Jean Eustache was a French filmmaker. During his short career, he completed numerous short films, in addition to a pair of highly regarded features, of which the first, The Mother and the Whore, is considered a key work of post-Nouvelle Vague French cinema. In his obituary for Eustache, the 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.
Jim Jarmusch dedicated his 2005 film Broken Flowers to Eustache.
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 cinéma 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, Eustache maintained ties to it, appearing as an actor in Jean-Luc Godard's Week End and editing Luc Moullet's Une aventure de Billy le Kid, which starred Jean-Pierre Léaud. 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 by gunshot in his Paris apartment, a few weeks before his 43rd birthday. Eustache had a son, Boris Eustache, who worked on his father's second feature and appears as an actor in Eustache's short filmLes 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, 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 first, is a 217-minute rumination on love, relationships, men and women. The film's central three-way romance plot focuses on Alexandre, his girlfriend Marie and the nurse he meets and falls in love with, Veronika. Writing in Time Out New York, Andrew Johnston described his experience in viewing the film in 1999: Eustache's second feature, My Little Loves, was intentionally different from his debut. Shot in color by cinematographer Nestor Almendros, the film also features significantly less dialogue and focuses on teenage characters in a rural setting. The film was entered into the 9th Moscow International Film Festival. Eustache appeared as an actor in The American Friend.
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 Americanfilm criticJonathan 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".
