Blu-ray, DVD Release: Hiroshima Mon Amour

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: July 14, 2015
Price: DVD $29.95, Blu-ray $39.95
Studio: Criterion


The 1959 drama-romance Hiroshima Mon Amour, the first feature from Alain Resnais (Wild Grass), is a cornerstone of the French New Wave and one of the most talked-about films of its day.

Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)

Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)

A French actress (Amour’s Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Woman in the Dunes’ Eiji Okada) engage in a brief, intense affair in postwar Hiroshima, their consuming mutual fascination impelling them to exorcise their own scarred memories of love and suffering.

With an innovative flashback structure and an Academy Award–nominated screenplay by novelist Marguerite Duras (India Song), Hiroshima mon amour is a moody masterwork that delicately weaves past and present, personal pain and public anguish.

Presented in French with English subtitles, Criterion’s Blu-ray and DVD editions of the film contain the following features:

  • New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
    • Audio commentary by film historian Peter Cowie
    • Interviews with director Alain Resnais from 1961 and 1980
    • Interviews with actor Emmanuelle Riva from 1959 and 2003
    • New interview with film scholar François Thomas, author of L’atelier d’Alain Resnais
    • New interview with music scholar Tim Page about the film’s score
    • Revoir Hiroshima . . . , a 2013 program about the film’s restoration
    • New English subtitle translation
    • An essay by critic Kent Jones and excerpts from a 1959 Cahiers du cinémaroundtable discussion about the film
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About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.