With Irma Vep, Olivier Assayas made himself known in this country for witty, atmospheric, knowing, "cult" filmmaking. But the Assayas cult was already going strong in France and at film festivals worldwide based on his first five features, which we are pleased to present in this Assayas retrospective. About these films, Gavin Smith has written for the Film Society of Lincoln Center: "An acutely contemporary sensibility, if Assayas has a defining subject it is the struggle of the young to find connection and self-definition in an indifferent, inhospitable adult world of pragmatic mores; in the end it comes down to a question-to preserve or sacrifice the fragile integrity of love and trust. These dispassionate but compelling scenarios are Generation X reinventions of melo- and psychodrama, and they find unexpected transcendent lyricism and romantic abandon in the numbing flux and emotional rupture of modernity. Assayas's films rush abruptly from ecstasy to desolation to vivid sensation, depicting modern life with the intensity of psychic crisis, conveying the proximity of desire and violence. Assayas's self-effacingly virtuoso visual style, evolved in collaboration with his remarkable cameraman Denis Lenoir, manages to be both naturalistic and heightened, exhibiting an exquisite pictorial sense. With Léos Carax and others, Assayas is in a vanguard revitalizing French cinema in the nineties." This touring series is organized by Dennis Bartok, The American Cinematheque. We thank Olivier Assayas, and Gavin Smith and Kent Jones for their assistance. Saturday January 31, 1998