A Post-May Adolescence. Letter to Alice Debord
Price: 14,00 Euro
Olivier Assayas is best known as a filmmaker, but cinema makes only a late appearance in A Post-May Adolescence. This is an account of a personal formation, an initiation into an individual vision of the world; it is, equally, a record
of youthful struggle. Assayas’ reflective memoir takes us from the massive cultural upheaval that was May 1968 in France
to the mid-1990s when he made his first autobiographical film about his teenage years, L’Eau froide. The movement of thought and creation known as Situationism is the golden thread that connects and, in part, inspires this
memoir. The book also includes two essays by Assayas on the aesthetic and political legacy of Guy Debord, who played a decisive
role in shaping the author’s understanding of the world and his path towards an extremely personal way of making films.
A Post-May Adolescence was first published in French, in 2005. Its expanded English edition is now offered as a companion book to the first English-language monograph on Assayas’ body of work, also published by the Austrian Film Museum.
Olivier Assayas (*1955) is one of the most widely celebrated filmmakers working today. In 1980, he began his career as a critic
for the legendary Cahiers du Cinéma in Paris and has since published several books such as Conversation avec Ingmar Bergman (1990) or Éloge de Kenneth Anger (1999), among others. In 2009, Gallimard published Présences, a collection of his essays. His new film Aprés-Mai (Something in the Air) is closely related to the present memoir and will be released May 2013.
"A thoughtful, personal survey of Assayas’s career by American critics edited by Jones and an English translation of
Assayas’s 2002 memoir „A Post-May Adolescence: Letter to Alice Debord“, both published in handsome volumes
by the Austrian Film Museum, expose this tension in Assayas’s work: between a desire for risk and a sensitive intelligence
resistant to easy solutions; between allegiance to cinema “degree zero,” a cinema of presence, and a romantic fascination
with the passage of time. [...] The slim memoir, packaged with two additional essays by Assayas on Debord, is a valuable companion
to the Jones collection, which is often in explicit dialogue with Assayas’s analysis of his own work." (Film Comment)
Olivier Assayas
A Post-May Adolescence. Letter to Alice Debord
And two essays on Guy Debord
Translated and annotated by Adrian Martin und Rachel Zerner.
With an introduction by Adrian Martin.
FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen Vol. 17
Vienna 2012, 104 pages. In English.
ISBN 978-3-901644-44-3
All publications produced by the Austrian Film Museum are distributed internationally by Columbia University Press.
