This paper will explore questions of difference and forgetting in the work of film-maker Alain Resnais. These will be tested specifically in a consideration of his filming of urban space. To begin, I draw on the notion of ‘creative geography’, that editing effect, defined by Kuleshov, whereby images from different locations are edited so they appear to be one continuous space or place. The intercut locations of the paper are, as in Resnais’s film, Hiroshima and Nevers, yet I also cut, more speculatively, between Hiroshima and New York, between two sites of devastation, ground zero. Creative geography may presuppose an illusory continuity between disparate locations. Hiroshima mon amour (1959) opens up questions about what it means in film, in the psyche and in global culture to cross between spaces and locations in an attempt to know and represent difference, and, more specifically, to apprehend the (traumatic) memory of the other. I draw on readings of Hiroshima mon amour, by Cathy Caruth, Lynn Higgins and others which emphasise Hiroshima as the site of catastrophe in which a link between cultures may find its source. Yet re-viewing Resnais’s Hiroshima through reference to theories of cultural memory and forgetting (Andreas Huyssen) and through urban theory (de Certeau) offers a divergent take on this city as site. In Hiroshima mon amour the first part of the film is dominated by a doubtful encounter with the museum aesthetic of a memorial city. As the film’s narrative unfolds, we move on to highly sensual, mobile filming of a rebuilt city through the optic of American film noir. The city as site of catastrophe is almost obliviated in the force of the French woman’s subjective images, in the surface beauty and cohesion of Resnais’s shots of urban fabric. The film works as a prescient experiment in working through modes of commemoration and remembering embraced within modernity. Yet its force and present impact comes in its emphasis on personal and cultural forgetting. In a time of temporal dislocation or suspension, looking back to Resnais, cross-cutting between Resnais’s Hiroshima and ground zero, may offer a melancholy reflection, at once new and familiar, on forgetting, on the ways in which no site can be known in its difference and specificity, no trauma (to self or other) adequately recalled.