Ashes, limbs, a haunting refrain. The pulsating woodwinds, strings and piano of the score commence. As they persist, title credits for Resnais' 1959 Hiroshima mon amour appear and fade; an image surfaces. This visual image, a networked matrix of lines with offshoots branching in various directions, as might a stitched scar, evokes a rhizomatic surfacing upon an unknown surface, a mysterious formation perceived against a strangely agitating soundtrack. Image and score finally fade to a momentary black silence. Then, as writes Marguerite Duras, ‘we see mutilated bodies – the heads, the hips – moving – in the throes of love or death – and covered successively with the ashes, the dew, of atomic death – and the sweat of love fulfilled’ (1961: 8).