Hiroshima, mon amour fully realized cinema's poetic fusion: an original soundtrack weds music to text, image to the clipped poetry of dialogue. The film was an intensely personal creation by two "auteurs," screenwriter Marguerite Duras and director Resnais. Its seamless integration of past and present is a central theme in Resnais's work, while the tactile sensuality of the photographic images and the obsessions of its protagonists clearly mark the "tension between the claims of sensibility and social imperative" that Annette Michelson finds in Duras's films. In Hiroshima, a French actress working on an antiwar film meets a Japanese architect. They become lovers 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 separateness which sex can transcend only fleetingly. Their struggle to come to terms with the idea that life goes on is reflected in images from a collective memory, represented in newsreel footage of Hiroshima's hospital, war museum, and the rebuilt city. Thus is the film's important pacifist sub-theme skillfully developed.