Jean Eustache
| Jean Eustache | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
30 November 1938 Pessac, Gironde, France |
| Died | 5 November 1981 (aged 42) Paris, France |
| Occupation | Film director |
| Years active | 1961–1980 |
Jean Eustache (French: [øs.taʃ]; 30 November 1938 – 5 November 1981) was a French filmmaker. During his short career, he completed numerous shorts, in addition to a pair of highly regarded features, of which the first, The Mother and the Whore, is considered a key work of post-Nouvelle Vague French cinema.
In his obituary for Eustache, the influential 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."
Jim Jarmusch dedicated his 2005 film Broken Flowers to Eustache.
Eustache was born in Pessac, Gironde, France into 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 fifties, though 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 as an actor in Jean-Luc Godard's Week End and editing Luc Moullet's Une aventure de Billy le Kid, which starred Jean-Pierre Léaud (the lead in Eustache's The Mother and the Whore).
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