Media Center showcases French director Assayas
The subject matters of writer/director Olivier Assayas’ films are so divergent that attempting to find a common parallel is a painstaking task. They range from a satirical backstage look at filmmaking in Irma Vep to an epic view of porcelain-making in Les Destinees Sentimentales to a slick exploration of corporate greed and betrayal in Demonlover. What Assayas’ films do have in common is his groundbreaking visual style — a camera that prowls around settings and wraps itself around the characters.
His latest film, Clean, which premiered at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and which will be released stateside this fall, is no exception. It stars Assayas’ ex-wife Maggie Cheung, who won the Best Actress prize at Cannes, as a drug-addicted rock star.
Assayas’ early films are the subject of a retrospective series at the Rice Media Center. The series provides a rare glimpse at Assayas’ early work — four films that were released in strictly limited engagements or not at all in the U.S. In fact, these screenings are all of these films’ Texas premiere. The retrospective culminates with a special advance screening of Clean.
Lovett College senior Daniel Stuyck said he has been planning this series since the beginning of last semester.
‘Assayas really is a throwback to a few decades past in [that] he makes no attempt to hide the theory behind his filmmaking process,’ Stuyck said. ‘He is also one of the most forward-looking filmmakers now, both thematically and stylistically.’
Assayas’ exhibition of theory surely comes from his former career as a film critic for the French magazine Cahiers du Cinema. This legendary publication was integral in launching the French New Wave movement in the 1960s. Assayas was a frequent contributor, writing about various topics within the sprawling blanket of international cinema. His writing on Hong Kong cinema was perhaps his most notable work, at least in part because he began to focus on the genre before it caught the eye of zealous cinephiles.
His first film, Disorder (shown yesterday and again tonight), about how a tight-knit group of musicians unravel in the wake of a serious crime, came out in 1986 and won the International Critics’ Prize at the Venice Film Festival. It has gone on to achieve cult-film status in France.
Kent Jones, the editor-in-chief of Film Comment magazine and the Associate Director of Programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City will be on-hand Sunday to introduce Assayas’ sophomore feature, Winter’s Child. Jones, who is considered the foremost American scholar on Assayas’ work, has said, ‘Assayas may be the only filmmaker who gives us the poetics of the digital age in all its mean perfection.’
The two other films in the series, Paris Awakens and A New Life, are two starkly divergent family dramas. Like Winter’s Child, these films were never distributed in the U.S. and are next to impossible to find, even in bootleg form.
‘But the rarity of these films isn’t that important,’ Stuyck said. ‘It sounds nice and everything, but what makes these particular films significant is that they make up the early period of one of today’s greatest living filmmakers.’
While the retrospective features Assayas’ work from the mid-’80s through the mid-’90s, he did not receive international acclaim until Irma Vep came out in 1996. Of the film, The New York Times’ Janet Maslin wrote, ‘Irma Vep offers opinions on topics ranging from the death of political cinema to the rise of John Woo, and it is best suited for audiences who take these matters seriously.’
His best known works, Les Destinees Sentimentales and Demonlover, both premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000 and 2002, respectively. Both received a hefty dose of international acclaim. The lavish attention showered on these later films inspired Stuyck to give Assayas’ early works much-needed exposure.
‘The reason I wanted to program these films and spend time trying to bring them to Rice was because I was sick of people writing about how brilliant they are and never having a chance to see them myself,’ he said.
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