"It's a good time to think about what cinema is, and who we are talking to" presume Olivier Assayas in an interview with Arnaud Laporte, producer of La Dispute and Master Classes, for France culture.
 |
| CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Who's Assayas:
One of the key figures in the new generation of French filmmakers. As a former critic for Cahiers du Cinema and a die-hard cinephile, he makes his films both personal and referential to the works of directors that he adores. His father was a director/screenwriter in the 1940s who later worked mainly for TV. When it was increasingly difficult for him to work because of a health condition, Olivier started to help him, first merely as a secretary, and then ghostwriting a few screenplays for the Maigret TV series. In the late 1970s he joined the team of influential film magazine Cahiers du Cinema, that once launched the French New Wave. While working for Cahiers he wrote essays on his favorite European filmmakers, Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, and published extensive studies on American horror films and Hong Kong Cinema (the latter came out long before Hong Kong cinema became fashionable with Western filmgoers and critics). He collaborated on screenplays of two André Téchiné films, Rendez-Vous and Le Lieu du Crime, and directed a few shorts before making his feature debut in 1986 with Desordre. Though his films enjoyed considerable critical acclaim in France and at international film festivals, his name was virtually unknown in English-speaking countries until the release of his 1996 film Irma Vep, a loving tribute both to Louis Feuillade and Hong Kong cinema. Still faithful to his critical roots, he later directed a documentary on Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien.
One of the key figures in the new generation of French filmmakers. As a former critic for Cahiers du Cinema and a die-hard cinephile, he makes his films both personal and referential to the works of directors that he adores. His father was a director/screenwriter in the 1940s who later worked mainly for TV. When it was increasingly difficult for him to work because of a health condition, Olivier started to help him, first merely as a secretary, and then ghostwriting a few screenplays for the Maigret TV series. In the late 1970s he joined the team of influential film magazine Cahiers du Cinema, that once launched the French New Wave. While working for Cahiers he wrote essays on his favorite European filmmakers, Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, and published extensive studies on American horror films and Hong Kong Cinema (the latter came out long before Hong Kong cinema became fashionable with Western filmgoers and critics). He collaborated on screenplays of two André Téchiné films, Rendez-Vous and Le Lieu du Crime, and directed a few shorts before making his feature debut in 1986 with Desordre. Though his films enjoyed considerable critical acclaim in France and at international film festivals, his name was virtually unknown in English-speaking countries until the release of his 1996 film Irma Vep, a loving tribute both to Louis Feuillade and Hong Kong cinema. Still faithful to his critical roots, he later directed a documentary on Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien.
The interview :
What do you think of ?
I think pretty much the same thing as everyone else, because we all went through pretty much the same thing. I may have crossed it in a slightly more privileged way because it turns out that I have a family house in the countryside, and so I could at least be in nature and not be subjected to the city and the lockdown. Today, I ask myself all kinds of questions about how to practice cinema and how cinema will be able to rebuild itself. I think it's a good time to think about what cinema is, why we make it and who we talk to.
In this moment of reflection, are there things that you have decided not to do anymore?
There are all kinds of things I can't do anyway. Today, we are not yet at a point where we can shoot films the way we made them before. Today, if we shoot films, that implies distancing measures and all kinds of rules that are very “anti-cinematographic”, and it becomes very restrictive. I don't want to make films in this context. I think I'll wait a bit. But until then, I ask myself the question of making films in a much smaller format, things that would be determined by the new conditions of the world in which we live.
Has this crisis that we are going through changed your relationship to time?
Yes and no because once again, I lived the same thing as the majority, that is to say that I found myself doing school for my daughter who is ten years old, I found myself cleaning up home, I found myself shopping, cooking, trying to manage to find time in the middle of it all, to do what I do, which is writing. Nevertheless, I managed to find this time and find a balance that is not so shaken as that. If I had had a film in progress, it would have been very different because there, everything would have been upside down and completely destabilized. The pleasure of writing on a daily basis is something that is part of my life, so it did not upset me. However, for example, I had to stage an opera in Lyon, Les Noces de Figaro, and obviously this project fell through because it was scheduled exactly in the dates of the lockdown period.
Do you think that in this context, creation, art, will address people differently?
I want to say that we cannot start again like before. In any case, I am utopian from this point of view there, I tell myself that we must first go back to basics, that is to say that everyone must question the reasons for which we practice this art and not another. What does this art have to say to the world today? How does it fit into today's world? These are questions that are not simple, not obvious at all. In the midst of disarray, pandemic, lockdown, it turned out that these questions about cinema fell at the right time. We wondered about the relationship with platforms, the transformation of cinema funding, the transformation of its audience and, in a way, lockdown gave urgency, obvious to these questions. From this point of view, I think it's a good time to question yourself and the question of cinema itself, and maybe find new solutions, find new answers and find maybe a new ethics, a new practice. It seems to me that there are few occasions or opportunities for this. It turns out that for a large number of months, we closed the rooms, we stopped everything, everyone found themselves in a certain way immobilized and sometimes, I thought of Charlie Hebdo that I read when I was a teenager and where Gébé published Year 01. He said: "We stop everything, we start again and it's not sad" These memories of my adolescence came back to me in an extremely insistent way every time I went for a walk to try to bring back a little inspiration, a little freshness to my inspiration.
What do you want to share?
I believe we all share an existential experience. We are perhaps the first generation to have lived this experience, to have lived it collectively, and in an often extremely painful way. So it seems to me that it brings us together and what I have to share is what we have already shared. The role of art could possibly be to try to find a meaning, and this meaning can be through a reformulation, a new thought of this practice.
Olivier Assayas, Tuesday June 23, 2020
France Culture
0 Comments