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French Forum, Volume 38, Numbers 1-2, Winter/Spring 2013, pp. 267-282
(Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/frf.2013.0004

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/frf/summary/v038/38.1-2.martin.html

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 Skin Deep
Bodies without Limits in Hiroshima mon amour1

Christian Martin

Depuis la Renaissance, la pense occidentale est obnubile par un thme pis-

tmologique; connatre, cest briser lcorce pour atteindre le noyau. Ce thme
arrive puisement, aprs avoir produit quelques russites et quelques dan-
gers: la physique du noyau na-t-elle pas conduit savants et militaires jusqu
lexplosion atomique?
Didier Anzieu, Le Moi-peau

The first images in Hiroshima mon amour (1959) are among the most
haunting of this film written by Marguerite Duras and directed by Alain
Resnais. Two bodies seem to be embracing, but in a derealized fashion: we
see no faces or other identifying features, only the slow movements of this
embrace. We cannot distinguish the limits between individuals, the point
at which one body ends and another begins. Or rather, to be more precise,
we cannot pinpoint where one skin ends and another skin begins, since this
initial sequence is filmed as a close-up on human skin accompanied only by
the musical score by Giovanni Fusco. As though to emphasize that the key
to this scene is skin deep, the camera draws our attention to the textured
surface of the embracing bodies covered by ash, which soon begins to shim-
mer. Finally, the grainy quality of the image here reminds us that it is film: in
French, pelliculefrom the Latin pellis, or skin.
Following the cues of this opening sequence, this paper attempts to bring
into focus the fragile covering of human bodies in Hiroshima mon amour.
Drawing on Didier Anzieus work on the skin ego (le moi-peau),2 my
intention is not to search beneath the surface for a deeper truth bearing
on war, passion, trauma, or memorythe films most haunting themes that
have drawn the attention of critics.3 Instead, taking a deliberately superfi-
cial approach, I argue that the skin itself is the screen on which much of the
268 French Forum Winter/Spring 2013 Vol. 38, Nos. 12

drama is projected, and as such, deserving of careful attention. Our herme-

neutic programming to look beneath the surface makes it easy to overlook
this most superficial part of our being. And yet, much rests on this delicate
membrane: sense of touch, registering pleasure and pain, an experience of
the world, and finally the possibility of an individually delineated body on
which to project a notion of the self. Duras and Resnais are both acutely
aware of the burden placed on this most vulnerable of membranes, able to
withstand neither atomic holocaust nor catastrophic passion. Hiroshima
mon amour thus begins with a tender homage to human skin, caught in a
moment of vulnerability, before probing both nightmarish images of burnt
and lacerated flesh as well as fantasies of bodies without limits, bodies no
longer kept apart by their individual envelopes.

Skin Deep
In her scenario, Marguerite Duras wrote that the opening sequence should
begin with the famous mushroom cloud expanding slowly across the screen
while little by little two shoulders appear in the frame. She is very precise in
insisting that these two shoulders should appear cut off from the body at
the height of the head and hips,4 noting that this embrace should be almost
shocking (choquante), and finally suggesting that the skin should be
covered in ashes, rain, dew, or perspiration.5 Because Resnais cut out the
mushroom cloud, the first images in Hiroshima mon amour consist solely
of a vague dorsal expanse of contours and texture with gentle movement,
which Resnais films as a series of dissolves. The technique of the dissolve is
perfectly suited to the material filmed, since one surface (film, skin) morphs
into another, suggesting at the outset the depth of sheer surfaces.6
What makes these initial images shocking (Duras) is that we first see
bodies covered in what seems to be ash, a tender but grim embrace suggest-
ing wounded flesh perhaps on the very threshold of death. However, this
image then dissolves into what is clearly a lovers embrace, their bodies now
covered not in glimmering ash but in perspiration. These initial images evoke
the title, Hiroshima (bodies seemingly covered in atomic ash) mon amour
(bodies in an amorous embrace), while suggesting in the impact of each
event on human flesh: it is after all the unique property of our skin to register
(extreme) pain and pleasure, skin being the locus of our sense of touch.7 With
its careful attention to tactile surfaces and textures, Resnaiss initial sequence
of dissolves appeals to what Laura Marks has termed a haptic visuality
images that invite the viewer to respond to the image as a tactile experience,
to use vision as though it were sense of touch.8 Haptic looking, as Jennifer
 Martin: Skin Deep 269

Barker observes, lingers on the surface of the image rather than delving into
depth and is more concerned with texture than with deep space.9 Engaging
with an image in a haptic way is a form of synaesthesia insofar as observing
images becomes an experience of touching.10 It is this synaesthetic quality of
cinematic perception that explains how we are able to experience Resnaiss
initial series of dissolves as a tactile visuality. When, after this close-up on
shimmering human skins, we finally see the faces belonging to the bodies at
the end of the first sequence, when we are finally able to identify two human
beings, the woman tells her lover: Cest fou ce que tu as une belle peau (36).
Thus, at the moment when the bodies become individualized and identified,
our attention is directed back to their skin.
In an interview about Hiroshima mon amour, Resnais evoked his will
to create immediate sensations and indeed, throughout the film runs a
sustained emphasis on sense of touch and thus on skin.11 After the initial
images, we thus see the French woman (elle) and the Japanese man (lui)
in the shower together, water running off their skin. This shower sequence
is echoed later in the film, when, the following night, we see the French
woman splashing water on her face and observing her reflection intensely.
The morning after their first night spent together, we see the two lovers
dress (clothing being a second covering placed over naked skin): the French
woman appears first in a kimono, and then in a nurses uniformher cos-
tume, for she is in Hiroshima acting in a film. We next observe her apply-
ing makeup. Later, we will see make-up being applied to resemble radiation
burns on the back of an actor playing a Hiroshima survivor. The camera also
follows the Japanese man who, having donned Western-style clothing, puts
on his watch, the camera attending to the gesture of wrapping the watch
around the wrist. All of these details might escape notice if it were not for
the striking first images, which in effect orient this entire sequence. After
observing the first images of Hiroshima mon amour which linger on the
shimmering texture of anonymous skin, we must take a closer look at the
elaborate morning rituals. We thus realize that we have just witnessed the
washing, masking, and covering of the fragile flesh exposed during the night
and filmed in the initial images.

Dans la peau de lautre

In the period between the initial shot of bodies covered in shimmering ash
or perspiration and the French womans declaration that her lovers skin is
extraordinarily beautifulroughly the first fifteen minutes of the film
Resnais interlaces a montage sequence documenting the tragedy in Hiro-
270 French Forum Winter/Spring 2013 Vol. 38, Nos. 12

shima. For this montage sequence, the documentary genre would have
required voice-over monologue narration and explanation to bring home
the images that we are called upon to witness. In explicit opposition to doc-
umentary conventions, this sequence is instead accompanied by voice-over
dialogue, which in effect calls into question the very possibility of witnessing
as a mans voice states flatly: Tu nas rien vu Hiroshima. Rien, to which a
womans voice replies: jai tout vu Hiroshima. Tout (22). In rendering this
voice-over exchange, Duras borrows the apocalyptic I saw (jai vu)12 even
as she undermines its testimonial value. Thus, the French woman insists that
she is able to take full measure of this event, that she has seen the effects of
the tragedy, and thus implicitly that she understands the suffering, that she is
able to identify with the victims in Hiroshima, that she knows: coute...
/ je sais... / Je sais tout. The Japanese man, for his part, calls into question
her testimony and her will to identify with those who suffered directly in
Hiroshima: Rien. Tu ne sais rien.
This is of course one of the great themes of Hiroshima mon amour: can
one penetrate the dim recesses of anothers experience, particularly if this
persons suffering exceeds the imagination and if this person belongs to a
different nation, language, race, and gender? Can a French woman resid-
ing in a country that celebrated the bombing of Hiroshima as the end of the
war understand the experience of a Japanese man from Hiroshima? For this
exchange calls to mind the French expression se mettre dans la peau de
quelquun (to put oneself in someone elses skin), meaning to be able to
understand something from another persons perspective, to experience the
same feelings as this person, to identify through empathy. The voice-over
exchange and the contoured expanse of as yet unidentified human skin both
evoke the same question, the former literally and the latter poetically: what
are the limits of individual experience?; to what extent is one fully contained
or even bound by the skin of ones birth?; is it possible to authentically
place oneself in anothers skin? Ultimately, Resnais gives weight to the Jap-
anese mans argument that no such commensurability is possible, at least
regarding Hiroshima, by accompanying the womans account of visits to the
museum with shots of gaudy flashing lights and carnival music, suggesting
that a tourist visiting Hiroshima apprehends the tragedy not as experience
but as spectacle, or indeed a kind of freak show.13
One cannot put oneself in another persons skin so easily. And yet, we
next see the French woman putting, as it were, her Japanese lover in the
skin of the dying German soldier, her tragic first love. As she observes her
Japanese lover sleep, his limbs sprawled out on the bed, his fingers twitch-
 Martin: Skin Deep 271

ing involuntarily, she experiences a flashback to the sight of her German

lover, lying on the ground, shot by someone in Nevers at liberation, his
hand trembling convulsively. In Durass scenario:
Tandis quelle regarde ses mains, il apparat brutalement la place du
Japonais, le corps dun jeune homme, dans la mme pose, mais mor-
tuaire, sur le quai dun fleuve, en plein soleil. (La chambre est dans la
pnombre.) Ce jeune homme agonise. Ses mains sont galement trs
belles, ressemblant tonnamment celles du Japonais. Elles sont agi-
tes des soubresauts de lagonie. (34)

In the film, all of this is of course packed into a brief flashback as Resnais
cuts directly from the sleeping Japanese mans hand to a shot of the dying
German soldiers hand, then quickly showing a young girl weeping over the
out-stretched body. And later in the course of a long wandering night in
Hiroshima, the Japanese man proceeds to voluntarily play the role of the
German soldier, using the first person to coax the French woman to speak of
the events which she has repressed from her waking life. He thus accepts to
be placed in the dying skin of the German soldier (je suis mort, 87) in an
attempt to truly know herpresumably because he grasps the importance
of these experiences, covered in a sacred veil of silence. However, we must
acknowledge that the viewer is never granted access to the Japanese mans
point of view, visually or narratively. We know very little beyond his desire
to hear the story of Nevers and to convince the French woman to remain in
Hiroshima: Reste Hiroshima (93).
In this way, skin relates metaphorically to the capacity for empathy
for suffering along with someone, for stepping inside their skin, the locus
of feeling (sense of touch). In attempting to take full measure of the catas-
trophe in Hiroshima, the French womans conscientious approach fails. In
spite of her four trips to the museum of Hiroshima, she knows nothing.
In contrast, the Japanese man is placed in the skin of the German soldier
thanks to the use of the first person (I am dead, says her Japanese lover)
and a trick of the camera (a flashback through which the Japanese mans
skin [peau] becomes the screen [pellicule] on which the French woman
projects memories of her German lover). Although the French woman is an
actress, ostensibly able to assume other roles and step into the mindsor
rather skins (costumes)of others, she appears much more prisoner of her
own experience than the Japanese man. He seems able to magically become
the German soldier in order to understand what happened in Nevers
paradoxically, not to understand the experience of the German soldier, but
272 French Forum Winter/Spring 2013 Vol. 38, Nos. 12

rather that of the French woman who loved him. Or perhaps it is simply
that the loss of a single beloved being is an experience universally available
whereas even the most assiduous empathetic identification is defied by the
sheer scale of Hiroshima or its singularity (to date, Hiroshima and Nagasaki
are the only instances in History of the atomic bomb being used as a weapon
of mass destruction).

Atomic Surfaces
Resnaiss montage sequence documenting post-apocalyptic Hiroshima
further establishes a series of analogies between coverings and envelopes,
human and non-human alike. The shock value of these images (fifty years
has done nothing to make them less horrific) only makes more apparent
their underlying structural analogy. We are thus invited to observe how
burnt and lacerated human flesh resembles iron melted and deformed from
extreme heat: le fer bris, le fer devenu vulnrable comme la chair (24),
explains the voice-over as the camera shows masses of iron on display in
the museum. Most striking, however, are the visual analogies established
through Resnaiss editing of this sequence. The camera cuts between images
of survivors and the site of Hiroshima, thereby suggesting that the anony-
mous bodies filmed are themselves a kind of landscape analogous to post-
atomic Hiroshima. In one aerial shot, the estuaries of the river Ota become
analogous to the fingers of the hand grasping a shoulder in the dissolves.
Similarly, the loss of vegetation on the surface of the earth becomes anal-
ogous to women losing their hair from radiation exposure. Physical ori-
fices (the eyes and mouth) are implicitly compared to gaping pits opened in
the earth. Human and non-human envelopes are examined by the camera,
which lingers over the shells of bombed out buildings (ground zero) and
then the lacerated and burnt skin covering the bodies of the victims. As the
camera lingers on a close-up of a mans scalp, burnt and scarred, it resembles
aerial shots of the scorched ground of Hiroshima.14 In short, both dialogue
and image attend to the effects of heat and radiation on human flesh and
urban landscape, which together constitute a kind of topography.15 In this
way, the camera captures the effect of the bomb as first and foremost an
assault on the fragile envelopes found in the physical world.

Bodies without Limits

As a consequence of Resnaiss topographical approach, human bodies
become eerily abstract: they are seen not as human singularities, but merely
part of a physical world in which fragile coverings of all kinds are shown
 Martin: Skin Deep 273

breaking apart and subject to deformities and lacerations. This attention to

topographyenvelopes, coverings, textures, and surfacesthus reveals a
shared vulnerability in the material world. Iron is shown to be as vulnerable
as human skin as we are confronted with the seemingly universal vulner-
ability of casings, coverings, and membranes. If the most obvious function
of skin is to establish a limit between inside and outside, Resnais apprehends
the atomic nightmare in part as unleashing bodies without limitsa terrify-
ing fluidity in which forms are broken apart, in which envelopes are opened
and containers no longer able to contain. In one image of the aftermath of
the bombing, we see a frantic woman emerging from beneath a layer of
debris. The shingles and bits of building materials which should, in a non-
disrupted physical world, provide a firm structure in which human beings
comfortably reside has instead become an unnatural casing, an inhospitable
second skin, covering (crushing in on) a living being. While this image of
a human being trapped beneath a layer of in-human debris is disturbing, it
becomes excruciating when we observe the effects up close on human flesh.
Particularly painful to observe are two haptic images of human skin
no longer delineating, containing, or enveloping. One image reveals for-
ceps opening the eyelid of a Hiroshima victim to reveal a gaping holethe
eye-socket being a particularly striking example of the function of skin to
serve as a pocket to hold something else, in this case a missing eye. As we
observe this eye-socket deprived of its reason for being, we cringe instinc-
tively. Another shot is a close-up of one of the exhibits in the Hiroshima
museum consisting of pieces of human skin floating in a jar of murky liquid
as Emmanuelle Rivas voice-over narrates: Des peaux humaines flottantes,
survivantes, encore dans la fracheur de leurs souffrances (24). The camera
lingers on this exhibit, a horrific artifact of the human agony unleashed by
the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. This image of detached yet living skin is a
haunting echo of the glimmering skin attentively filmed in the first images
they, too, seem to be cut off (to quote Duras) and almost floating. Having
migrated from its original body to float in a murky liquid which keeps it
preserved (surviving to use Durass term), the orphaned skin on exhibit
at the museum is a living, breathing, human envelope deprived of its reason
for being. This unhealthy migration stands as a gruesome consequence of
the radical disruption of limits (of atomic splitting), of the disturbance of
boundaries attacking the very integrity of what it means to be human.
What are the implications of Resnaiss cinematic juxtaposition of human
and non-human surfaces? Does this montage sequence create a post-human
274 French Forum Winter/Spring 2013 Vol. 38, Nos. 12

landscape in which the human epidermis becomes simply one of many

disrupted surfaces? Are broken iron made vulnerable as flesh and float-
ing human skintwo exhibits on display side by side in the Hiroshima
museummerely two sides of the same coin? For both exhibits present arti-
facts from an event that burnt across urban landscapes and human bodies
with the same intensity. Resnaiss chiasmic editing both humanizes the non-
human and de-humanizes the human in a leveling out that seems to under-
mine the possibility of human singularity.
However, a post-human interpretation of this initial sequence does lit-
tle to advance our understanding of the rest of the film, which hinges on
the very human concerns of loss and madness. We must therefore pursue
a differentindeed, strictly antitheticalinterpretive course in order to
take into account the entirety of Hiroshima mon amour, a course leading
not away from the human, but rather back toward the self. It is through its
topographical lens that Resnaiss initial montage sequence prepares the way
for a broader exploration of the formation (and disruption) of the self in
the rest of the film. Drawing on Didier Anzieus notion of the skin ego, we
can bridge Hiroshima mon amours initial topographies (dissolves and mon-
tage sequence) with the rambling second half of the film, marked by a topo-
graphical conception of subjectivity.
Anzieu first developed his skin ego hypothesis in a 1974 article titled Le
Moi-Peau in which he argued that our early experience of skin offered a
metaphorical scaffolding for the constitution of the Ego, based on three pri-
mary functions of the skin: first, as a sack, holding inside what is absorbed
to promote well-being; second, as a surface marking the limit with the out-
side; and third, as a means of exchange with the outside.16 Anzieu reworked
this initial model in his book Le Moi-Peau published in 1985, subsequently
revised and republished in 1995, a few years before his death in 1999. Explic-
itly presenting the skin ego as a metaphor,17 Anzieu examined expressions,
myths, and extensive clinical research to elucidate the psychic investment in
the human epidermis. The theoretical basis on which his theory rested was
drawn in part from Freuds work on the topographical structure of the Ego.
In particular, Anzieu glossed Freuds notion of the psychic apparatus as an
envelope in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and The Ego and the Id
(1923):18 the experience of the skins surface allows the infant to represent the
self as a container of sorts.19 Interestingly (and this will prove key in Hiro-
shima mon Amour), before there can be a skin-egoa sense of an individual
self; the infant must first experience the fantasy of a common skin shared
with the mother. This common skin fantasy reemerges in adults when two
 Martin: Skin Deep 275

lovers share the dream of being covered by the same skin.20 Finally, for
Anzieu, the common skin fantasy can also explain some adult masochistic
behavior. Indeed, Anzieus idea of the skin ego seems to have grown out of
his early work on masochism,21 as he explains in his 1974 article:
Nous avons dj mis lide que le fantasme originaire du masochisme
est constitu par la reprsentation quune mme peau appartient
lenfant et sa mre, peau figurative de leur union symbiotique, et que
le processus de dfusion et daccs de lenfant lautonomie entrane
une rupture et une dchirure de cette peau commune.22

Present at the earliest stages of his thinking, the masochistic impulse

directed against the skin remains an important part of the equationand
a difficult one for Anzieu. In the first edition of Le Moi-Peau (1985), he
described the ninth function of the skin ego as assaulting and destroying the
skin itself. However, in the revised edition which was published in 1995, he
removed the ninth function from the list, concluding that this toxic func-
tion was not in fact a function of the skin ego, but rather the name for its
collapse.23
Although presented in a highly abbreviated form, my account of Anzieus
notion of the skin ego already suggests a number of parallels with Hiro-
shima mon Amour, including the fantasy of a common skin. For the painful
images of bodily envelopes under duress and unable to enclose the human
substance they are charged with containing find their corollary in an erotic
topography of being entirely covered by ones beloved as by a second skin:
tu tais fait la taille de mon corps mme (35). This exclamation comes
near the end of the sequence of dissolves in which we observe skin visu-
ally covering skin, blending together, and morphingan erotic topography
which is in effect performing the French womans desire. For the French
woman, this fantasy of transcending the solitary condition of one solitary
body covered by one skin relates back to the loss of her first love in Nevers.
She remained with him as he hovered on the threshold of death, losing any
sense of her individually delineated self as she lay across his body, as though
her body could provide a protective covering to his wounded body:
Ah! quest-ce quil a t long mourir. Quand? Je ne sais plus au juste.
Jtais couche sur lui... oui... le moment de sa mort ma chapp
vraiment puisque... puisque mme ce moment-l et mme aprs,
oui, mme aprs, je peux dire que je narrivais pas trouver la moindre
diffrence entre ce corps mort et le mien. (100)
276 French Forum Winter/Spring 2013 Vol. 38, Nos. 12

As her body completely covered his, she ceased to be able to differentiate

between herself and her dying lover. The unbearable reality of discontinu-
ity, of loss, is substituted by a dream of magical continuity whereby nothing
separates the young girl in Nevers from the German soldier she loves, as
though there ceased to be two skins establishing a firm limit between two
bodies, leaving only one skin encapsulating both. Later, in Hiroshima, she
will experience the same fantasy of two bodies no longer delineated, two
bodies merging together, represented in the initial dissolves and then in her
discovery that her Japanese lover fits her body so well, like a second skin.

Folle Nevers
The skin ego is in Anzieus model as vulnerable as human skin itself, for it
is subject to masochistic fantasies of flayed skin, psychosomatic skin con-
ditions (of which the blush is the most innocuous), and various dissocia-
tive states (tats limites). In Nevers, the French woman experiences both
masochistic assaults on her own skin and a more radical troubling of limits
during a period of madness. Durass dialogue suggests how inadequate the
conventional language of rationality is when it comes to accounting for
eruptions of madness such as the one experienced by the French woman
after the death of her German lover. In answer to her Japanese lovers ques-
tioning about Nevers, the French woman reveals that she was born in Nev-
ers, grew up in Nevers, and went crazy in Nevers. She then observes:
Cest comme lintelligence, la folie, tu sais. On ne peut pas lexpliquer.
Tout comme lintelligence. Elle vous arrive dessus, elle vous remplit et
alors on la comprend. Mais, quand elle vous quitte, on ne peut plus la
comprendre du tout. (43)

Madness is not the opposite (or absence) of rationality (intelligence).

From the inside, one understands it. Indeed, madness is here described
using a metaphor of containers and contents rather than rationality: it fills
its victim (elle vous remplit) who then contains itfor in French, the
verb to understand (comprendre) can also mean to contain. Madness sub-
stitutes as it were a toxic content for inside our structuring envelope, recall-
ing Freuds topographical metaphor of the Ego as an envelopea con-
tainer of psychic contents.
In the second half of the film, when the French woman relates in detail
her period of madness in Nevers, she once again uses metaphors of contain-
ers and contents, shown visually in the flashback scenes. Faced with her per-
sistent cries after the loss of her lover, her parents decide to place her in the
 Martin: Skin Deep 277

cellar, as though it could serve as a provisional container for her. The camera
attends to images of her exploring the cellar walls, a kind of surrogate skin:
we see her tasting the walls, feeling their limits, and at times scraping her
fingers down the rough surface of these walls. In Durass scenario:
Les mains deviennent inutiles dans les caves. Elles grattent. Elles
scorchent aux murs... se faire saigner... cest tout ce quon peut
trouver faire pour se faire du bien. (88)

We note that her flayed skin is a masochistic assault on the same cover-
ing invested with the charge of setting the self apart from the other, for it
is precisely the separation from her dead lover that she finds intolerable. In
Anzieus model, violence directed against the skin is closely linked to the fan-
tasy of the common skin shared by lovers just as in Hiroshima mon amour, the
French woman associates her fantasy of one common surface covering her
body and her German lovers body with her subsequent assault on her own
skin after his death.
If the French womans madness involves a breaking down of the protec-
tive envelope and defining sense of self, and if in the process the skin ego
itself becomes toxic by seeking its own destruction, how, then, does she
emerge from this state of breakdown of the self, bent on attacking its own
limits? How does she leave eternity in the words of her Japanese lover
(eternity being precisely that which has no limit)? The camera best answers
this question by showing the young girl moving through her room in Nev-
ers, exploring its surfaces with her hands. It is not only vision (and its corol-
lary, understanding, as in the French expression, je vois or I understand)
that allows her to emerge from eternity, but also sense of touch. We see
her in the process of identifying the structuring limits of her room and the
cellar: lombre gagne dj moins vite les angles des murs de la chambre
(78). With this voice-over, we see the girl in her nightdress slowly moving
through her room, tracing out its circumference, realizing that she is in fact
enclosed within a walled structure. At the same time, we observe her in a
state of tactile consciousness as she touches its surfaces: the top of a dresser,
a decorative shell, and then an ink-well. Her actions suggest a fascination
with small structures, whose limits she explores tactilely, feeling them slowly
with her hands. Anzieus hypothesis that tactile sensitivity functions as an
organizing principle for the thinking subject sheds light on this scene, all the
more insofar as the young girl is in fact moving through one container (her
room) and exploring the other containers it contains (a shell, a dresser, an
ink-well) with her fingers. This tactile method of recovery is further devel-
278 French Forum Winter/Spring 2013 Vol. 38, Nos. 12

oped in the next scene in the cellar, when she picks up a childs marble which
has just rolled in through an open window. She then rolls it gently against
her skin, experiencing its round form, smooth surface, and warmth: elle
(la bille) tait chaude (80). She credits this tactile encounter with a humble
object with triggering her recovery: I think then is when I got over my hate
[...] Im becoming reasonable (66).
But let us return to her very first gestures on the road to recovery, the
scene taking place within the walls of her bedroom, and in particular her
tactile experimentation with the ink-well. In Durass scenario, the young
girl merely says, I see the ink (63), but Resnaiss filming shifts the focus
from literary self-referentiality (Durassian ink) to the ink-wells function as
a tactile three dimensional object (a container with contents). The camera
attends to her gestures, as she picks up the ink-well, examines it, pours out
a little ink, and then returns it to the top of the dresser, all the while observ-
ing its capacity to contain, to spill, and then to resume its function as a con-
tainer. We share in her manner of experiencing the specificity of this object
as a container with contents. She seems to be learning a tactile lesson that
could have been taken straight out of Anzieu, the lesson of using skin meta-
phors (envelopes, containers) as a screen onto which to project a concep-
tion of the self:24 for the ink-well is precisely and individually delineated; it
is in communication with the outside world (there is exchange between the
inside and the outside); it is vulnerable (its ink can be poured out) and yet
able to recover. This little experiment is precisely not a Rorschach test. The
heroine of Resnaiss film does not look at the ink-blots following the cues of
the standard personality test. As she pours out a couple of drops, she does
not contemplate the suggestive shapes of the spilled ink, but rather pon-
ders the containing function of the ink-well, which can temporarily cease
to contain (when it is turned upside down and its contents are spilled out)
and then recover and resume containing. The analogy with her fragile self is
implicit herea self that collapsed, that succumbed to a masochistic assault
on its own protective shell, that ceased to function in an ordered and struc-
tured world, but that could then be reconstituted. Modern man, James
Joyce observed, has an epidermis rather than a soul.25 And for the French
woman, the road to recovery consists not of searching for her lost reason
deep within herself, but rather of groping her way through a tactile physical
world of human and non-human skins, relying to a large extent on her sense
of touch. The lessons she draws pertain not to deep structures of meaning,
but rather to the metaphors and physicalities of having a skin, being in a
skin, or indeed being a skin.
 Martin: Skin Deep 279

Anzieus notion of the skin ego allows us to shed new light on the persistent
investment in topographies in Hiroshima mon Amourtopographies of the
self, of lovers, of post-atomic Hiroshima. The films attention to surfaces,
containers, and texturesall part of a tactile physical worldencourages
the viewer to exercise a horizontal gaze rather than plunging into illusion-
ist depth, a way of looking typical of haptic visuality as described by Jen-
nifer Barker.26 Resnaiss attention to psycho-topography in Hiroshima mon
amour places front and center those tactile surfaces charged with establish-
ing limits and providing envelopes, experiencing pleasure and enduring
pain. It reveals a generalized state of disruption affecting all of the functions
ascribed to skin: pleasure mingles with pain; envelopes are emptied out or
broken open; and the limits of one clearly delineated formbe it a human
body or an urban buildingare broken down.27 In its preoccupation with
blurred lines, deformation, indeterminateness, disruption, Hiroshima mon
amour explores an uncomfortable terrain occupied simultaneously by Eros
and Thanatos. The nightmare of disrupted surfaces and boundaries in the
aftermath of Hiroshima thus finds its corollary in the fantasy of bodies with-
out limits haunting the French woman. Both lead to madness: the point at
which the self dissolves, to use filmic vocabulary. It is thus appropriate that
the key to the films enigmatic topographies should be provided at the very
outset. The initial sequence of dissolves reveals that in Hiroshima the truth
is indeed skin deep, for the most profound human dramas are played out on
the most superficial part of our being.

Stonehill College

Notes
1. I wish to thank the anonymous readers whose suggestions and comments were
extremely helpful.
2. Didier Anzieu, Le Moi-peau (Paris: Dunod, 1995), the most complete exposition of
Anzieus notion of the skin ego, which was first presented in an earlier article titled Le
Moi-Peau, Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse 9 (1974), pp. 195208.
3. Among the finest interpretations of the film are Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experi-
ence: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity Press, 1996); Michael Roth, The Ironists Cage: Memory, Trauma, and the Construction
of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); and Emma Wilson, Alain Resnais
(Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2006).
4. On ne voit que ces deux paules, elles sont coupes du corps la hauteur de la tte
et des hanches. Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour: scnario et dialogue (Paris:
280 French Forum Winter/Spring 2013 Vol. 38, Nos. 12

Gallimard, 1960), p. 21. Trans. Richard Seaver (New York: Grove Press, 1961), p. 15. Unless
otherwise stated, English translations will be Seavers. All French citations will be from
the published scenario. Page numbers will be given in parentheses after each quote.
5. Ces deux paules streignent et elles sont comme trempes de cendres, de pluie, de
rose, ou de sueur, comme on le veut (21).
6. As Jennifer Barker observes, the dissolve is the cinematic equivalent of the caress: a
dissolve moves us from shot to shot by allowing the surface of one image to press against
the other as they merge slowly, dissolving into one another. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the
Cinematic Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), p. 60.
7. This is the point Resnais made in commenting on these initial images: par asso-
ciations dides, nous sommes passs de la peau source dextrme plaisir la peau source
dextrme douleur quoted by Emma Wilson, Alain Resnais (Manchester and New York:
Manchester University Press, 2006), p. 48.
8. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 2 and 127. Marks does not include Hiro-
shima mon amour in her exploration of haptic images, but subsequent work by Jennifer
Barker has extended her model to Resnaiss film. See The Tactile Eye, p. 60. See also Ste-
ven Shaviros influential work on the tactile image in The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 4954.
9. The Tactile Eye, p. 35.
10. See Vivian Sobchacks discussion of synaesthesia and coenaesthesia in Carnal
Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2004), pp. 6770.
11. Pour Hiroshima non plus, il ne sagissait pas de faire un monument aux morts. L-
bas plus quailleurs, il importe de vivre. Partout on sent la prsence de la mort. Par rac-
tion, on ressent un violent apptit de vivre, une volont de sensations immdiates. Alain
Resnais, Propos dAlain Resnais sur le cinma, LAvant-scne du cinma 6162 (1966), p. 50.
12. Jai vu les gens se promener (24); Jai vu des capsules en bouquet (24); Jai
vu les actualits (27); Jai vu aussi les rescaps et ceux qui taient dans les ventres des
femmes de Hiroshima (29); Jai vu la patience, linnocence, la douceur apparente avec
lesquelles les survivants provisoires de Hiroshima saccommodaient dun sort tellement
injuste que limagination dhabitude pourtant si fconde, devant eux, se ferme (29).
13. The audio commentary by Peter Cowie included in the 2003 Criterion dvd makes
this point.
14. As one critic eloquently observes: [D]ans Hiroshima Resnais relie les victimes
dHiroshima la gographie de la ville elle-mme par des images similaires: la camra
effectue un panoramique sur la photographie dun homme brl, glisse jusqu son crne
et sy arrte. Une grande brlure a laiss une plaque chauve au milieu des cheveux ras.
Cest un trs gros plan, toute la surface de lcran est occupe par les cheveux et la plaie.
Limage ressemble trangement la vue arienne dun paysage pel. Sarah Leperchey,
Alain Resnais: une lecture topologique (Paris: LHarmattan, 2000), p. 20.
15. Topography being not only a representation of an areas features, but also, in anat-
omy, the mapping of the surface of the body with reference to the parts beneath. Oxford
English Reference Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
 Martin: Skin Deep 281

16. Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse 9 (1974), p. 207.

17. Avant dtre un concept, mon ide du Moi-Peau est, volontairement, une vaste
mtaphore. Le Moi-Peau, p. 28.
18. Le Moi-Peau, p. 98. No less important for Anzieu was the work of the English psy-
choanalyst John Bowlby on attachment, in particular, The Nature of the Childs Ties to
his Mother, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 39 (1958), pp. 25073; and Attach-
ment and Loss, 3 vols. (London: Hogarth, 196975).
19. Par Moi-peau, je dsigne une figuration dont le Moi de lenfant se sert au cours
des phases prcoces de son dveloppement pour se reprsenter lui-mme comme Moi
contenant les contenus psychiques, partir de son exprience de la surface du corps. Le
Moi-Peau, p. 61.
20. Naomi Segal examines this fantasy: Before there can be a skin-ego, each child
must experience the delusion of a common skin with its mother [...]. This is paralleled
later by the experience of lovers who imagine they share [...] a single body unique to the
two of them, with the same skin. Consensuality: Didier Anzieu, Gender and the Sense of
Touch (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008), p. 75.
21. De la mythologie particulire chaque type de masochisme, Bulletin de
lAssociation psychanalytique de France 4 (1968), pp. 8491.
22. Le Moi-Peau, p. 208.
23. See Steven Connors discussion of the problematic ninth toxic function in
Anzieus thought. The Book of Skin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 50.
24. In an essay published one year before Le Moi Peau, Anzieu described the psycho-
analysts task as helping the patient to inhabit a notion of the self as a personal and con-
taining skin ego. La Peau de lautre, marque de destin, Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse
30 (1984), p. 66.
25. Quoted by Connor, The Book of Skin, p. 9.
26. As she explains, haptic visuality can be used to designate a horizontal look along a
flat surface which tends to move over the surface of its object rather than to plunge into
illusionistic depth. The Tactile Eye, pp. 37 and 38.
27. See also Emma Wilson, Material Relics, esp. pp. 20 and 30.

Works Cited
Anzieu, Didier. De la mythologie particulire chaque type de masochisme. Bulletin de
lAssociation psychanalytique de France 4 (1968): 8491.
. Le Moi-Peau. Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse 9 (1974): 195208.
. Le Moi-peau. Paris: Dunod, 1995.
. La Peau de lautre, marque du destin. Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse 30 (1984):
5568.
. The Skin Ego. Trans. Chris Turner. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
Barker, Jennifer. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2009.
Bowlby, John. The Nature of the Childs Ties to his Mother. International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis 39 (1958): 25073.
282 French Forum Winter/Spring 2013 Vol. 38, Nos. 12

. Attachment and Loss. 3 vols. London: Hogarth, 196975.

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore and
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(1966): 4851.
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Segal, Naomi. Consensuality: Didier Anzieu, Gender and the Sense of Touch. Amsterdam
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Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
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. Material Relics: Resnais, Memory and the Senses. French Studies 59:1 (2005):
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