Introduction*

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book addresses collective memory, understood however much broader than delineated in Maurice Halbwachs’s research. It focuses on music as one of the key cinematic devices expressing “nostalgia.” The book analyzes music within Dutch, Italian, British, and German cinema as a signifier of what Sharon Macdonald calls “memorylands.” It shows how filmmakers from different European countries shape local customs and recreate national historical consciousness through music. Disruptions are strategies with which the filmmakers expose nostalgia as fabricated truths and precarious “romances with one’s own fantas[ies]”. Embedded stories of individual nostalgia in the films provide opportunities for the directors to reflect on their personal situations or historical moments. According to Macdonald, a memory complex constitutes “an assemblage of practices, affects and physical things, which includes such parts as memorial services, nostalgia and historical artefacts”, and of course also music and film.