Love passions, political passions

Abstract

This essay aims to take part in the studies on the prolific relations between cinema and nostalgia. I seek to discuss how a film by French director André Téchiné, Les roseaux sauvages (1994), addresses youth as a moment of intensification, openness and incertitude, by situating the dramas and conflicts of its characters within the context of 1962´s France, during the final moments of the Algerian war. Despite of the film’s subject and its potential autobiographic connotations, I argue that nostalgia here should be explored less in the authorial dimension than through its reassessment of cultural artifacts and also in its articulations between love, history and politics. Nostalgia is here understood as a complex structure of multiple superimposed temporalities in which the spectator is necessarily implied. In this sense, nostalgia involves an affective engagement and a subjective response that I make explicit.