The world of tomorrow according to Juliette Binoche, Guillame Canet and Vincent Macaigne

Juliette Binoche, Guillaume Canet et Vincent Macaigne, les acteurs de Doubles vies d’Olivier Assayas, nous racontent ce qu’ils attendent de demain.

What are the double lives of Olivier Assayas’ new film? Most of his characters lead double lives. Because the life of the bourgeois often resembles caricature to bourgeois theater, their double lives are at first conjugal: Alain (Guillaume Canet) cheats his wife Selena (Juliette Binoche) with a young collaborator of his publishing house ; and Selena misleads Alain with one of his best friends, Leonard (Vincent Macaigne). The friendly lives are also double: Alain is the friend of Leonard, but also his publisher, and their friendship does not prevent the first to release the second when the potential of his new novel leaves him skeptical. Double games, double stakes …

Double lives travels with a lot of verve on the tracks of satirical marivaudage and the chronicle as amused and inspired by the mores of a social environment and an era. But the title of the film is itself double. The true object of investigation of Doubles lives , it is first of all what which doubles the life, the duplicate, deploys it in a more virtual space than current. This power of duplication is the great digital switch of the world that affects our lives in their smallest ramifications, revolutionizes the world of work, transforms relations between people. Double livesinspected with great precision and irony – but also with tenderness and delicacy of human understanding – the way everyone negotiates with the principle of transformation of the world, alternates between resistance and adaptation. To begin an issue mainly dedicated to the coming year, we wanted to bring together the three main performers of the beautiful film by Olivier Assayas to project further and ask them the question posed by the film: what are the reasons to fear or hope in the world that is coming?

Is technological progress a source of worry or excitement for you?

Guillaume Canet – On these questions, I feel pretty close to my character in Doubles Lives. I want to welcome progress with a lot of curiosity and yet it mixes a little skepticism. I want to live in my time, but I sometimes freak out at the implications in creating this digital revolution. The way art is consumed, that is to say as a content, delivered at home, among many others, interferes with the way it is conceived. It affects thought at work in every creation. To satisfy these new modes of consumption, there is an injunction to make simpler, shorter. Here, for example, I finish the postproduction of my new film, and the mixer explains to me, about a replica which I wanted it to be really whispered, that it will go to the trap with the compressed sound smartphones. What are we doing ? Do we consider it or not?

Vincent Macaigne – I think that in terms of VOD, you would have to invent media where the films disintegrate as you see them … (laughs). No, but I’m not kidding! On streaming sites, I myself watch bits of movies, which do not really exist as works, and from which I take fragments. When the ritual of the hall jumps, bending to the rhythm of the one who thought the work becomes something more restrictive. And yet, for me it really is what defines the aesthetic experience: to bend to the rhythm of another. Basically, I find it odd that the viewer has control of the progress of the work. It creates a somewhat strange spectator grammar. But yet, I do it. For example, I watch some series focusing only on one character. All the related intrigues, I pass them in fast forward, and I stop only when my character comes back (laughs) .

Continue at LesInRocks https://www.lesinrocks.com/2019/01/09/actualite/binoche-canet-et-macaigne-entretien-avec-les-acteurs-de-doubles-vies-111157342/

The French are Leading the Revival of The Velvet Underground in New York

This exhibit chronicles The Velvet Underground’s lasting impact on not only music, but also fashion, art, literature, and cinema.

“We want to tell a story about the history and heritage of this group who influenced not only music but also fashion, art, literature, and cinema.” Two years after the success of the first exhibit dedicated to the American group at the Philharmonie de Paris, Christian Fevret is reviving The Velvet Underground in New York in a temporary exhibit open until December 30th in Greenwich Village.

Joined by the audiovisual producer Carole Mirabello, Fevret, the founder of the magazine Les Inrockuptibles, takes us back in time to 1960s New York, where four friends including Lou Reed and John Cale are going to invent a new type of rule-breaking music, “at the notch between rock and new wave,” that will define an entire generation. “It’s the paradox of The Velvet Underground. They were before their time, too advanced to be known during their period. But they influenced many artists like David Bowie, LCD Sound System, Andy Warhol, who produced their first album, photographers such as Stephen Shore, and even French artists like Serge Gainsbourg and Vanessa Paradis,” explains Fevret.

The voice of the American poet and writer Allen Ginsberg, symbol of the beat poet generation, sets the tone of the exhibit from the entrance with two screens displaying images from an archive of a capitalist and puritan America on one side, rock n’ roll and controversy on the other. Hundreds of photos document the story of Velvet, from the group’s first performances to the split in 1968. Six exceptional films will also be shown for the occasion. Among them, Mirabello and Fevret have gotten their hands on rare concert images of Velvet at the Bataclan in Paris in 1972. “To present an exhibit on Velvet was a great challenge, given their short existence (three years), and the few relics that they left behind,” confides Fevret.

To make the exhibit even more immerse and “underground,” Bandsintown Studio has converted the exhibit’s basement into a space to host masterclasses and concerts twice a week.

The two French leaders of the revival hope that the exhibit will be “at least as good as in Paris.” The Philharmonie exhibit hosted over 65,000 visitors during its run. The success in New York will determine if it’s the start of an American tour. “We would love to bring it to Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Toronto. We are also discussing Manchester and perhaps Beijing,” says Fevret.

The former boss of Inrocks estimates that The Velvet Underground Experience comes at a good time for New York, “in the face of puritanism and conservatism, which has resurfaced in the US.” He adds that “many young people leave the exhibit saying, ‘It’s the crazy, the freedom we’ve lost.’ They realize that people were more curious and had fewer taboos during that period.”

Source: The French are Leading the Revival of The Velvet Underground in New York – Frenchly

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