The Taking of Power by Louis XIV

Director: Roberto Rossellini

1966 / 94min / DCP

The last, lesser-known, and—for a few ardent admirers, at least—most fascinating act of Rossellini’s career, in which he strove to build, in a series of film and television productions, a cinematic encyclopedia that would depict crucial junctures in the history of humanity and ideas, began with this recounting of the ascent of the politically inexperienced “Sun King” as he struggles against court intrigue to fill the power vacuum left in the wake of Cardinal Mazarin’s death.

“I had read The Wizard of the Kremlin, I had written a screenplay adapting the novel, shot and edited a film, and yet I still hadn’t understood how deep went the roots of the story that I was telling. The Wizard of the Kremlin could have been called The Taking of Power by Vladimir Putin, echoing Roberto Rossellini’s masterpiece The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (1966). Even though one is about events relating to a 23-year-old king, living in the 17th century, and the other describes the rise of a former KGB agent after the fall of Soviet Russia, it’s one and the same story. How to tame the opposition to absolutism? Easy, give them distraction. Louis XIV, traumatized as a child by the Fronde uprising, decided to build in Versailles a castle so big and magnificent it could entertain all of the French aristocracy. Inside their gilded cage, they could only think about petty rivalries, and devolved into deferential courtiers whose only concern was to please their king. Putin, equally traumatized by the fall of the Iron Curtain and the partition of the Soviet Empire recreated the tsar’s court, numbing its opponents by getting them hooked on the shadow play of the internet and social media. I’ve always emphasised that The Wizard of the Kremlin is not only about post-Soviet Russia, but about modern iterations of propaganda; it took Rossellini to remind me it was mostly about the smoke-and-mirrors games of politics, the way they have always been played—nothing new nor particularly modern, the same stage and the same actors performing the same play.” —Olivier Assayas

Distributor: Institut National de l'Audiovisuel

Introduction by Olivier Assayas on Friday, March 6th

Part of One Night Only: Olivier Assayas