July 11 – 17

Few retrospectives promise the revelations of this, a look at one of postwar cinema’s most legendary bodies of work: the films of Jean Eustache (1938 - 1981), which have gained an almost mythical status due to their unavailability in North America. Influenced by the French New Wave, which he was both a part of and apart from, Eustache has exerted a profound influence on the following generations of French filmmakers, with his confessional, often raw and desperately sexual portraits of a generation adrift, including the monumental The Mother and the Whore. Both tender and vehement, much like their maker, Eustache’s films provoke and inspire in equal measure. His volatile, brilliant career was short-lived; “the most independent of French directors and the least understood” (David Braun), Eustache committed suicide at the age of forty-three.

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“One must respect what one films.” – Jean Eustache   Eustache has long been treated as the outlaw poet of French cinema, as Molly Haskell’s characterization of him (above) indicates. Those he has been frequently compared with – Rimbaud, Artaud, Cassavetes, Pialat, Garrel – are all in some way associated with risk, pugnacity, or madness; with perilously personal and, in the extreme cases, self-annihilating art. (David Braun calls Eustache’s films “violently intimate.”) So merciless is Eustache’s examination of his self – he was “an ethnologist of his own reality” in Serge Daney’s memorable phrase – that he turns autobiography into auto-excoriation, especially in the flaying portrait of the glib, narcissistic Alexandre in The Mother and the Whore, which was shot in his own apartment. (He was kinder to his younger self, in the Bressonian Mes Petites amoureuses.) Increasingly unable to reconcile himself to a world of aesthetic and moral accommodation, Eustache became a harbinger of the disenchantment of the post-‘68 generation; and, immobilized by a (suicidal) accident during a trip to Greece, killed himself. “The death of Jean Eustache shocked but it didn’t surprise,” wrote Daney in the first line of his obituary. The romance of self-destruction has no doubt obscured our sense of Eustache’s immense achievement. Reading fatalism into even his early work, some critics find initial signals of his distress