1 Lost Paradise - Armin Kerber

Lost Paradise – “Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima”
Belting used Balzac’s famous novella to describe the modern artist’s unwinnable
struggle for an artistic ideal: “The ideal of perfection concealed a
notion of art that was unrelated to practice. The contradiction between
the idea and the work could not be resolved because only the idea can be
absolute. At the very moment when it became work, it had to be lost. (…)
Paradoxically, a painting would contain the ideal of perfection only for as
long as it remained unfinished. That is how long it promised to furnish an
impossible proof. (…) art was a fiction, not a work.” Bataille’s “informe”
is quite substantially responsible for a destructive ambiguity that has taken
over artistic perception, for an apparent disorder of non-obviousness
[that has prevailed] over the order of the familiar. In La ressemblance informe
(Paris 1995), however, Georges Didi-Huberman established
that “informe” did not signify a refusal but rather a specific questioning
of form in the sense, perhaps, of Alberto Giacometti – or
of Paul Klee.
Hiroshima mon amour — After the Second World War, Bataille’s breakthrough
reached the cinema. Co-produced by French writer Marguerite
Duras and director Alain Resnais – who made the 1955 documentary Nuit
et brouillard (Night and Fog) about the liberation of the Buchenwald
concentration camp – the 1956 film Hiroshima mon amour symbolises in
a different way the post-apocalyptic transformation of the medium. The
film demonstrates how the form disintegrates into a psychologically and
socially dis-membered, informal corpse. Our fear of the apocalypse, embodied
in the atom bomb, has mercilessly imposed itself on post-war
consciousness. Writers as well as painters have had to face this everyday
reality up-front. The existential activities of writing and painting no longer
seem to be motivated by a humanistic belief in the mission of art, but
have come to express the futility of a natural, unselfconscious life.
Hiroshima mon amour reflects the traumatic situation of complete
political and ethical disorientation. Its iconography begins with nuclear
fission and ends with abstract, unidentifiable moving elements. Off-screen,
a male voice says in a strong Japanese accent, “Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima”
(You saw nothing at Hiroshima). Like Adam and Eve after the
Fall, two traumatised protagonists search for a future below the jagged
outline of the annihilated city – a future beyond the ruins of the past. To
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