Antonin Baudry, Cultural Counselor for the French Embassy, welcomed a full house to Festival Albertine last night. In his opening remarks he noted that the roster of Nobel Prize winners this year was peopled with both French and American writers, and the recent New York Film Festival with both French and American filmmakers.

Saying, “We have a lot to talk about,” he introduced French cinéaste Olivier Assayas, American film writer Larry Gross, Village Voice film critic Stephanie Zacharek, and author Greil Marcus, who co-organized the 6-day event, for an evening of non-stop dialogue.

The subject at hand was the unsettled legacy of the May 1968 student protests and general strike that brought France to a standstill as interpreted in Assayas’s films, Après Mai (Something in the Air) and Carlos (about the notorious terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal).

This was a brilliant opening gambit that promoted discussion from different points of view about the same era. While here in the U.S., the student strikes at Berkeley and Columbia University were centered on free speech and intergenerational head-knocking that sprang out of the anti-war movement, in France, the student protests grew out of intergenerational differences about culture and society itself in an increasingly anti-Gaullist and anti-Communist world.

Après Mai, which is largely autobiographical, is set in 1971; during the protests, the director was just 13 years old and not aware, he said, of the totality of events as they unfolded. During the ensuing discussion, he spoke about the importance of this historical moment and what he called “the failure of a revolution” due to the lack of a cohesive leadership amid too many different ideological elements. 

Film still, Après Mai (2012, dir. Olivier Assayas)

The result, for him, as an aspiring artist during the years that followed, amounted to an overwhelming feeling of alienation as the hopes of youth, his own and that of his peers, for a better world and a better way of life, were subsumed into social mores that he said were, if possible, even more rigid than what were the norm prior to “the events of 1968”.

© Bruno Barbey. FRANCE. Paris. May 6th 1968. 6th arrondissement. Boulevard Saint Germain. Students hurling projectiles against the police. Magnum Photos.

The film expresses a palpable atmosphere of hope, joy and fear, in equal measures, as a band of high school students, played for the most part by artists, rather than actors, navigate a world where the rules keep changing and identities falter under the strain. A heightened feeling of truth to the times—the music, the clothes, the drugs and the mysticism—prevails in scenes that unfold at the school, at a house party on a country estate fueled by drugs and booze, during car bombings and night-time raids, at film screenings, and on an escape to Italy undertaken to evade notice by the authorities.

© Bruno Barbey. FRANCE. Paris. Night from 10 to 11 May, 1968. Demonstrators with molotov cocktail. Boulevard St. Michel. Magnum Photos

Having screened Après Mai during the days prior to this discussion, I looked at the online archive of Magnum Photos to find images that Assayas probably studied to set up his opening scenes of a riot. And, having made my first visit to Paris in 1972, where graffiti from the events of 1968 were still very much in evidence, the film offered just the right transportation for a Proustean experience.

© Bruno Barbey. FRANCE. Paris. 11th arrondissement. Worker and student demonstration from Republique to Denfert-Rochereau. (about 1,000,000 demonstrators) May 13th, 1968. Magnum Photos.

Olivier Assayas’s most recent film, Clouds of Sils Maria, which was screened at the New York Film Festival last week, is slated to open next March.

 “Festival Albertine” continues through October 19; while the RSVP list is full, events can be followed on livestreamhttps://new.livestream.com/frenchembassy. For a schedule of future events, click here.

Albertine Books opens at 11 am seven days a week, at 972 Fifth Avenue at 79^th Street, NY, NY. Information.