Retrospective Jean Eustache

Alongside Maurice Pialat, Jean Eustache (1938–1981) is one of the most significant directors of the generation that immediately followed the Nouvelle Vague, but remained an outsider in the French film industry during his lifetime. His oeuvre is as slim as it is both rich and heterogenous. Over the 18 years of his career, Eustache shot twelve films: fiction and documentaries, films that sought to reach large audiences as well as ones of a more experimental character; shorts, medium-length films and features, which were either long or very long. None of these works has the standard length of 80 to 120 minutes important for commercial release. Not least for this reason, Eustache was never able to take up the prominent position in French cinema that critics had foreseen for him ever since his first film. 

1963’s DU CÔTÉ DE ROBINSON still carries the influence of the Nouvelle Vague, yet is already an introduction to his own unique universe, at once sober, melancholy and humorous. In contrast to the films of the Nouvelle Vague, which are often set in middle class circles, Eustache depicts a proletarian milieu with atmospheric precision. As the son of a bricklayer and an unskilled seamstress, he was the first French filmmaker not to come from a bourgeois background – a fact also reflected in his films. The protagonists of his feature films are outsiders, lost souls who would like to belong, but maybe also aren’t so inclined to. Eustache always maintains a distance from his characters in the process, who in part narrate the story from a first-person perspective, and does not attempt to win the audience’s approval. The first ever German Jean Eustache DVD box set put together by Grandfilm together with an accompanying theatrical release for the majority of his films is the perfect opportunity to present his work in Berlin again for the first time since our 2005 retrospective. 

For the opening, we are showing Eustache’s first two medium-length films that were released together in 1967 under the title LES MAUVAISES FRÉQUENTATIONS. Beforehand, we’ll screen LA SOIRÉE (1963), a fragment of Eustache’s very first film. (Hans-Joachim Fetzer)