Jean Eustache

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.

Filmography

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