Hiroshima mon amour was the creation of two auteurs of the French New Wave, screenwriter Marguerite Duras and director Resnais. In Hiroshima, a French actress (Emmanuèle Riva) working on an antiwar film meets a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada). They become lovers but their encounter only revives memories of the war, revealing that the woman is her past, the man, his. 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, in which the film's pacifist subtheme is skillfully developed. The seamless integration of past and present, the poetic fusion of music to text and image to the clipped poetry of dialogue, were shared tropes of Resnais and Duras. The tactile sensuality of the images is in profound counterpoint to the radical interiority of the protagonists: for Duras, especially, there is something irreducible about separateness which sex can transcend only fleetingly.