The National Center for Experiments in Television, 1967-1975Jean Eustache"The films I made are as autobiographical as fiction can be."-Jean EustacheJean Eustache was "the doomed Baudelairean poet of the cinema," Molly Haskell wrote. The director whose works captured so much of the energy and ambivalence of youth died in 1981, a suicide at the age of 43. Eustache's best-known film, The Mother and the Whore, depicted a generation spit out by May '68 and the sexual revolution to a life of freewheeling masochism which the film examines for some three hours. It was radically personal, in many aspects a confessional, and yet it was fiction-completely scripted, enacted by top French actors, and, as Pauline Kael wrote, "took three months of editing to make (it) seem unedited." In this series we have the rare opportunity to see other Eustache films, made both before and after his mammoth chef d'oeuvre, and examine the cinematic paradoxes he presented us, and finally left us.Eustache grew up in the small town of Pessac, where a lonely kid could learn a lot about life from the cinema. This upbringing figures in the semiautobiographical My Little Loves (Mes Petites Amoureuses), written before but filmed after The Mother and the Whore, as well as in his documentary subjects. Eustache is professionally linked with the French New Wave but stylistically he is left of Left Bank. Films such as Le Cochon (The Pig) were admired as contributions to the cinema verité school, but, as John Wakeman notes, "it (was) characteristic of Eustache that he should reject the term along with the praise." A new generation of admirers has linked him with Cassavetes and Garrel. What is sure is that the rigor of his style combined with his constant experiments with fiction and fact make Eustache's films a rare kind of truth-telling. (Credit line) This series is presented in collaboration with the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs Bureau of Cinema, the French Cultural Services in New York, the Consulate General of France in San Francisco, and the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York. Special thanks to Véronique Godard, Emmanuel Delloye, Janine Deunf, Kent Jones, and Isa Cucinotta.Saturday November 18
