Olivier Assayas' Memories of May

A member of the "post-May" generation, Olivier Assayas sketches an autobiographical bildungsroman narrative across the films L'Eau froide (1994) and Apres mai (2012), and the autobiographical essay Une adolescence dans l'apres-mai (2005, written in 2002), that depends upon May '68 as a structuring absence. The characteristics of this narrative are explicated using concepts drawn from Holocaust memory studies: postmemory and the 1.5 generation. Furthermore, this article shows how, particularly in the films, Assayas displaces political discourse onto the bodies of the protagonists' love interests, "sacrificing" the young women to the protagonists' creative coming of age. Through these characters, then, Assayas represents the 1.5 generation of May '68 as a group for whom all politics are haunted by May, but who can only find a reinvigorated artistic meaning through nihilistic erasure.