4 Aug 2021

Mining Memories: New Explorations in Cinema, Memory and the Past

Jean-Luc Godard once observed of Bertrand Tavernier that they shared a common origin: as children of “the Libération and the Cinémathèque” they came of age in the turbulent 1960s (qtd. in A Journey Through French Cinema (Voyage à travers le cinéma français,Bertrand Tavernier, 2016)). Tavernier, who died in March of this year, is an appropriate filmmaker to commemorate in this Introduction to an issue of Alphaville dedicated to themes of memory and the past. In a career spanning seven decades, he produced work that investigated, appraised and revealed the role that the past—and what gets remembered and what gets forgotten—plays in the shaping of individual identity and collective culture.