Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour (1959)

Alain Resnais and scriptwriter Marguerite Duras both agreed that it was impossible to make a film about Hiroshima, and this is the result. Everything is double, not only a collaboration between Resnais and Duras, but memory and forgetting, past and present, life and death, love and war, Nevers and Hiroshima, the personal and the collective, even the film really only has two human characters, male and female, Elle (Emmanuelle Riva) and Lui (Eiji Okada).

At the beginning we see two bodies (or shoulders of bodies), covered in the dust of the past, until the dust goes and we see two sweating bodies loving each other in Hiroshima: she is a French actor who has been visiting to make a film about peace in a city destroyed by hate, he is a Japanese architect or engineer who wasn't in Hiroshima at the time of the destruction. Both are married to another person.

There is archival footage of the former city, footage of the present rebuilt town in 1958, the museum, and shots of Nevers and its Place de la République where a street is now renamed after Duras and there's a plaque commemorating where the shooting took place. There are reconstructions of Nevers around the time that the bomb hit Hiroshima, when Elle's trauma serves as a  personal microcosm of the collective trauma of Hiroshima: she had an affair with a German soldier who was killed, and she lay on his dying body all night, underwent the ritual of the 'tondues' by having her head shaved, rode all night on her bicycle to Paris, away from the traumatic memory. In the present, she says, she doesn't think about the past, although it haunts her in her dreams.

He is the only person she's told about the German and it's here where memory and forgetting merge into a paradoxical oneness. He wants her to stay but it's an impossibility, an impossible love, and this impossible film is one of the most important in the history of cinema.