Collections/April 2024

The Dirty Stories of Jean Eustache

One of the most revered yet enigmatic figures to emerge in the wake of the French New Wave, Jean Eustache left behind a handful of unsentimental yet compassionate films that continue to be rediscovered and embraced by new generations of cinephiles. With a string of early shorts, he developed the rigorous visual style and themes—the bewildering complexities of romance and the obliviousness of awkward young men chasing it—that led to his magnum opus The Mother and the Whore , an epic, cuttingly intimate record of post–May ’68 disillusionment as glimpsed via a rocky ménage à trois. Though he completed only one other feature—the similarly personal, Bressonian coming-of-age gem My Little Loves —and another fascinating cycle of shorts exploring the relationships between language, image, performance, and meaning, Eustache’s small but influential body of work constitutes a vital trove of self-inquiry, structural exploration, and humanistic yearning.

12 films