hiroshima to Paris. Around this the two collaborators weaved a Proustian study of time and memory and the devastation wrought by war.

From its opening scenes of two intertwined bodies sequentially filmed with what Duras explained as “ashes, dew, atomic fallout – and the sweat of completed love”, to the night-time tracking shots of the woman wandering the ghostly, deserted streets of the Japanese city, Hiroshima mon amour is full of unforgettable visual imagery, all shot in luminous, silky, black and white by cinematographer Sacha Vierney. Rarely has human anguish been captured so powerfully. An early montage leads inexorably from museum hallway to hospital corridor to newsreel footage of the immediate aftermath of the atomic explosion. This is Resnais the documentarian at his most effective – his sedate, gliding camera leading us back into time and history both literally and figuratively. Later he proves himself equally adept at directing intense human drama as the woman relates the story of her affair and its tragic consequences. The scenes of the young woman’s humiliation at the hands of vengeful villagers and her enforced imprisonment in the family cellar are amongst the most harrowing ever put on screen.