Olivi­er Assayas: ​‘Peo­ple are no longer on the side of art’

Non-Fic­tion is a com­ic broad­side aimed at the world of mod­ern lit­er­ary pub­lish­ing, writ­ten and direct­ed by the always-inter­est­ing and provoca­tive French film­mak­er Olivi­er Assayas. Though it may seem a lit­tle lighter than recent works like 2014’s Clouds of Sils Maria and 2016’s Per­son­al Shop­per, there’s a core of seri­ous­ness in how he sees the cul­ture indus­try slid­ing in an abyss of algo­rithms and content.

LWLies: Have you ever made a deci­sion based on an algorithm?

Assayas: The clos­est I have come to mak­ing a deci­sion based on an algo­rithm is buy­ing Blu-rays of silent films. I’m addict­ed to silent cin­e­ma, so I buy some on Ama­zon and I get lots of sug­ges­tions. So thanks to Ama­zon, once in a while I dis­cov­er that they restored a great movie.

Do you feel like you’re giv­ing your­self over to a machine?

No, absolute­ly not. It actu­al­ly makes me nos­tal­gic for record shops where I used to go as a teenag­er. You would not go to a super­mar­ket to buy records. You would go to the actu­al shops which stocked the imports. Once in a while, because that stuff wasn’t on the radio, you would buy the records because they weren’t adver­tised. Pure­ly on the basis that they were in the win­dow of the shop. If it’s in the win­dow, it has to be important.

Record shops are run by humans though.

Of course, that’s why it makes me nos­tal­gic. It gen­er­ates a divi­sive sub-cul­ture. It’s not, ​‘Oh you’re inter­est­ed in silent films so we’re going to flood you with pur­chase oppor­tu­ni­ties.’ What has changed in major ways, based on the evo­lu­tion of dig­i­tal cul­ture, is the way I con­sume music. In that Ama­zon sug­ges­tions don’t work that well for me. I read music mag­a­zines: Mojo, Uncut, and I func­tion the way I used to func­tion. I’m not on Spo­ti­fy. I don’t like it.

If Spo­ti­fy tries to rec­om­mend me some­thing, I’ll active­ly avoid it.

Same here. My rela­tion­ship to music was built on read­ing the music press. It allowed me to fan­ta­sise about the music before I got to hear it.

In the film, you touch on the idea that soon, algo­rithms won’t just be rec­om­mend­ing con­tent, they will make it.

Yes, that’s why com­pa­nies are so inter­est­ed in per­son­al data. It’s about nar­row­ing the scope of per­son­al taste. It’s the same thing when you read the press online, because you go straight to what you’re focused on and what you want to read. With print, when you have to go through the stuff you’re not inter­est­ed in, once in a while, some­thing will stop you in your tracks. Read­ing the press is about open­ing your mind to stuff that you do not know.

How do you feel about the term ​“con­tent”? Do you ever use it?

No, of course not. It’s hor­ri­fy­ing. The minute peo­ple start­ed using the word con­tent, it led to this idea of soft­ware ver­sus hard­ware. The cul­ture has shift­ed in favour of hard­ware. Peo­ple are not on the side of art, which becomes con­tent. They’re on the side of the com­put­er. The com­put­er embod­ies pow­er. Peo­ple have got­ten used the fact that they are ready to invest in the hard­ware. They are ready to invest in high-speed inter­net. They have no prob­lem lin­ing the pock­et of some cor­po­rate behe­moth. But they have a major prob­lem pay­ing very lit­tle mon­ey to buy a news­pa­per or a film. That’s the moment when art becomes content.

The scary issue now is that it all becomes about feed­ing the hard­ware. Mean­ing, to gen­er­ate flux. In the end, in terms of mov­ing images, it becomes the age of the series, because with series, you put the episodes in a pipe and there’s a flow. You only cut off the flow when there’s some indus­tri­al log­ic to it. Movies are the oppo­site of con­tent or flux. They are sin­gu­lar. They are specific.

Do you think Non-Fic­tion will feel nos­tal­gic in a few years? It’s very of the moment.

It is very nos­tal­gic. I was think­ing about that when I was writ­ing. I came to the oppo­site con­clu­sion because the movie is about change. It’s a very abstract sub­ject. You can’t real­ly deal with change unless you are super spe­cif­ic. Things change in small ways. The issues of change have to do with the human expe­ri­ence at any giv­en moment.

Along­side the art itself, do you think people’s rela­tion­ship with art is changing?

Yes I do. It can be argued that peo­ple live art. They are hor­ri­fied by mass tourism, but in a cer­tain way, this is the first gen­er­a­tion of peo­ple from a more dis­ad­van­taged back­ground who can trav­el the world. Art – mean­ing paint­ing, music, lit­er­a­ture, movies – has been struc­tured by a peri­od where it was not that easy to access. If you want­ed to see a paint­ing you had to go to a church. Lit­er­a­ture became indus­tri­al in the late 19^th cen­tu­ry. They were open win­dows on the world for peo­ple who, at that time, had very few.

Now, the 20^th cen­tu­ry has deliv­ered to the mass mar­ket an expe­ri­ence which is, in many ways, more pow­er­ful than art. An inter­net con­nec­tion allows you to move around in the world of image and fan­ta­sy, and it’s a world which is way beyond what any­one would’ve pre­dict­ed a cen­tu­ry ago. Some­thing that used to be the space we gave to the artis­tic expe­ri­ence has been replaced by some­thing that’s hap­pen­ing in real life. Twit­ter and Insta­gram allow us to be artists cre­at­ing our own lives. We sculpt with our own persona.

Non-Fic­tion is released 18 Octo­ber. Read the LWLies review.