Olivier Assayas’s Coming of Political Age
Olivier Assayas’s new film, “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” is an adaptation of Giuliano da Empoli’s 2022 novel of the same name, which centers on a fictional former adviser to Vladimir Putin, and tells the story of the Russian President’s rise to power. (In Assayas’s adaptation, which opens on Friday, the associate, Vadim Baranov, is played by Paul Dano; Putin, by Jude Law.) Not long ago, he joined us to discuss some of the other books that have served to shape his work—perhaps not as directly as da Empoli’s, but just as profoundly. His remarks have been edited and condensed.
The Society of the Spectacle
by Guy Debord
Growing up in Paris in the seventies, I was surrounded by various brands of radicalism—a lot of “options,” to say the least, including Maoism and Trotskyism. None of them really satisfied me, until I came across the Situationists. It was like discovering the Velvet Underground—suddenly, a whole new world opened up.
“The Society of the Spectacle” offers a sharp critique of consumer society, and of how media systems reinforce the dominant ruling structure. In the book—and its companion, “Comments on the Society of the Spectacle”—Debord puts his finger on the alienation that individuals experience in a consumerist society. Debord came from the art world. In a way, he was the inheritor of the project André Breton commenced with Surrealism. Reading Debord steered me in such generative directions, in terms of his aesthetics, his philosophy, his morality; and he was funny, he was smart, he was an artist. I don’t think I’ve moved one inch, in terms of how I read and understand the world, since I encountered his work. He is still providing the tools that we need right now, with what’s going on. You know what I mean when I say “what’s going on,” because it’s all so in your face. We’re living in very brutal times, confused and confusing times.
The Turning Point
by Klaus Mann
Klaus Mann was Thomas Mann’s son, but he was also an illustrious writer in his own right. He was born in 1906 and, in his twenties, was a writer and critic in Berlin. He left Germany in 1933, when Hitler was appointed Chancellor, because, unlike many other intellectuals, he was a vehement and consistent public critic of Nazism.
Mann saw his society fall apart, and he analyzed this dissolution in “The Turning Point,” which, to me, is just one of the most underrated books—I really think it should be compulsory reading in schools. It’s an autobiography of sorts, which follows Mann’s life as a German exile and a gay man. Part of the point is, it’s tough to be Thomas Mann’s son. But it also explains the crucial junctures of the twentieth century. Mann had such a clear vision of the world he was living in, and he embodies the courage, the energy, and the passion of the artists and intellectuals who flourished in the Weimar Republic. It was a period of reinventing painting, reinventing writing, in some ways inventing cinema—and then it all disintegrated. In many ways, Mann embodies that arc, and the way he captures it in “The Turning Point” is extraordinary.
Kolyma Stories
by Varlam Shalamov
Artists provide us with tools to analyze the world. But there’s also another side to this coin—when theory fails, when politics fails, when the bad guys win, then what happens is like what you read in “Kolyma Stories.” It’s a book that reminds you that politics really has consequences.
These stories are based on experiences that Shalamov had when he was exiled to labor camps in the Arctic region of Kolyma, where he spent seventeen years. This book is very important to me in terms of my political upbringing, but I also love it because it’s just so clearly the work of a poet. He describes what went on in Stalinist Russia and in the Gulag inferno, but he also writes about it all from a human point of view—the descriptions of hardship and suffering are intermixed with descriptions of the beauty of the Siberian spring.
Voices from Chernobyl
by Svetlana Alexievich
This is an oral history of the Chernobyl disaster and the stupidity that provoked it—and of the extraordinary courage of all those who tried to minimize the damage and lost their lives doing so. It’s another book about the consequences of failed politics. It’s also a tale of the suffering that Ukraine endured in the twentieth century—a country that went through the great famine, paid one of the highest tolls in the Second World War, then had Chernobyl. And now, of course, in the twenty-first century, they have a war with Russia.
Honestly, this book made me cry. I think Alexievich is one of our greatest living writers. All of her books are profound. They balance modesty and ambition, and they deal with issues that are truly vital—the horrors happening in our lifetimes.