The horror of the Nazi death camps placed a chilling prohibition on imagery in postwar Europe. Resnais’s stirring documentary essay shattered that taboo with images of incomparable power, culled from the archives and from his own visit to the abandoned sites.

Resnais’s first feature is greatly indebted to Marguerite Duras’s screenplay and is considered one of the finest films of the early French New Wave. Using a radically novel approach to expressing temporality through associative cuts that bridge the past and the present, Resnais presents the subjective point of view of a French woman who, haunted by her past during the war and filming an historical recreation of the atomic blast in Hiroshima, falls in love with a Japanese man.