Jean Eustache
Encyclopedia
Jean Eustache was a French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 filmmaker. During his short career, he completed numerous shorts, in addition to a pair of highly regarded features, of which the first, The Mother and the Whore
The Mother and the Whore
The Mother and the Whore is a 1973 French film directed by Jean Eustache. Examing the relationship between three characters in a love triangle, it was Eustache's first feature film and is considered his masterpiece.-Plot:...

, is considered a key work of post-Nouvelle Vague French cinema.

In his obituary for Eustache, the influential critic Serge Daney
Serge Daney
Serge Daney was an influential French movie critic who went on from writing film reviews to developing a “television criticism” and onto building a personal theory of the image...

 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."

Biography

Eustache was born in Pessac
Pessac
Pessac is a commune in the Gironde department in Aquitaine in southwestern France.It is the second-largest suburb of the city of Bordeaux and is adjacent to it on the southwest. It is a member of the metropolitan Urban Community of Bordeaux...

, Gironde
Gironde
For the Revolutionary party, see Girondists.Gironde is a common name for the Gironde estuary, where the mouths of the Garonne and Dordogne rivers merge, and for a department in the Aquitaine region situated in southwest France.-History:...

, France into a working class
Working class
Working class is a term used in the social sciences and in ordinary conversation to describe those employed in lower tier jobs , often extending to those in unemployment or otherwise possessing below-average incomes...

 family. Relatively little information exists about Eustache’s life prior to the time he became a member of the Cahiers du cinéma
Cahiers du cinéma
Cahiers du Cinéma is an influential French film magazine founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. It developed from the earlier magazine Revue du Cinéma involving members of two Paris film clubs — Objectif 49 and...

 coterie 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. 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.".

Though not a member of the Nouvelle vague
French New Wave
The New Wave was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced by Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood cinema. Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of...

, Eustache maintained ties to it, appearing as an actor in Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"....

's Week End and editing Luc Moullet
Luc Moullet
Luc Moullet is a French film critic and filmmaker, and a member of the Nouvelle Vague or French New Wave. Moullet's films are known for their humor, anti-authoritarian leanings and rigorously primitive aesthetic, which is heavily influenced by his love of American B-movies.Though such influential...

's Une aventure de Billy le Kid, which starred Jean-Pierre Leaud
Jean-Pierre Léaud
-Early years:Born in Paris, Léaud made his major debut as an actor at the age of 14 as Antoine Doinel, a semi-autobiographical character based on the life events of French film director François Truffaut, in The 400 Blows....

 (the lead in Eustache's The Mother and the Whore
The Mother and the Whore
The Mother and the Whore is a 1973 French film directed by Jean Eustache. Examing the relationship between three characters in a love triangle, it was Eustache's first feature film and is considered his masterpiece.-Plot:...

).

After becoming a filmmaker, Eustache maintained close ties to his friends and relatives in Pessac. In 1981, he was partially immobilized in an auto accident. He killed himself in his Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 apartment, 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.

Work

Eustache was quoted as saying, “The films I made are as autobiographical as fiction can be.” Because of his reluctance 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
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

, 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 Mother and the Whore
The Mother and the Whore
The Mother and the Whore is a 1973 French film directed by Jean Eustache. Examing the relationship between three characters in a love triangle, it was Eustache's first feature film and is considered his masterpiece.-Plot:...

 (La maman et la putain), the first, is a 217 minute rumination on love, relationships, men and women. The film’s central three-way romance plot focuses on Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud
Jean-Pierre Léaud
-Early years:Born in Paris, Léaud made his major debut as an actor at the age of 14 as Antoine Doinel, a semi-autobiographical character based on the life events of French film director François Truffaut, in The 400 Blows....

), his girlfriend Marie (Bernadette Lafont
Bernadette Lafont
Bernadette Lafont is a French actress and the mother of Pauline Lafont .Bernadette Lafont won the César Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for L'Effrontée...

) and the nurse he meets and falls in love with, Veronika (Françoise Lebrun
Françoise Lebrun
Françoise Lebrun is a French actress. She has appeared in many movies, and is especially known for her role as Veronika in The Mother and the Whore . She also worked for, amongst others, Paul Vecchiali, Marguerite Duras and Lucas Belvaux, and is the subject of the documentary Françoise Lebrun, les...

).

Eustache’s second feature, Mes petites amoureuses
Mes petites amoureuses
Mes Petites Amoureuses is a film written and directed by Jean Eustache, his second and last feature. It was released in 1974 and stars Martin Loeb as an adolescent boy shunted from a tranquil lifestyle at his grandmother's rural abode to his mother's cramped apartment in the city. Ingrid Caven...

 (1974), was intentionally different from his debut. Shot in color by cinematographer Nestor Almendros
Néstor Almendros
Néstor Almendros, ASC was an Oscar winning Spanish cinematographer. One of the highest appraised contemporary cinematographers, "Almendros was an artist of deep integrity, who believed the most beautiful light was natural light...he will always be remembered as a cinematographer of absolute...

 (as opposed to The Mother and the Whores grainy
Film grain
Film grain or granularity is the random optical texture of processed photographic film due to the presence of small particles of a metallic silver, or dye clouds, developed from silver halide that have received enough photons. While film grain is a function of such particles it is not the same...

 black-and-white), the film also features significantly less dialogue and focuses on teenage characters in a rural setting.

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
La Rosiere de Pessac
La Rosière de Pessac is the title of two hour-long films directed by Jean Eustache . The films cover an annual ceremony, held in Eustache's place of birth, in which the Major and his associates nominate a girl as the town's most virtuous...

, in 1968 and 1979, and remade his short Une sale histoire
Une sale histoire
Une Sale Histoire is an unusual short film of two halves, or two related short films tagged on to each other, by French director Jean Eustache....

 twice. Regarding the tendency to re-examine in Eustache's work, the American film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Jonathan Rosenbaum is an American film critic. Rosenbaum was the head film critic for the Chicago Reader from 1987 until 2008, when he retired at the age of 65...

 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."

Features

  • 1973 La Maman et la putain
    The Mother and the Whore
    The Mother and the Whore is a 1973 French film directed by Jean Eustache. Examing the relationship between three characters in a love triangle, it was Eustache's first feature film and is considered his masterpiece.-Plot:...

     (220 minutes)
  • 1974 Mes petites amoureuses
    Mes petites amoureuses
    Mes Petites Amoureuses is a film written and directed by Jean Eustache, his second and last feature. It was released in 1974 and stars Martin Loeb as an adolescent boy shunted from a tranquil lifestyle at his grandmother's rural abode to his mother's cramped apartment in the city. Ingrid Caven...

     (120 minutes)

Shorts and other work

  • 1961 La soirée
    La Soirée
    La Soirée is a cabaret/variety show presented by Brett Haylock, Mark Rubinstein and Mick Perrin for Just for Laughs Live that debuted in London in October 2010. The show featured a number of artists who previously appeared in La Clique, a variety show created by Brett Haylock, Markus Pabst and...

     (unfinished)
  • 1963 Les Mauvaises Fréquentations
    Les Mauvaises fréquentations
    Les Mauvaises fréquentations is a 1963 short drama film written and directed by Jean Eustache. It stars Aristide and Daniel Bart....

     (42 minutes), aka Du côté de Robinson & Bad Company
  • 1966 Le Père Noël a les yeux bleus
    Le Père Noël a les yeux bleus
    Le Père Noël a les yeux bleus is a fifty minute film starring French nouvelle vague icon Jean-Pierre Léaud, whose character takes on a job dressing up as Santa Claus in order to save money for a stylish duffel coat...

     (47 minutes)
  • 1968 La Rosière de Pessac
    La Rosiere de Pessac
    La Rosière de Pessac is the title of two hour-long films directed by Jean Eustache . The films cover an annual ceremony, held in Eustache's place of birth, in which the Major and his associates nominate a girl as the town's most virtuous...

     (65 minutes)
  • 1969 Sur Le dernier des hommes de Murnau (26 minutes) (TV movie)
  • 1969 A propos de La petite marchande d'allumettes de Jean Renoir (26 minutes) (TV movie)
  • 1979 Le Cochon
    Le Cochon
    Le Cochon is a fifty-minute featurette co-directed by Jean Eustache and Jean-Michel Barjol in 1970. Shot in a cinema verité style, it documents the traditional killing of a plump pig in a French rural village...

     (65 minutes), directed with Jean-Michel Barjol
  • 1971 Numéro zéro (110 minutes)
  • 1977 Une sale histoire
    Une sale histoire
    Une Sale Histoire is an unusual short film of two halves, or two related short films tagged on to each other, by French director Jean Eustache....

     (50 minutes)
  • 1979 La Rosière de Pessac
    La Rosiere de Pessac
    La Rosière de Pessac is the title of two hour-long films directed by Jean Eustache . The films cover an annual ceremony, held in Eustache's place of birth, in which the Major and his associates nominate a girl as the town's most virtuous...

     (67 minutes)
  • 1980 Les Photos d'Alix (18 minutes)
  • 1980 Le Jardin des délices de Jérôme Bosch (34 minutes)
  • 1980 Offre d'emploi (18 minutes)

External links

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