Happy Birthday, Jean Eustache! Born today in 1938, this French screenwriter and film director, during his short career, completed numerous short films.
This was in addition to a pair of highly regarded features, of which the first is considered a key work of post-Nouvelle Vague French cinema.
Eustache was the son of 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 1950s.
However, 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 uncredited as L'auto-stoppeur (The Hitchhiker).
This was in Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 French/Italian Eastmancolor dark comedy/drama film 'Weekend'.
Eustache admired the documentary qualities of early actuality films, and frequently cited the Lumiere Brothers as influences.
Eustache later made two films about a religious parade in Pessac, (one shot in black and white and one in color) both titled 'La Rosière de Pessac' ('The Virgin of Pessac'), in 1968 and 1979 respectively.
During this time, Eustache edited French film critic and filmmaker and a member of the French New Wave Luc Moullet's 1971 French Western film 'Une aventure de Billy le Kid' ('A Girl is a Gun').
It starred French actor Jean-Pierre Léaud as Billy the Kid (of whom, two years later, would play the lead in the film of which Eustache is best known for co-editing, writing and directing.
This was the 1973 French black and white romance/drama film 'La Maman et la Putain' ('The Mother and the Whore').
In this sexually frank French drama (shot in grainy monochrome), the aimless young Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) juggles his relationships with his girlfriend, Marie (Bernadette Lafont), and a casual lover named Veronika (Françoise Lebrun).
The dialogue-heavy film focuses intently on the love triangle, with Marie increasingly jealous of Alexandre's fling with Veronika.
As the trio continues their unsustainable affair, the emotional stakes get higher, leading to conflict and unhappiness.
With a runtime of almost four hours, the film was Eustache's first feature, and is considered his masterpiece.
Eustache wrote the screenplay in drawing inspiration from his own relationships, and shot the film from May to July 1972.
'The Mother and the Whore' screened at the 26th Cannes Film Festival in May of that same year, where it won the Grand Prix. With some divided initial critical reaction, it has been championed by later critics and filmmakers.
Four years later, Eustache appeared as an actor (credited Freundlicher Mann [Friendly Man]).
This was in Wim Wenders' ('Paris, Texas', 'Wings of Desire') 1977 West German/French neo-noir crime thriller/crime drama film 'Der amerikanische Freund' ('The American Friend').
After becoming a filmmaker, Eustache maintained close ties to his friends and relatives in Pessac. Unfortunately, in 1981, he was partially immobilized in an auto accident.
Eustache later killed himself by gunshot in his apartment in Paris, France on November 5, 1981. He was 42. This was just a few weeks before Eustache's 43rd birthday.
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 were very personal, including several shot in his hometown of Pessac. This also included a feature-length interview with his grandmother.
In his obituary for Eustache, French movie 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."
In January 1999, Roger Ebert wrote: "At 3 1/2 hours, the film is long, but its essence is to be long: Make it any shorter and it would have a plot and an outcome, when in fact Eustache simply wants to record an existence."
He also wrote: "The Mother and the Whore" made an enormous impact when it was released. It still works a quarter-century later because it was so focused on its subjects, and lacking in pretension.
It is rigorously observant, the portrait of an immature man and two women who humor him for a while, paying the price that entails."
In the mid-2000s, Jim Jarmusch ('Stranger Than Paradise', 'Down by Law', 'Dead Man') dedicated his 2005 French-American mystery/comedy-drama film 'Broken Flowers' to Eustache.
Regarding the tendency to re-examine in Eustache's work, American film critic and author Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote the following:
"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".
'The Mother and the Whore' was one of only two features Eustache had made in a short career, of which also included a number of shorts and documentaries.
A fiercely independent director, Eustache had absorbed the principles of the French New Wave but reworked them into his very own personal cinematic oeuvre.
Eustache had been active from 1961–1980.
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