The Film Translated into Music: Hiroshima Mon Amour by Alain Resnais and Giovanni Fusco

Abstract

This article investigates Giovanni Fusco’s Piccola suite per otto strumenti dal film Hiroshima Mon Amour (1960), derived from his score for Alain Resnais’s film Hiroshima mon amour (1959). While Resnais himself compared the film’s structure to Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations or a string quartet, underlining the central role of music within its narrative construction, Fusco’s transformation of the soundtrack into a concert suite exemplifies how film music can be translated from its original visual-narrative context into an autonomous musical composition. Through processes of reordering, reduction, and merging of musical material, the suite reconfigures themes initially tied to the cinematic image, preserving their expressive force while enabling them to function in a purely aural domain. The analysis demonstrates how Fusco’s re-elaboration not only situates film music within the concert repertoire but also translates the film’s central concerns with memory, oblivion, and trauma into an independent musical form.