In 1959, this nouvelle vague classic broke with many conventions, with an original soundtrack that fused music and text, profoundly photographed imagery counterpointing Marguerite Duras' poetic dialogue, and a seamless integration of past and present (a theme central to Alain Resnais' work from Toute la Memoire du Monde and Last Year at Marienbad to Providence). In Hiroshima, a French actress working on an antiwar film meets a Japanese architect. They become lovers, wordlessly, at a finite moment in time, but their encounter revives memories of the war, revealing that the woman is her past, the man, his. For Duras, there is something irreducible about the separateness of two individuals which sex can transcend only fleetingly. The lovers' struggle to come to terms with their separate pasts, and with the idea that life goes on, is also reflected in images from a collective memory-represented in newsreel footage of the hospital at Hiroshima, the war museum, and the rebuilt city-through which the film's pacifist subtheme is skillfully developed.