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| PROGRAMME
1 |
BAD COMPANY / DU CÔTÉ
DE ROBINSON (15) |
Double
bill with Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes
London Ciné Lumière 8 November 2.00pm
Edinburgh
Filmhouse 14 November 3.45pm |
This is Jean Eustache’s first
film. In typical New Wave style, it is shot on location with
young unknown actors. The storyline also allows for ample documentary
footage of everyday Paris: on an idle Sunday afternoon, two
working-class and penniless youths set out picking up girls
on the streets of Montmartre. With observational rigor, the
camera tracks the two friends as they try hard to impress a
young woman. She finally agrees to accompany them to a local
dance hall, the Robinson, but when things do not go as expected,
they take revenge. On its release, the critics at Cahiers du
Cinéma gave it unanimous praise and Jean-Luc Godard generously
provided a penniless Eustache with left over stock, costumes
and film crew from the just completed Masculin- Féminin
so that Eustache could make his second film, Le Père
Noël a les yeux bleus.
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Cast
Aristide, Daniel Bart, Dominique Jayr
Director
Jean Eustache
1963, 42 min
Print Source Tamasa
Distribution
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SANTA
CLAUS HAS BLUE EYES /
LE PÈRE
NOËL A LES YEUX BLEUS (15) |
Double
bill with Bad Company
London Ciné Lumière 8 November 2.00pm
Edinburgh Filmhouse
14 November 3.45pm |
| New Wave actor Jean-Pierre Léaud
is here Eustache’s screen alter ego for the first time
(Léaud will spectacularly resume the role six years later
as Alexandre in La maman et la putain). From its early days
the cinema of Jean Eustache is steeped in the director’s
personal experiences. As such, Le Père Noël a les
yeux bleus, set in Narbonne where Eustache spent his teenage
years, centres around the character of Daniel, an unemployed
but fashion-conscious youth determined to buy himself a trendy
duffle-coat. This, he reckons, should greatly improved his prospects
with girls. To this end, Jean-Pierre Léaud’s Daniel
takes up a job with a photographer as a street Santa and, in
disguise, finds a new audacity with women. As in Du côté
de Robinson, the film’s premise is an opportunity to observe,
with direct cinema distance, the frustrating lives of working-class
teenagers, this time in a provincial town. |
Cast
Jean-Pierre Léaud, Gérard Zimmermann
Director
Jean Eustache
1966, 47 min
Print Source Tamasa
Distribution
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| PROGRAMME
3 |
NUMERO ZERO (15) |
Edinburgh
Filmhouse 19 November 6.00pm
Glasgow
Film Theatre 24 November 6.00pm |
| A two-hour interview of Eustache’s
grand-mother, Odette Robert, who brought him up after his parents’
divorce marks a reversal of roles, as she is now nearly blind,
and lives with Jean in Paris. The interview takes place in their
apartment. With this film, Jean Eustache breaks away from the
observational approach of Le Cochon and La Rosiere de Pessac
(1968). In cinéma vérité style, the distance
between the ‘objective’ filmmaker and his subject
dissolves. Eustache appears on screen (although turning his
back to the camera), prompting his grandmother to speak about
his childhood and some traumatic events in her life. “…in
maintaining the footage of clapperboard marks – often,
interrupting Odette in mid thought to signal the necessity of
a reel change – Eustache also creates a sense of intersecting
reality, briefly disengaging Odette (and the spectator) from
the reality of her vivid memories towards the parallel reality
of her role as storyteller…” (Film Fest Journal).
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Director
Jean Eustache
1971, 110 min
Print Source Tamasa Distribution
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| PROGRAMME
6 |
A DIRTY STORY / UNE SALE HISTOIRE
(18) |
| Edinburgh
Filmhouse 29 November 4.00pm |
| This is the same anecdote told
twice: first in the ‘fiction part’ (35mm) by professional
actor Michaël Lonsdale and second, in the so-called ‘documentary
part’ (16 mm), by Eustache’s friend Jean-Noël
Picq. A man tells a group of mostly female friends how he used
to go to a café where, lying down on the filthy basement
floor, he had a direct view, from a hole in the toilet door,
on women’s vaginas. Story-telling here works as a substitute
for impossible images on a ludicrous tale. To his dismay, Picq,
after the film, was sometimes shamed by people and accused of
being a pervert. But why believe Picq more than Lonsdale? What
can be said of the relationship between film and reality? Eustache
tricks and confuses the audience by filming the same story in
two different genres. |
Cast
“Fiction”: Michaël Lonsdale, Jean Douchet,
Douchka
Cast “Document”:
Jean-Noël Picq, Françoise Lebrun, Virginie Thévenet
Director Jean Eustache Jean-Michel
Barjol
1977, 49 min
Print Source Tamasa Distribution
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| PROGRAMME
2 |
THE PIG / LE COCHON (18) |
London
Ciné Lumière 15 November 2.00pm
Edinburgh
Filmhouse 18 November 6.15pm |
| Co-directed with Jean-Pierre Barjol,
this documentary shows the slaughter of a pig on a small farm
in Cévennes, in south Massif Central. Eustache’s
and Barjol’s cameras never shy away from the killing and
ensuing processing of the animal into various meat products.
“With scrupulous respect for popular traditions, the film
features an amazing soundtrack in which the source and originality
of natural voices remains captivating, even though the thick
patois and onomatopoeic accents make the actual spoken words
incomprehensible” (Luc Moullet, Film Comment). This is
why the film does not require subtitles. As in the best of direct
cinema documentaries, the uncompromising but sympathetic observational
style brings a poetic dimension to the film. Beyond the recording
of a fast disappearing tradition for posterity, one of Eustache
and Barjol’s motives for Le Cochon was to make a truly
collective film, thus dismissing the notion of cinéma
d’auteur. Although not for the faint-hearted, this is
a unique ethnographic document. |
Director Jean
Eustache Jean-Michel Barjol
1970, 50 min
NB no subtitles
Print Source Tamasa Distribution
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| PROGRAMME
4 |
THE MOTHER & THE WHORE / LA MAMAN
ET LA PUTAIN (18) |
Edinburgh
Filmhouse 21 November 1.15pm + Intro
Glasgow Film Theatre 23 November 4.00pm
+ Intro |
Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud)
is poor and financially dependent on his lover Marie (Bernadette
Lafont). He also feels miserable as he is still in love with
Gilberte, his ex-girlfriend. One day, he meets a girl, Veronika
(Françoise Lebrun), outside the Left Bank café
Les Deux Magots. Eustache based the film on his own, complex,
love life. The film indeed captures Alexandre’s conversations
with friends and lovers, in Parisian locations, streets, cafés,
Jean Eustache’s own apartment. Gender issues come to the
fore when the three protagonists are trapped in a destructive
love triangle. Shot in minimalist visual style, the film records
the verbal mannerisms and bohemian lifestyle of the May 68 generation.
It is also a stern (some say reactionary) re-examination of
that generation’s defeated dreams. Now a cult film, La
maman et la putainwon the Grand Jury and International Critics
Prizes at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, while some critics
condemned it for obscenity. The conservative broadsheet Le Figaro
even described the film as “an insult to the nation”.
A key film in the history of French cinema.
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Cast
Jean-Pierre Léaud, Bernadette Lafont, Françoise
Lebrun, Isabelle Weingarten
Director Jean Eustache
1973, 218 min
Print Source Tamasa Distribution
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| PROGRAMME
5 |
MY LITTLE LOVES / MES PETITES AMOUREUSES
(15) |
Edinburgh
Filmhouse 24 November 5.45pm + Intro
Glasgow Film Theatre 25 November 8.15pm |
| Based on Eustache’s
teenage years and first loves, Mes petites amoureuses is, in
style and content, Jean Eustache’s delayed response to
Truffaut’s 400 Blows. Like Antoine Doinel’s distant
mother in Truffaut’s film, Daniel’s mother has little
interest in her teenage son. However, the parallel stops here.
When Antoine plays truant and roams the streets of Paris, Daniel
reluctantly leaves school to work in a small garage. To this
introvert and marginalised adolescent, cinema comes as a saviour.
Eustache had written the script for Mes petites amoureuses ten
years before but only after the success of La maman et la putain
could he afford to go into production. Unfortunately, by then,
Jean-Pierre Léaud, his initial choice for the role of
Daniel, was too old. Instead, Martin Loeb gives a superb performance
and there is also a cameo appearance by Eustache on a park bench,
looking at his younger self. |
Cast
Martin Loeb, Ingrid Caven, Jacqueline Dufranne, Dionys Mascolo,
Maurice Pialat
Director Jean Eustache
1974, 123 min
Print Source Tamasa Distribution
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