6/22/2023 0 Comments 2011 clockmaker movie![]() ![]() There follows a quest to uncover the truth about his son’s actions, one that prompts a journey into self and memory that forces him to confront uncomfortable truths about their fractured relationship and about the selective nature of individual memory and narratives of the past. Set in his hometown of Lyon, it follows the story of the ordinary and orderly clockmaker, Michel Descombes (Philippe Noiret), whose mundane routine is thrown into chaos when he learns that his son (Sylvain Rougerie) has been arrested for murder. Paul ( L’Horloger de Saint-Paul, 1974),introduces themes and a sense of place that would resurface, in diverse iterations, throughout his career. Tavernier’s debut feature, The Clockmaker of St. They underpin, too, the core considerations of the essays and the podcast that make up this Issue. This formative memory, related at the start of a documentary that offers a personal journey through the labyrinths of French cinema, contains revealing associations-of past and present, trauma and liberation, light and dark-that would go on to inform Tavernier’s career as filmmaker, writer and advocate for film preservation. The screen about to light up symbolised in a way the hope I sensed around me.Ī vivid anecdote, recollecting a moment in which long years of dark trauma were eclipsed-albeit fleetingly-by the flares of the Libération, segues here into a remembrance of the joy of cinemagoing. And when I went to the cinema and suddenly light filled the screen and the curtain opened, I thought of the lights in the sky. I’ve never forgotten that light in the sky. All around me people were laughing and clapping. They announced the entrance of troops liberating Lyon. And I saw lots of flares lighting up the sky. I was three years old, it was September ’44. My parents took me out to the terrace that overlooked Lyon. In his 2016 documentary, A Journey Through French Cinema, Tavernier shared a memory of a seminal incident from his childhood: 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. 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 Journey Through French Cinema ( Voyage à travers le cinéma français,Bertrand Tavernier, 2016)). 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. Mining Memories: New Explorations in Cinema, Memory and the Past Editorial Gwenda Young
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |