Erika Balsom on Irma Vep - Artforum International
SOMETIMES THE WAY OUT is the way through. With Irma Vep (2022), an eight-part miniseries reprising his 1996 film of the same name, Olivier Assayas dives headlong into the sorry state of twenty-first-century cinema: superheroes, endorsement deals, the menace of “quality” television. He depicts a world in which the old idea of the noble seventh art has definitively withered. If the repetitiveness of contemporary popular media is part of the problem—as Adorno memorably put it, “Bourgeois commodities . . . must touch up the ever-same as the ever-new in order to win customers”—then Assa...
Source: artforum.com