Jean Eustache

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Jean Eustache was also the name of a 17th century French organ maker.

Jean Eustache (November 30, 1938 - November 3, 1981) was a French filmmaker. During his short career, he completed numerous shorts, as well as two highly regarded features, of which the first, The Mother and the Whore, is considered a key work of post-Nouvelle Vague French cinema. [1][2][3]

In his obituary for Eustache, the influential critic Serge Daney wrote: "In the thread of the desolate 70s, his films succeeded one another, always unforeseen, without a system, without a gap: film-rivers, short films, TV programs, hyperreal fiction. Each film went to the end of its material, from real to fictional sorrow. It was impossible for him to go against it, to calculate, to take cultural success into account, impossible for this theoretician of seduction to seduce an audience." [4]

Contents

[edit] Biography

Eustache was born in Pessac, Gironde, France into a working class family. Relatively little information exists about Eustache’s life prior to the time he became a member of the Cahiers du cinema crowd in the late fifties, though it is known that he was largely self-educated and worked in the railroad service prior to becoming a filmmaker[5]. Information suggests that the mystery surrounding his youth was intentional, with sources stating that "during his lifetime Eustache published little information about his early years, indicating that he felt no nostalgia for an unhappy childhood." [6].

Though not a member of the Nouvelle vague, Eustache maintained ties to it, appearing as an actor in Jean-Luc Godard's Week End[7] and editing Luc Moullet's Une aventure de Billy le Kid[8], which starred Jean-Pierre Leaud (the lead in Eustache's The Mother and the Whore).

After becoming a filmmaker, Eustache maintained close ties to his friends and relatives in Pessac[9]. In 1981, he was partially immobilized in an auto accident. He killed himself in his apartment Paris, a few weeks before his 43rd birthday.

Eustache had a son, Boris Eustache (b. 1960), who worked on his father's second feature and appears as an actor in Eustache's short film Les Photos d'Alix.

[edit] Work

Eustache was quoted as saying, “The films I made are as autobiographical as fiction can be.” [10] Because of his reticence to discuss his personal life, it is assumed that his body of work was largely autobiographical. Besides his fictional shorts and features, Eustache made numerous documentaries, many of them very personal, including several shot in his hometown of Pessac and a feature-length interview with his grandmother.

Eustache directed two narrative features. The first, The Mother and the Whore (La maman et la putain), is a three-hour-and-forty-minute rumination on love, relationships, men and women. The film’s central three-way romance plot focuses on Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud), his girlfriend Marie (Bernadette Lafont) and the nurse he meets and falls in love with, Veronika (Françoise Lebrun).

Eustache’s second feature, Mes petites amoureuses (1974), was intentionally different from his debut. Shot in color 35mm by acclaimed cinematographer Nestor Almendros (as opposed to The Mother and the Whore's grainy black-and-white), the film also features significantly less dialogue and focuses on teenage characters in a rural setting.

[edit] Remakes and Serial Works

Eustache admired the documentary qualities of early actuality films, and frequently cited the Lumiere Brothers as influences. He made two films about a religious parade in Pessac, both titled La Rosière de Pessac, in 1968 and 1979, and remade his short Une sale histoire twice. Regarding the tendency to re-examine in Eustache's work, the American film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote: "An obsessive-compulsive filmmaker and clearly a tormented one who wound up dying by his own hand, Eustache was clearly experimenting with his variations as well as goading viewers into examining their own reactions to them."[11]

[edit] Filmography

  • La soirée (1961), unfinished
  • Les Mauvaises Fréquentations (1963), 42 minutes (first title, 16 mm), aka Du côté de Robinson (second title, 35 mm); "Bad Company" aka "Robinson's Place" (English titles)
  • Le Père Noël a les yeux bleus (1966), 47 minutes; "Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes" (English title)
  • La Rosière de Pessac (1968), 65 minutes; "The Virgin of Pessac" (English title)
  • Two TV-films of 26 minutes each one in 1969: Sur Le dernier des hommes de Murnau and A propos de La petite marchande d'allumettes de Jean Renoir
  • Le Cochon (1970), 65 minutes, directed with Jean-Michel Barjol; "The Pig" (English title)
  • Numéro zéro (1971), 110 minutes (TV-version: Odette Robert, 54 minutes): a portrait of Eustache's elderly grandmother.
  • La Maman et la putain (1973), 220 minutes; "The Mother and the Whore" (English title)
  • Mes petites amoureuses (1974), 120 minutes
  • Une sale histoire (1977), part document: 22 minutes and part fiction: 28 minutes; "A Dirty Story" (English title)
  • La Rosière de Pessac (1979), 67 minutes; "The Virgin of Pessac" (1979) (English title)
  • Les Photos d'Alix (1980), 18 minutes
  • Le Jardin des délices de Jérôme Bosch (1980), 34 minutes; "Hieronymous Bosch's Garden of Delights" (English title)
  • Offre d'emploi (1980), 18 minutes

[edit] References

  1. ^ The Way We Are, by Jonathan Rosenbaum
  2. ^ Word Made Flesh: The Films of Jean Eustache
  3. ^ Harvard Film Archive -- Of Flesh, of Spirit: The Cinema of Jean Eustache
  4. ^ The Thread, by Serge Daney (translated by Steve Erickson)
  5. ^ Dryden Theatre: The Rediscovery of Jean Eustache
  6. ^ John Wakeman, World Film Directors, Vol. 2
  7. ^ IMDB Jean Eustache
  8. ^ IMDB Jean Eustache
  9. ^ La Peine Perdue de Jean Eustache, directed by Angel Diaz
  10. ^ Tisch Film Review -- Coming Soon To This Screen: Rare And Important French Films
  11. ^ Notes on JonathanRosenbaum.com: Notes on Reading, Watching, Looking, and Listening

[edit] External links