Nic nie widzieliście w Hiroszimie
You Saw Nothing in Hiroshima

Summary/Abstract: “You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing. / I saw everything. Everything” – this dialogue between the main protagonists of Alain Resnais’ film: Hiroshima Mon Amour and the book by Marguerite Duras perfectly discloses the paradox we tackle while attempting to present the unforeseeable. With the Resnais film as a point of departure the author deliberates about relations between inability and the compulsion to depict, the ways in which the cinema and photography face the tragedy of Hiroshima, as well as, predominantly, that, which images of destruction and, more generally speaking, ephemeral traces from the archive of destruction, “say” to us today, from an emotional and time distance. Does this mean that there is nothing to imagine because there is nothing – or almost nothing – to see? Certainly not – wrote Georges Didi-Huberman in Bark, an essay endeavouring to reflect on the ability (inability) to behold in Auschwitz. Are we capable today of taking yet another look at the titular piece of bark and the dust left behind by History?

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