Though on the periphery of the Cahiers du Cinema and French New Wave scenes, which spawned the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, and Agnes Varda, Jean Eustache is a key figure in the history of French film. Unlike the directors listed above, Eustache came into his own at the end of the 60s, when the idealism and revolutionary fervor of the era was beginning to fizzle. Eustache captured these shifting emotions swirling in a post-idealist epoch in his 1971 masterpiece “The Mother and the Whore,” starring Jean-Pierre Léaud. The film, noted for its elusiveness and long runtime, details the inner workings of a love triangle defined by emotional violence and shifting power dynamics. “The Mother and the Whore” is just one of over a dozen works by Eustache that will be screened as part of a retrospective titled “The Dirty Stories of Jean Eustache.” Other notable works playing as part of the retrospective include “My Little Loves,” “Le Cochon,” and “Numéro Zéro,” the latter of which is centered upon an expansive interview with the director’s grandmother at her kitchen table.
Eustache would not be able to reach the same heights of fame as his contemporaries (or, better yet, his equals), as he would take his own life in 1981 at the age of 42. However, he filled his short life with a diverse filmography, ranging from inventive shorts, narrative features and documentaries. Though reticent to discuss his personal life, there is a throughline of the autobiographical in the work of Eustache, work that will now be available to a new generation of audiences.
Courtesy of Janus Films, “The Dirty Stories of Jean Eustache” opens in New York at the Lincoln Center on July 7 and runs through July 13. And look at that new poster below with its Criterion Collection-like art. Given the super close relationship between the two companies, one could easily surmise a ‘Dirty Stories of Jean Eustache’ Criterion box set is eventually coming out, and maybe even by the end of the year. Additional dates and cities for this retrospective can be found here and underneath the retrospective trailer, which you can see below, a full description of all the films that will be shown.
The Mother and the Whore
Jean Eustache, 1973, France, 219m
After the French New Wave, the sexual revolution, and May ’68 came The Mother and the Whore, the legendary, autobiographical magnum opus by Jean Eustache that captured a disillusioned generation navigating the post-idealism 1970s within the microcosm of a ménage à trois. The aimless, clueless, Parisian pseudo-intellectual Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) lives with his tempestuous older girlfriend, Marie (Bernadette Lafont), and begins a dalliance with the younger, sexually liberated Veronika (Françoise Lebrun, Eustache’s own former lover), leading to a volatile open relationship marked by everyday emotional violence and subtle but catastrophic shifts in power dynamics. Transmitting his own sex life to the screen with a startling immediacy, Eustache achieves an intimacy so deep it cuts.
Robinson’s Place
Jean Eustache, 1963, France, 40m
Jean Eustache’s second narrative short continued to cement the template for his subsequent fictions: a portrait of emotionally immature men on the prowl for female companionship. Aristide Demonico and Daniel Bart play Parisian friends who try to pick up the same young woman (Dominique Jayr). Their competitive barbs and repeated failures in flirtation lead them to band together for petty revenge against their would-be conquest. In less than forty minutes Eustache delineates the parameters of his moral universe, in which characters fool themselves into believing that life is completely defined by romantic prowess.
Followed by:
Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes
Jean Eustache, 1966, France, 48m
French New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Leaud stars in Jean Eustache’s third narrative short as Daniel, a thief, schemer, and would-be ladies’ man who loafs around Paris with his ne’er-do-well friends in search of easy money and pretty young women. Daniel believes a new job playing a street-greeting Santa will provide him with golden opportunities to meet girls, but his own desperation continually stands in the way of success. By turns comic and melancholy, and filmed with Eustache’s signature documentary-style black-and-white cinematography, Le Père Noël marks an important stepping stone among the director’s unsentimental explorations of awkward young men who avoid self-reflection while pursuing the opposite sex.
The Virgin of Pessac
Jean Eustache, 1969, France, 66m
As political and social tumult rocked France in May and June of 1968, Jean Eustache used his first documentary to focus on persistent tradition in the form of a centuries-old ceremony in his hometown of Pessac. Each year Pessac’s civic leaders choose a young woman they consider an exemplar of moral virtue, with a day-long celebration commemorating the changing of the guard from the previous year’s “virgin” to the present one. Eustache observes the exacting selection process, the fostering of communal bonds, and a bold implication by Pessac’s presiding priest that the ritual upholds the same Christian values for which leftist students and workers were currently fighting.
The Pig
Jean Eustache, 1975, France, 50m
Co-directing with Jean-Michel Barjol, Eustache creates for Le Cochon a cinéma vérité record of a farming community’s ritual slaughter of a pig in Pessac, the filmmaker’s rural hometown. The documentary captures in unflinching detail — and in beautifully unpolished black-and-white cinematography — the procedural killing, dismembering, and processing of the animal, resulting in a depiction of both the physical gruesomeness and artisanal craft of such work. Le Cochon not only builds upon Eustache’s ethnographic representation of working class custom and tradition in La Rosière de Pessac (1968) but also develops the tough yet compassionate lens he would soon apply to his feature narratives.
Numéro Zéro
Jean Eustache, 1971, France, 112m
Before paying homage to his grandmother Odette Robert in the autobiographical My Little Loves, Eustache made Numéro Zéro, a documentary portrait in which Robert answers questions about her difficult Bordeaux upbringing, contentious marriage, and traumatic wartime experiences. In excavating the painful details of Robert’s life Eustache discovers their universal resonance in the lives of so many others — their struggles, triumphs, mistakes, and learned lessons. Much of Eustache’s later style can be found in Numéro Zéro, from the inimitable black-and-white photography and static framing to the emphasis on the major revelations of minor movements and gestures. This is the complete version of the shorter Odette Robert that was broadcast in 1980 on France’s TF1 channel.
My Little Loves
Jean Eustache, 1974, France, 123m
Eustache’s second and final narrative feature, My Little Loves, follows Daniel (Martin Loeb) as he navigates the bewildering world of early adolescence. Living with his grandmother (Jacqueline Dufranne) in a sleepy village outside of Bordeaux, France, Daniel enjoys a carefree existence with his similarly innocent peers. But when his mother (Ingrid Caven) arrives and relocates him to Narbonne, Daniel is prematurely thrust into adulthood: pulled out of school, he is forced to work for a surly mechanic and left to his own devices, spurring him to fall in with an older crowd that is far more experienced in dating and sex. Featuring a wonderfully nuanced performance by Loeb, My Little Loves is a coming-of-age gem, surpassed only by Eustache’s own masterpiece, The Mother and the Whore.
A Dirty Story
Jean Eustache, 1977, France, 50m
Deceptively simple in form and content, Eustache’s Une Sale Histoire is a fascinatingly complex investigation of the relationship between fiction and documentary, verbal and visual storytelling, and personal and universal desires. The film’s two sections mirror each other: in the first Michael Lonsdale acts in the role of a man explaining to a roomful of friends his past voyeuristic obsessions, while the second section shows an unscripted recording of Jean-Noël Picq, the man Lonsdale has played, recounting the same real-life tale. Eustache presents dramatic and authentic versions of the “dirty story” without authorial commentary and thus encourages the viewer to untangle a web of structural correspondences between the two sections as well as the sexual and moral implications of Picq’s candid confession.
The Virgin of the Pessac ’79
Jean Eustache, 1979, France, 71m
Eleven years after the first La Rosière de Pessac, Jean Eustache filmed another documentary about his hometown’s annual coronation of a young woman of upstanding moral integrity. The differences between the ritual in 1968 and in 1979 are subtle yet telling: the selection process is slightly more fraught in ‘79 than in ‘68, while local leaders are more concerned with the current economic depression than wide-scale social upheaval. The ceremony also provides a stage on which progressive changes are made official, with a local order, the Fellows of Pleasant Pessac, inducting their first female member. Finally, this time around Eustache employs color photography to capture the ceremony, an appropriate choice given its verdant outdoor spring setting.
SHORTS PROGRAM
Jean Eustache, France, 1979-1980, 68m
Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Delights
Jean Eustache, 1981, France, 34m
French television series Les enthousiastes asked art afficionados to offer their thoughts and interpretations about paintings that they themselves selected. For Eustache’s episode, Jean-Noël Picq (of Une sale histoire) chose the third panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, an apocalyptic nightmare-scape that predicted the darkest reaches of surrealism by almost 400 years. Looking beyond its obvious grotesqueries, Picq points out several notable qualities of Bosch’s masterwork, including its near-absence of perspective, its conflation of ontological categories (human and animal, living and dead, time and space), and its objective depiction of sadomasochistic pleasure.
Alix’s Pictures
Jean Eustache, 1980, France, 15m
Winner of the 1982 Cesar Award for Best Short Film, Les Photos d’Alix is Jean Eustache’s playful meditation on the ambiguity of images and the elusiveness of interpretation. In a room a young woman (Alix Clio-Roubaud) describes to a young man (Boris Eustache, the director’s son) the stories, techniques, and meanings behind several of her meticulously composed black-and-white photographs. But at some point her explanations don’t seem to match what we see. Is this because language can never accurately account for the visual? Because the viewer is being asked to perform more than a surface-level comprehension of art? Because Eustache is perpetrating some sort of absurdist practical joke? Or all of the above?
Employment Offer
Jean Eustache, 1982, France, 19m
Eustache’s final film – commissioned for the French television series Contes Modernes (Modern Tales) – is a sharp satire of contemporary man’s dehumanization at the hands of specialized psychology. In the first half an unemployed, middle-aged sales director (Michel Delahaye) seeks a job from the want ads and performs well in his interview. In the second half a handwriting analyst (Michèle Moretti) determines the suitability of each candidate by reading into their cover letters various subconscious weaknesses and faults. Like much of Eustache’s later work, Offre d’emploi contrasts different modes of communication, with an emphasis on the considerable blindspots in human understanding and interrelationships.