“Becoming a Song: Sound, Memory, and Cinema History in Michael Haneke’s Amour”
2016; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/scr.2016.0016
ISSN1549-3377
Autores Tópico(s)French Literature and Critical Theory
Resumo“Becoming a Song:Sound, Memory, and Cinema History in Michael Haneke’s Amour” Lynn A. Higgins (bio) “Le Visuel persiste jusque dans son évanouissement, le sonore apparaît et s’évanouit jusque dans sa permanence.” —Jean-Luc Nancy “[…]la suspension des images devait être l’espace même de l’amour, sa musique.” —Roland Barthes A key scene appears about three quarters of the way through Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012). Anne Laurent (Emmanuelle Riva) has suffered a debilitating stroke, transforming the graceful and articulate elderly woman we met only 90 minutes ago into a bedridden invalid unable to speak or feed herself. Her husband, Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant), holds a cup to her lips, but Anne, discouraged and humiliated, clamps her mouth shut, her eyes signaling her desire for the end. When Georges gently forces her to drink, she defiantly spits the water out. After many weeks of loving care, Georges finally loses patience and slaps her. Immediately contrite, he apologizes, but the damage is done (Figure 1). This turning point in Amour evokes another scene filmed 53 years earlier. A Japanese man (Eiji Okada) and a French woman (Emmanuelle Riva, in her most famous role) sit in a riverside café, their beer glasses on the table between them. The woman is gripped by a flashback to the Occupation, when she loved a German soldier who was killed at the Liberation. As she regresses into her story, she asks her companion to help her drink, and he holds the glass to her lips. As her memory reaches its paroxysm, she cries out. Recognizing that her relived emotion is so intense she is slipping into madness, the man slaps her. She immediately returns to the present moment. The film is, of course, Hiroshima mon amour (1959, Figure 2), directed by Alain Resnais after a script by novelist Marguerite Duras. At first blush, we might attribute these echoes to the type of conspiratorial wink to the audience favored by the Nouvelle Vague directors. What, after all, could a youthful French actress on location in Hiroshima with [End Page 80] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Hiroshima mon amour (1959). Screen capture by author. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Amour (2012). Screen capture by author. [End Page 81] her Japanese lover have in common with two octogenarians sequestered in their Paris apartment? Amour might more readily bring to mind Haneke’s own previous films, such as Le Septième Continent (1989), Benny’s Video (1992), Funny Games (1997), Code Inconnu (2000), and Caché (2005), in each of which a couple named Anne and Georges (often surnamed Laurent and sometimes, as in Amour, with a daughter named Eva) respond to a crisis situation by acting out the violence hidden under the “civilized” surfaces of everyday bourgeois social and family relations. Yet the similarities between these two scenes cannot possibly be coincidental: a couple is in the throes of an intensely emotional turning point in their relationship; the man holds a cup to the woman’s lips to help her drink; then, unexpectedly, he slaps her. Just as abruptly, the couple returns to the banality of their present situation. Clearly, some subterranean connections link Amour to Hiroshima mon amour. Comparing the two films is made irresistible not only by these parallel scenes and the casting of Emmanuelle Riva, but also by their titles, their interconnected themes (love, death, memory), and their violation of social taboos against “impossible” love stories (involving racial difference, enemy camps in wartime, or extreme old age). Haneke professes great admiration for Resnais, whose work he has studied carefully. “I especially love his early films,” he explains; “I was deeply impressed by Hiroshima mon amour, L’Année dernière à Marienbad, Muriel.” Haneke wrote the script for Amour with Trintignant in mind, and he confidently selected the female lead after an initial audition: “I had noticed Emmanuelle Riva at the release of Hiroshima mon amour, one of my favorites and a cult film among Austrian young people in the 1960s.”1 With both Riva and Trintignant in starring roles, Amour alludes unmistakably to that earlier era of (French) filmmaking. Like the “young Turks” of...
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