Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) by Hayao Miyazaki is maybe not as famous as some of his later films, such as Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, but it is one of my favourites and it is currently available for free on Google Videos! One aspect that strikes me in Nausicaä and the other films of Hayao Miyazaki is how much villains are portrayed with humanity. Their roughness is what makes them somehow fragile and human. They are most often forgiven by the other characters, this generosity is in my view related to their sensual experience of the natural surroundings, which seems to soften feelings and induce a more distant view on human conflicts. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is a utopia, but its poetic description of an imperfect human nature is touching on something very real.
Hiroshima mon amour (1959) directed by Alain Resnais is an emblematic film of the French New Wave. Its opening scene showing images of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb is narrated by Emmanuelle Riva, her voice delivering with great sensitivity the screenplay of Marguerite Duras. I could not stop thinking about my study on the appropriation of space when I saw the movie. The female character is from Nevers, a small town in France. The male character lives in Hiroshima, where they both met. There is a feeling of placeless during the whole film; the past of Hiroshima “had to be forgotten” and the couple seems to be lost in a city without any apprehensible meaning. The two characters are unrooted, they move from one place to another without care, all the settings look impersonal and interchangeable. Staying one more day in Hiroshima is too long and the night seems to never end. But there is no coming back, Nevers can only represent the troubled past of the female character. The paradox is that the film is undeniably about places, described in great details, but from the point of view of a painful detachment…
