Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour (1959)

Alain Resnais and scriptwriter Marguerite Duras both agreed that it was impossible to make a film about Hiroshima, and this is the result. Everything is double, not only a collaboration between Resnais and Duras, but memory and forgetting, past and present, life and death, love and war, Nevers and Hiroshima, the personal and the collective, even the film really only has two human characters, male and female, Elle (Emmanuelle Riva) and Lui (Eiji Okada).

At the beginning we see two bodies (or shoulders of bodies), covered in the dust of the past, until the dust goes and we see two sweating bodies loving each other in Hiroshima: she is a French actor who has been visiting to make a film about peace in a city destroyed by hate, he is a Japanese architect or engineer who wasn't in Hiroshima at the time of the destruction. Both are married to another person.

There is archival footage of the former city, footage of the present rebuilt town in 1958, the museum, and shots of Nevers and its Place de la République where a street is now renamed after Duras and there's a plaque commemorating where the shooting took place. There are reconstructions of Nevers around the time that the bomb hit Hiroshima, when Elle's trauma serves as a  personal microcosm of the collective trauma of Hiroshima: she had an affair with a German soldier who was killed, and she lay on his dying body all night, underwent the ritual of the 'tondues' by having her head shaved, rode all night on her bicycle to Paris, away from the traumatic memory. In the present, she says, she doesn't think about the past, although it haunts her in her dreams.

He is the only person she's told about the German and it's here where memory and forgetting merge into a paradoxical oneness. He wants her to stay but it's an impossibility, an impossible love, and this impossible film is one of the most important in the history of cinema.

Johan-Barthold Jongkind, Nevers, Nièvre (58)

The Dutch painter Johan-Barthold Jongkind (1819-91) was a precursor of Impressionism and stayed in the building to which this plaque is affixed, then L'Hôtel Saint Louis', for several months each year between 1871 and 1875. He was very interested in the area which he had discovered in 1861, and painted a large number of views of Nevers – its streets, monuments and the banks of the Loire, creating wonderful watercolours.

Le Pont de la Loire, Nevers, Nièvre (58)

This is not supposed to be a pretty tourist shot, although I have to admit it gives that impression, with the Pont de la Loire in the foreground, middle ground and background, and Nevers cathedral in the background on the left. But what pleased me about it is that it reminds me so much of Éric Rohmer's film Conte d'hiver, part of his Contes des quatre saisons tetralogy.

Walter Benjamin, Nevers, Nièvre (58)

The German philosopher, writer and critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was interned in the camp at Vernuche near Nevers in 1939, and in 2011 the Esplanade Walter Benjamin was named in honour of him. Benjamin killed himself shortly after reaching the Spanish border in September 1940.

L'Église Sainte Bernadette du Banlay, Nevers, Nièvre (58)

In the 1950s Banlay, on the northern outskirts of Nevers, was rapidly expanding. The need for a new church was becoming important. Robert Bourgoin, the future parish priest, was appointed for the planning of the future parish by the bishop of Nevers: it was dedicated to Bernadette Soubiros.

The building of the church, by Claude Parent and Paul Virilio, was from 1963 to the end of 1966. It to some extent recreates the bunkers of World War II at the same time as it indicates the havens of a cold war environment designed as refuges from nuclear attack: this is the modern church as symbol.

Parent and Virilio envisaged a new kind of architecture, an 'architecture oblique', or 'forme oblique' removed from the vertical and lateral of the past, more horizontal.

The regional newspaper Le Journal du Centre told us that the church was to be open this Sunday from 15:00 to 18:00. Needless to say, it came as no surprise to us to find the doors closed at 15:30, so we couldn't see inside!

Pierre Bérégovoy in Nevers, Nièvre (58)

Pierre Bérégovoy (1925-1993) was for a relatively brief time (2 April 1992 to 29 March 1993) Prime Minister under President François Mitterrand's second term of office. His reputation as a fighter of corruption was injured by his borrowing a sum of money without interest from businessman Roger-Patrice Pelat to buy an apartment in Paris. Although he'd declared the loan and there was no corruption, his image became severely tarnished. On 1 May 1993 the police declared that he had killed himself. His family said that he'd been depressed after the defeat of the left in the March legislative elections, as well as depressed about the controversy over the loan. However, a number of people, among them Dominique Labarrière, have researched this subject and concluded that he was assassinated: there are many question marks surrounding the issue.

Claude Tillier in Nevers, Nièvre (58)

'CLAUDE

TILLIER

1801–1844'

Pamphleteer and novelist Claude Tillier has been mentioned below in relation to the bust of him in Clamecy where he was born. Here he is again, in this splendid monument in the Cimetiére Jean-Gautherin in Nevers, where he died.