Retrospective: Jean Eustache: Blue-Collar Dandy november 1 - 9, 2000 photo: the mother and the whore

program description To those who know his name at all in America, Jean Eustache may be a one-hit wonder. But in France he’s far and away the most important filmmaker of the post-New Wave era. Eustache left an indelible mark on French cinema, and he’s exercised a profound influence on such directors as Olivier Assayas, Catherine Breillat, Claire Denis, Philippe Garrel and Benoit Jacquot. Eustache was born into a working class family in the south, and was a delivery man and railroad worker before he tried his hand at cinema in the early 60s. In due course, he turned himself from a country mouse into a citified dandy, a metamorphosis chronicled with loving care throughout his small but formidable body of work. His 1973 THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE is the kind of movie that few filmmakers even allow themselves to contemplate, let alone make: brutally honest as self-portraiture, as frank about human relationships (sexual and otherwise) as movies have ever gotten, and the last word on post-’68 bohemian Paris. But as great as that film is, it’s only one item in an always surprising career. Eustache was like a pitcher with an infinite number of moves: rigorous documentary portraits of French rural life (LE COCHON, the two versions of LA ROSIÈRE DE PASSAC), precise behavioral investigations (SANTA CLAUS HAS BLUE EYES), inquiries into the nature of art and perception (LES PHOTOS D'ALIX, HIERONYMOUS BOSCH'S GARDEN OF DELIGHTS), and, in his 1974 masterpiece MES PETITES AMOUREUSES, a portrait of adolescence so concentrated and exquisitely detailed that it virtually stands alone. Meanwhile, the jaw-dropping 1977 UNE SALE HISTOIRE, which presents two versions of the same encounter (a rap session on the subject of scopophilia), is all but unclassifiable. Eustache died before his time — by his own hand, in 1982. Though he’s often likened to John Cassavetes, he doesn’t need the comparison — he was just as great an artist. For their help and support, thanks to Véronique Godard and French Cultural services, Jacques le Glou and Mercure, INA, New Yorker Films, Les Films du Losange, and Luc Moullet.

une sale histoire

program: UNE SALE HISTOIRE (1977; 50m) Eustache got his friend Jean Nöel-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. Fascinating in itself. But then Eustache “remade” his own film in a scripted, 35mm version, with the critic Jean Douchet as the “director” and Michel Lonsdale in the Picq role. One of the cinema’s great curiosities, UNE SALE HISTOIRE exerts a mysterious — and often uncomfortably voyeuristic — fascination. with SANTA CLAUS HAS BLUE EYES / LE PÈRE NOËL AL LES YEUX BLEUS (1966; 47m) Eustache made his second film with 35mm black-and-white stock left over from Godard’s Masculine / Feminine, and he also used that film’s star, Jean-Pierre Léaud. But where Godard’s film was a snapshot of Parisian youth with time on their hands, Eustache’s was a portrait of existence for a poor young man in the provinces, specifically the director’s hometown of Narbonne. Eustache gives us a closely-scaled, intimate portrait of Daniel and the town he lives in. As always, daily reality is at the forefront: how Daniel spends his time, his efforts to meet girls, his attempts to make money. His photographer friend engages him to dress up as Santa Claus for the holiday season and have his pictures taken with passers-by, giving him a different vision of Narbonne and its inhabitants. A wonderfully earthy film, and Eustache’s first major work. with LES MAUVAISES FRÉQUENTATIONS (1963; 42m) During the heyday of the French New Wave, many young men and women got moviemaking fever, and jumped in with short films revolving around two guys and a girl getting a quick sentimental education on the streets of Paris. In 1963, Jean Eustache, married at the time to the secretary at Cahiers du Cinéma, took the plunge with this short film, shot on 16mm with post-sychned sound. What was it that distinguished LES MAUVAISES FRÉQUENTATIONS from the many others like it at the time? As Eustache’s old friend Luc Moullet put it so well in a recent Film Comment article, the movie had "rigor, observational exactitude, and Eustache’s creation of a specific rhythm that seemed to coincide with everyday reality," three qualities that would come to distinguish all of his work. A small film, but Eustache’s greatness was evident right from the start. Wed Nov 1: 1 & 6:15 Fri Nov 3: 3:45 & 8:40 Sat Nov 4: 4:10 & 9:30

jean eustache

MES PETITES AMOUREUSES (1974; 123m) After the success of THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE, Eustache was finally able to make this equally personal but vastly different film, a portrait of his childhood in the south of France in which every footstep, every gesture and every visual detail feels as though it’s been drawn directly from the filmmaker's memory. Young Martin Loeb plays Daniel, Eustache’s adolescent alter ego, and he figures in every scene of this magnificent movie, which takes a hard look at adolescence and budding adulthood, at the realities of love and work. Beautifully photographed by the great Nestor Almendros, MES PETITES AMOUREUSES (the title is taken from Rimbaud) reaches its emotional climax during an extended scene in which Daniel gets his first kiss in a movie theater showing Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. With Fassbinder regular Ingrid Caven as Daniel’s mother and, in a small role, director Maurice Pialat. Wed Nov 1: 3:45 & 9 Sat Nov 4: 7 Sun Nov 5: 6:15 Tues Nov 7: 5 LES MINISTÈRES DE L'ART (1988; 52m) Philippe Garrel’s tribute to his friend and role model Eustache, but also to his friends in the lonely fraternity of post-New Wave directors. The film features conversations between Garrel and Eustache himself (filmed in 1966), Jacques Doillon, Benoit Jacquot, Chantal Akerman, a very nervous André Téchiné and a very young Leos Carax, walking a dog and carting around the biggest script in the history of film production. with LA PEINE PERDUE DE JEAN EUSTACHE (1997; 52m) Angel Diaz’ beautiful inquiry into the life and work of Eustache. Thurs Nov 2: 1 & 6 Mon Nov 6: 1 & 6 LA ROSIÉRE DE PASSAC (1968/1979; 65m/67m) Eustache went back to the village where he was born and made a film right before the uproar of May 1968, carefully, faithfully recording a charming ceremony: the election of the town’s most virtuous young girl. Then he went back in 1979 and filmed the ceremony again, in exactly the same manner. “If the 1968 film and the 1979 version are more than merely interesting on their own,” wrote the late Alain Philippon in his book on Eustache, “the contrast between the two is breathtaking.” In Eustache’s own words, he wanted to film “the passing of time, the evolution and transformation of society within the confines of a certain place and a certain tradition. It’s the idea of time that interests me.” Thurs Nov 2: 3:15 & 8:15 Mon Nov 6: 3:15 & 8:15

jean-pierre léaud

HIERONYMOUS BOSCH'S GARDEN OF DELIGHTS (1979; 34m) Eustache’s friend Jean-Nöel Picq, the happy scopophiliac of UNE SALE HISTOIRE, explains the Bosch painting to an audience of two. A playful inquiry into the relationship between words and images, a running theme throughout Eustache’s career. with LES PHOTOS D'ALIX (1980;18m) Alix-Clio Roubaud, wife of the poet Jacques Roubaud, discusses her photographs with a young boy (Boris Eustache, the director’s son). As we listen to her speak, we realize that the photos she’s talking about aren’t the ones we’re seeing. A French counterpart of Hollis Frampton’s nostalgia, and one of Eustache’s simplest and most beautiful films. with LE COCHON (1970; 50m) Eustache’s second documentary, which he co-directed with Jean-Michel Barjol, was shot in one day on a farm in the Massif Central. The filmmakers carefully recorded the slaughtering, dismemberment, and evisceration of a pig on a blustery day, and its subsequent conversion into sausages. Eustache, perhaps more than any other French filmmaker, made it his business to get as much of French culture down on film as he could, and here he records a practice that has all but vanished in the face of industrialization. Perfectly edited, LE COCHON is an amazing, one-of-a-kind document. Without subtitles, but you don’t need them: the onscreen action is pretty direct, and the accents are so thick that even many French people have a hard time understanding what the farmers are saying to one another. Fri Nov 3: 1:30 & 6:30 Sun Nov 5: 4:10 & 8:45 Wed Nov 8: 5; Thurs Nov 9: 5 THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE (1973; 220m) In his 1982 obituary for Jean Eustache, critic Serge Daney wrote that thanks to this film, people would remember exactly what it was like in Paris for the generation that came in the wake of May 1968. And THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE is most certainly a document of its time, as precise in its rendering of the rhythms and textures of Bohemian life as it’s possible to imagine. But it’s also much more than that. Eustache digs so deeply into the emotional complications between the triangle of Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud, in what might be his greatest role), Marie (Bernadette Lafont, the “mother”) and Veronika (Françoise Lebrun, the “whore”) that he goes much farther than most filmmakers have even dared to dream of. This interior epic, one of the great films of the 70s (and, for many people, a milestone in cinema history), reaches a climax with Veronika’s harrowing monologue of self-debasement, perfectly acted by Lebrun. With Isabelle Weingarten as the young girl at the beginning, Jacques Renard as Alexandre’s taciturn buddy, and the director himself as the guy with shades in the supermarket. Tues Nov 7: 1 & 7:20 Wed Nov 8: 1& 7 Thurs Nov 9: 1 & 7