Biography: life and films
A key marginal
Jean Eustache's impact on the art of cinema in the latter decades of the
20th century and subsequently goes way beyond the dozen or so films he made
in the course of his fraught and sporadic twenty year long career.
His untimely death (by suicide) in the early 1980s came at the exact moment
when cinema (at least its more serious manifestation as opposed to the over-hyped
megabucks blockbuster) appeared to be entering a phase of terminal decline.
A new generation of emerging auteur filmmakers were inspired by Eustache's
almost obsessive devotion to the most truthful representation of life through
cinema and fashioned their own aesthetic around this idea. The auteur
comeback of the 1990s and 2000s owes much to a French film director that
few cinemagoers had heard of.
A protégé and faithful acolyte of the leading figures of the
French New Wave, Jean Eustache incorporated the principles and techniques
of their art in his own cinema, whilst developing his own unique style, frequently
using his own life experiences as the subject matter for his bold explorations
of the human condition. It seems odd that a self-educated young man
from a working class provincial background should feel at home among the
bourgeois intellectuals of the Cahiers wing of the French New Wave, but Eustache
gained much from his close association with these cinematic revolutionaries
(not least the means to make his first few films), although his humble origins
and lack of a formal education would inevitably set him apart from his more
self-assured Nouvelle Vague contemporaries.
Less showy and provocative than Godard, less sentimental than Truffaut, less
intellectual than Rivette and far more sombre than Rohmer, Eustache's cinema
sits in distinct counterpoint to much of the French New Wave, and yet at
the same time it resonates with the movement's core essence, through
its searing authenticity and unwavering individuality. Some of Eustache's
work may appear daunting at first to the uninitiated, but once you have stepped
over the threshold it is not too difficult to become utterly seduced by the
simplicity and directness of this auteur's approach to cinematic expression.
When this happens, you cannot help feeling profoundly shaken by his
sharp and sensitive observations on the rich complexities of the human psyche.
Eustache was one of France's most dedicated adherents to the
cinéma
direct approach to filmmaking. No doubt influenced by Jean Rouch's
early experiments with
cinéma vérité - on such
films as
Chronique d'un été
(1961) - he made the technique his own, both in his documentaries and fictional
slice-of-life dramas, to the extent that the separation between the two is
barely noticeable. Eustache may not have achieved great fame for himself,
and even today his films are incredibly hard to come by, but he had a considerable
influence on other filmmakers of his own time and subsequently - most notably
Philippe Garrel and Jim Jarmusch. His best known film
La Maman et
la putain is widely acknowledged as one of the great works of the French
New Wave and a landmark of French cinema.
The autodidact
Jean Eustache was born on 30th November 1938 in Pessac, a suburb of Bordeaux
in southwestern France. He came from a modest working class family,
his father being a mason and staunch communist. After his parents'
divorce, he was brought up by his maternal grandmother until he was 13, at
which age he returned to live with his mother. Self-taught, he qualified
as an electrician and moved to Paris in 1957, where he was employed by the
French railway company, the SNCF. Traumatised at the prospect of being
posted to Algeria for his military service, he attempted suicide and spent
a year recovering in a psychiatric clinic.
Eustache had been a keen film enthusiast since childhood and, now in his
early twenties, he made a habit of visiting the Cinémathèque
française every weekend. It was around this time that he married
Jeanne Delos, with whom he would have two sons, although they separated in
1967. It was through his wife, who worked as a secretary for the film
review magazine the
Cahiers du cinéma, that Eustache first
came into contact with the firebrand critics who would go on to become the
pillars of the French New Wave - Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, Paul
Vecchiali and Jean Douchet.
Whilst trying his hand as a film critic, Eustache was encouraged by his Nouvelle
Vague acquaintances to take up filmmaking. Rohmer employed him as an
assistant on his early short film
La Boulangère de Monceau
(1963) , and he also assisted Jean Douchet on
Le Mannequin de Belleville
(1962). With Paul Vecchiali's support, he was able to attempt his first
film - a short entitled
La Soirée - in 1962, although he was
unable to complete the film. This was followed by another short,
Les Mauvaises fréquentations
(1963), in which Eustache was able to perfect his own style of
cinéma
direct, filming life as authentically as possible and thereby delivering
a pretty damning portrayal of the moral vacuity of modern youth. The
film is also known by the title
Du côté de Robinson.
On the crest of the New Wave
Eustache then directed what is probably his best known short film,
Le Père Noël
a les yeux bleus (1966), another, more sympathetic depiction of the
youth of the day. This was the director's first collaboration with
Jean-Pierre Léaud, one of the most emblematic young actors of the
French New Wave, made famous by his debut appearance in Truffaut's
Les 400 coups (1959). From 1966 to 1967, Jacques Rivette employed
Eustache as an editor on a series of three films on the director Jean Renoir for
the television series
Cinéastes de notre temps. He also
cropped up a few times in front of the camera, for example making a fleeting
appearance in Godard's apocalyptic film
Week End (1967).
Between 1968 and 1971, Jean Eustache committed himself to a series of feature-length
documentaries that dealt with subjects very close to his heart - his hometown,
the mundane lives of country folk and his immediate family.
La Rosière
de Pessac (1968),
Le Cochon (1970) and
Numéro Zéro
(1971) form a loose trilogy on provincial life in which the director continued
to develop and refine his direct cinema approach. The last of these,
an intimate profile of his grandmother, was first seen, in an edited form,
on French television in 1980 under the title
Odette Robert, the name
of his grandmother. It wasn't until 2003, twenty years after its author's
death, that the restored
Numéro Zéro was given a theatrical
release. In 1969, Eustache also made two documentary short films for
French television, one about F.W, Murnau's
Der Letzte Mann, the other
on Jean Renoir's
La Petite marchande d'allumettes.
The Mother and the Whore
In 1972, Jean Eustache made what is considered to be his masterpiece -
La Maman et la putain
- a film that can rightly be regarded as the apotheosis of the French New
Wave. Drawing on his own personal experiences, Eustache presents an
engaging and true-to-life portrait of a
ménage-a-trois featuring
his real-life partner at the time, Françoise Lebrun, along with Léaud
and another Nouvelle Vague diva, Bernadette Lafont. Filmed in grainy
black and white, with long static takes and lengthy exchanges of dialogue,
La Maman et la putain epitomises most people's conception of the Nouvelle
Vague, but with its melancholic Bergmanesque tone and documentary-like feel
it is unmistakably the work of a unique individual comfortably distanced
from his New Wave contemporaries.
The naturalistic dialogue may appear to have been improvised but it was in
fact meticulously worked out beforehand, Eustache insistent that his actors
stick rigidly to his text.
La Maman et la putain is not only
the director's most personal work (recounting the emotional upheavals he
suffered in the few years before making the film, with a Proustian
compulsion for brutal self-analysis), it also serves as a startlingly accurate piece of social commentary,
reflecting the changing politics and moral attitudes of the period in which
it was made.
Despite the film's length (it ran to three hours and forty minutes) it proved
to be both a critical and commercial success and received the Jury Grand
Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973, although some prominent reviewers
were quick to write it off as pretentious, sordid and corrupting. The
day after
La Maman et la putain's had its first screening at Cannes,
Eustache's mistress Catherine Garnier (the model for Lafont's character in
the film) committed suicide. On hearing the news, Eustache had an immediate
mental breakdown and was admitted to a rest home as soon as he had departed
from the furore he had created at Cannes.
The frustrated auteur
By the following summer, Eustache was well enough to embark on his second
dramatic feature,
Mes petites
amoureuses (1974), another autobiographical work, this time based
on his experiences of childhood and adolescence in Narbonne. With its
rural location setting, eye-catching colour photography (supplied by award
winning cinematographer Nestor Almendros) and an almost complete lack of
dialogue, the film makes a striking contrast with the oppressively confined
and verbose one that preceded it. It was only a modest success, attracting
an audience of just over 0.1 million in France. This proved to be a
major setback for a filmmaker who already harboured serious doubts over his
own abilities, and he would never complete another feature-length film.
With his next short film,
Une sale histoire (1977), Eustache attempted
to combine fiction and documentary in the form of a 50 minute diptych.
The film's subject matter - voyeurism - and unusual style did not endear
it to audiences or critics. After remaking an earlier film as
La
Rosière de Pessac 79 (1979), he turned out another short,
Le
Jardin des délices de Jérôme Bosch (1980), and then
Offre d'emploi (1980), his contribution to an anthology TV movie,
Contes modernes: A propos du travail (1982). Eustache's final
film was the 19-minute short
Les Photos d'Alix (1980), based on the
work of the Canadian photographer Alix Cléo Roubaud - his son Boris
Eustache briefly shows up in the film. It's worth mentioning, en passant,
that Eustache appeared on screen in a minor role in Wim Wenders'
The American
Friend (1977) and Luc Béraud's
La Tortue sur le dos (1978).
Infinite regrets
In 1981, Jean Eustache managed to break a leg during a stay in Greece, and
was informed that he would never fully recover from the injury. During
his long period of convalescence, he had time to mull over several projects
he had conceived, including a sequel to
La Maman et la putain, but,
sadly, none of these would ever see the light of day. Succumbing to
a crushing depression, he became increasingly reclusive and irrational, rarely
venturing out of his Paris apartment, until he finally shot himself in the
heart, after a long telephone conversation with Alix Cléo Roubaud.
The incident took place on 5th November 1981, just over three weeks before
his 43rd birthday. On the door to his bedroom Eustache had hung up
a notice with the words: 'Frappez fort. Comme pour réveiller
un mort' ('knock hard, so as to awaken a dead man').
The news of Eustache's death came as a shock to those knew him and admired his
work. He was posthumously awarded the César for Best Fictional
Short in 1982, for his last film,
Les Photos d'Alix. Since,
numerous filmmakers and writers have paid tribute to him in their work.
Philippe Garrel acknowledged his debt to him in his film
Les Ministères
de l'art (1988) and Jim Jarmusch dedicated his 2005 film
Broken Flowers
to him. Jean Eustache now lies buried in an anonymous cemetery in Bagneux,
in the southern suburbs of Paris, with a small gravestone bearing the simple
inscription
Regrets infinis.
© James Travers 2019
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