The echoes of Hiroshima mon Amour in Memories of Underdevelopment

« First, the similarities are found in the fragmented narrative: in Hiroshima mon amour , the narrative perspective moves throughout the movie in the sense that the spectator assists to either the couple's story or to the story of Hiroshima that is been told through the voiceover and the images of victims.

In Memories of underdevelopment , in one hand, there is the story of Sergio (also narrated by chapters without any chronological order) and on the other hand, the history of Cuban society, for example with one of the first scenes of the movie in which we see the family of Sergio and thus an important part of Cuban society in the process of leaving the country to go to Miami. Photography also plays a role quite important in the visual language of the two films.

In Hiroshima mon amour , it serves as a set of traces of the atomic bomb by showing the faces of the victims with a close-up.

In memories of underdevelopment , we see also that the photography inserted in the film, including close-ups, shows the political personalities of Cuba and thus not the victims but rather the leaders, the origin of the whole history and the events that are narrated. Indeed, in both films, there is a mixture of fictional writing and the documentary one, especially with the preponderance of the voiceover and the contrast between the image and dialogue: the voice that speaks about a certain fact and the images that show something else: if in Hiroshima , this technique is used to demonstrate the indifference of some people vis-a-vis the nuclear disaster, in Alea's film, it serves to emphasize the character's distance from what surrounds him, to reinforce the idea of alienation. The main difference between the two films in my opinion is that in Hiroshima , the couple's story is somewhat Separated from the story of Hiroshima, while in Alea’s film, the story of Sergio and more precisely his speech in the sense that the viewer attends various events at the. »