Jean Eustache

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The Eustachian intervention within his Rosières would perhaps not be strictly that of a filmmaker behind the camera, but that of a collagist-editor who plays with the film material and temporality to make a meaning spring forth from it. And if there is an erasure in the director, Eustache makes a conscious gesture of a programmer affirming, at the time of making the second Rosières, that he prefers that his two documentaries be viewed in reverse chronology: the first last, and the last first. Read More »

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In a French village near Bordeaux, Pessac, a young lady is chosen for her virtue by the townspeople.

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This is the first version that Eustache shot. The second version will be shot 10 years after. May ’68 will have been replaced in the conversations by the unemployment and crisis…Read More »

A man is looking for a job, unaware of the employers’ selection processes. Commissioned by INA for the program “Contes modernes”, on the world of work, which Eustache tries to divert.Read More »

Unfinished film by Jean Eustache (1961, or ’63), with Jean-André Fieschi, Chantal Simon, Paul Vecchiali and André S. Labarthe.Read More »

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Photographer Alix Cléo-Roubaud shows her photos to a young man (Boris Eustache), talking about them as they look at them together. Each of the photos appears as a countershot. Yet after awhile, doubts emerge: we are not really seeing what is being described.Read More »

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Jean Eustache is filming an evening with friends here, during which actor-turned-psychoanalyst Jean-Noël Picq delivers his personal analysis of Jérôme Bosch’s painting “The Garden of Earthly Delights”. Between this conversation between friends, cigarette and glass of wine in hand, the infernal creatures of Bosch arise, raising more questions than explanations…Read More »

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Almost the entire hour and three-quarters of Jean Eustache’s 1971 film “Numéro Zéro” is filled with the director’s interview of his grandmother Odette Robert on Feb. 12th of that year. Eustache includes in the film the conditions of its production—the director himself is seated at the table with her, pours her some whiskey, speaks with the camera operator, manipulates the clapboard at the head and tail of the reels, and even takes a phone call from a foreign firm that wants to distribute one of his early short films. Odette Robert had come from her home in the provinces to live with Eustache in Paris and help care for his son Boris (who is seen, at the beginning of the film, helping guide her through the streets of Paris—she had recently had eye operations and had to wear dark lenses, including on-camera).Read More »

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Eustache’s debut film follows two young men near the place de Clichy, looking for fun and whatever trouble comes with it. Unsurprisingly, their attention ultimately falls on a girl. They go to a dancing called “Robinson”. Spurned when she decides to go dancing with someone else, their thoughts quickly turn to revenge. Slowly, we discover the layer of despair that sits just under their carefree appearance.Read More »

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The same voyeuristic story, told by two different men: first by Michaël Lonsdale, in a « fiction » version, then by Jean-Noël Picq, in a « document » version. The way the film was shot is worth mentioning: Eustache first got his friend Jean Noël-Picq to sit down with a group of people (including The Mother and the Whore’s Françoise Lebrun) and recount a strange episode in his life: how in the men’s room of a local restaurant, he found a hole in the wall and peered through, finding that he had a perfect view of the ladies’ room. He became a regular patron, and his daily dose of scopophilia turned into an addiction until one day, with some relief, he found that the hole had been plastered over. Then Eustache “remade” his own film in a scripted, 35 mm version, with the critic Jean Douchet as the “director” and Michel Lonsdale in the Picq role. One of the cinema’s great curiosities, A Dirty Story exerts a mysterious – and often uncomfortably voyeuristic – fascination.Read More »