MÉMOIRES DE LA MINE

Presented by Brice Amouroux, co-director of the Data & Technologies department at INA – Institut National de l’Audiovisuel

Episode 1 : La Mine | Episode 2 : La Mémoire | Episode 3 : Le Cœur | Episode 4 : Le Corps

This documentary series, directed by Jacques Renard in 1981, retraces seventy years of life in the mines through the testimonies of miners from the Nord-Pas-de-Calais coalfield. Confronted with numerous archival documents, the protagonists tell their stories and reflect on their past and present history. These four episodes (The Mine, The Memory, The Heart and The Body) shed light on the beginnings of coalmining, its working conditions, social and political struggles, the different technical evolutions of the miners’ work and the decline of the sector. Mémoires de la mine is unique in the history of French television documentaries because of its scope: never before have such life and career stories been recorded. Mémoires de la mine won the Prix de la critique and the Prix de la Société des Gens de Lettres.

Le restaurateur – INA – INSTITUT NATIONAL DE L’AUDIOVISUEL

The National Audiovisual Institute is a state-owned company created in 1975 to collect, preserve and enhance French radio-TV heritage. After more than twenty years of large-scale digitisation with 2 million hours of programs, INA is more and more focused on promoting its collections through a pro-active editorial policy. Beyond digitizing and indexing, restoring is also a way to enlarge access to rarely-seen/heard images and sounds for today’s audiences.

Photo credit: © INA – La Mine