Postwar Mourning and Melancholy: Germany Year of Zero and Hiroshima Mon Amour

Abstract This paper focuses on two films, Germany Year Zero and Hiroshima Mon Amour , which serve as testimonies to the postwar status of Berlin and Hiroshima, offering magnificent topological touches of traumatized cities and profound insights into the intersection of cities and trauma. Through their narratives, these films intricately explore the interplay between the interiorized exterior and the exteriorized interior, the spatialization of the unspeakable, and the folding of memory into the very fabric of cinematic architecture. All these elements are complicatedly intertwined with the themes of melancholy, forgetting, and remembering, adding layers of depth to the cinematic exploration.