Entrelacements de Jean Eustache: 3 Short Films

New 4K Restorations

Screenings in collaboration with Hors Champ for the release of their new issue “Entrelacements de Jean Eustache”

A DIRTY STORY (Jean Eustache, France, 1977, 50 minutes)

Deceptively simple in form and content, Eustache’s Une Sale Histoire is a fascinatingly complex investigation of the relationship between fiction and documentary, verbal and visual storytelling, and personal and universal desires. The film’s two sections mirror each other: in the first Michael Lonsdale acts in the role of a man explaining to a roomful of friends his past voyeuristic obsessions, while the second section shows an unscripted recording of Jean-Noël Picq, the man Lonsdale has played, recounting the same real-life tale. Eustache presents dramatic and authentic versions of the “dirty story” without authorial commentary and thus encourages the viewer to untangle a web of structural correspondences between the two sections as well as the sexual and moral implications of Picq’s candid confession.

HIERONYMUS BOSCH’S GARDEN OF DELIGHTS (Jean Eustache, France, 1979, 34 minutes)

French television series Les enthousiastes asked art afficionados to offer their thoughts and interpretations about paintings that they themselves selected. For Eustache’s episode, Jean-Noël Picq (of Une sale histoire) chose the third panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, an apocalyptic nightmare-scape that predicted the darkest reaches of surrealism by almost 400 years. Looking beyond its obvious grotesqueries, Picq points out several notable qualities of Bosch’s masterwork, including its near-absence of perspective, its conflation of ontological categories (human and animal, living and dead, time and space), and its objective depiction of sadomasochistic pleasure.

ALIX’S PICTURES (Jean Eustache, France, 1980, 15 minutes)

Winner of the 1982 Cesar Award for Best Short Film, Les Photos d’Alix is Jean Eustache’s playful meditation on the ambiguity of images and the elusiveness of interpretation. In a room a young woman (Alix Clio-Roubaud) describes to a young man (Boris Eustache, the director’s son) the stories, techniques, and meanings behind several of her meticulously composed black-and-white photographs. But at some point her explanations don’t seem to match what we see. Is this because language can never accurately account for the visual? Because the viewer is being asked to perform more than a surface-level comprehension of art? Because Eustache is perpetrating some sort of absurdist practical joke? Or all of the above?