When the Camera Is On, Cinema Is Happening: The Complete Works of Jean Eustache
Screening Dates
  • July 22, 2023 4:30
  • July 31, 2023 6:30
New Restorations

“Like Georges Franju’s Blood of the Beasts, this film shocks and shatters you; it is also strangely beautiful.”

Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune

Held in high regard by Eustache admirers, Le cochon is both an unflinching record of a vanishing rural tradition and the outcome of an experiment to smudge the signature of its creator. As in Eustache’s twice-made The Virgin of Pessac, a French custom is observed with almost ethnographic precision; here it is the passed-down method of slaughtering and processing a pig in the southern highlands of Massif Central. Wary of the chic, Cahier-espoused doctrine of film authorship, Eustache invited director Jean-Michel Barjol to simultaneously document the event, then stitched the footage together to mark the invisibility of difference. ​“What happened with Le cochon had at least one result: you can no longer, I believe, talk about a filmmaker’s ​‘point of view’ after this film” (Eustache). The dialect of the farmhands, a thick patois of onomatopoeic phrasing, makes the dialogue amusingly incomprehensible to non-speakers.

In French patois, no subtitles

“A beautiful, sensitive, big-hearted short documentary that shows not a trace of the despair and defeat radiating from Eustache’s fictional films.” Jared Rapfogel, Senses of Cinema

followed by

Offre d’emploi
(‎Employment Offer)
France 1982
19 min. DCP In French with English subtitles

Shot in 1980 but aired posthumously in 1982, Eustache’s superb contribution to the TV anthology series Contes modernes is a snapshot of an employment process, shot in customary unadorned fashion but boasting a clever structural fold. We observe a middle-aged man interview for a sales job; only after are we privy to the internal mechanisms of hiring.

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