last night's regis dialogue with olivier assayas at the walker

Some quick thoughts and a recap of last night's Regis Dialogue at the Walker:

The title of last night’s Regis Dialogue at the Walker, “Olivier Assayas: Between Love and Terror,” hints at the dichotomy that most film critics highlight in discussions of the director.  On the one hand he creates character-driven, reflection pieces like Summer Hours and Late August, Early September, and then there are the surreal and often disturbing works like demonlover and Boarding Gate.  But what this dialogue demonstrated is the connection all these films share with the human experience, and it placed his works in the middle of those two camps.
Assayas lived through quite a bit during 1960’s and 70’s France, as anybody in that same environment can attest to.  However, when discussing moments that most defined his art, he often brought up punk rock and American genre films.  He talked about political turmoil in 60’s Paris and new wave cinema with slight disdain.  He was coming into his own just as the rewards of the 1968 “revolution” were supposed to have come to fruition.  Seeing as nothing much changed, Assayas felt the movement was disconnected from reality and thought it was founded in empty ideology.

This disaffection informed his own art early on.  In addition to creating short films, he also expressed his more abstract inclinations in painting.  Kent Jones, the dialogue’s interviewer, found this abstraction to be at slight odds with his more narrative tendencies in filmmaking.  Assayas responded by saying that, in drawing from the abstract, his style of narrative cinema is able to distance itself from directors that look only to other films for inspiration.  His main objective in filmmaking is to make one lose their reference points used to understand film, and in turn be forced to use their brains.  I’d argue that those two ideas aren’t necessarily conflicting ones, but I think the thought's overall sentiment is one admired by a majority of dedicated film audiences.

As the discussion turned towards specific films Assayas created in his over 20 years in the industry, the focus veered a little too much towards the technical.  But out of that topic came the idea of cinema as a heavy art form.  Trucks filled wall to wall with burdensome equipment, endless rooms for makeup and costumes, and everyone from production assistants to camera operators crowding the location all add to this horrible weight used to create such a fragile work.  Assayas seemed pretty worked up when talking about this contrast in production and product and I could sympathize.  His biggest struggle is trying to maintain a light feeling in his work amidst all this weight.

There’s one idea Assayas mentioned that I believe holds the best summary of viewers’ experience with his films.  Late in the evening he stated, “if i tried to rationalize [the film during production] I would not have made it.”  Such notions can be either infuriating or liberating for audiences.  Personally, the idea gives me more of a framework to watch his movies -- probably not something Assayas would want from his audience.