Nijuman no borei
2007 · 10m · France
Directed by Jean-Gabriel Périot
Genres: documentary, historical, war
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Archive photographs in time-lapse chart Hiroshima from 1914 to 2006 — the city rising, vanishing in the atomic flash of 6 August 1945, and slowly rebuilding over the decades that follow.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the mushroom cloud to devastate—Périot refuses the catharsis, instead making the real subversion the slow, patient rebuild, the city's refusal to be its own tragedy. It's the opposite of the war film everyone wants.
A masterwork of restraint that speaks to the lineage of Farocki and structural documentary: the time-lapse itself becomes the formal argument, letting photographic duration compress 92 years into an unbearable meditation on erasure and persistence. The craft *is* the history.
The decision to let the archive photographs themselves move—to animate stillness rather than narrate it—transforms exhausted source material into something that feels discovered rather than explained, which is exactly what makes this ten minutes feel infinite.
Reviews
L'audace formelle dont le film fait preuve dénote d'une volonté d'impliquer totalement celui qui regarde, au-delà de l'informer, Périot choisit de lui faire ressentir l'absence et le manque perçus dans les clichés d'avant et après la catastrophe. Dédié aux 200.000 fantômes qui hanteront toujours la ville d'Hiroshima, « Nijuman no borei » est à l'image du Dôme de Genbaku, un véritable hymne à la paix.