Worlds in "Hiroshima Mon Amour"

In Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), the multiplicity of worlds is demonstrated in the opening sequence. A French woman and a Japanese man lie together in a bed in Japan. "You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing," he tells her. "I saw everything," she replies. "I saw the hospital--I'm sure of it. The hospital in Hiroshima exists. How could I not have seen it?" "You didn't see the hospital in Hiroshima. You saw nothing in Hiroshima," he insists. The camera seems to justify the woman's belief in having seen Hiroshima by floating through the hospital and visiting a museum for the atomic bomb, showing for us the viewer what she claims to have seen. But he maintains that she knows nothing of Hiroshima.

Thus, Resnais portrays a complex version of the multiplicity of worlds. This is related to Goodman's idea in "Words, Works, Worlds," that, "We are confined to ways of describing whatever is described," (pg. 3). Only here it is with both words and symbols that worlds are described. There are the woman's words and the photographic depiction of those words, but are these proof that the woman shares with the Japanese man an experience of the same world: his world? The fact that she is absent from all of the shots in this opening scene calls this into question, almost as if a third world of the camera is created apart from the other two. Whether or not she did in fact perceive the hospital with her own eyes does not draw her into his world as a Japanese native, where the experience of Hiroshima is something different from a non-native. As Goodman says, "Knowing cannot be exclusively or even primarily a matter of determining what is true," (pg. 21). She may relate to this world and Resnais' camera may relate to it, but these are worlds apart, separate yet intersecting.