Jean Eustache – Films in August and September
Hardly any body of work in French film history is as limited in scope and yet as significant as that of Jean Eustache (1938–1981). Standing at the crossroads between the Nouvelle Vague and its decline, he created cinema of radical sincerity – films that explore speech, desire and failure without ever resorting to euphemism.
Low-barrier, air-conditioned and breastfeeding-friendly
Die Filme von Jean Eustache – Kinemathek Karlsruhe
at the cinema
Original version with German subtitles | (e) English subtitles
Screening with introduction/film talk
Saal Held in the Saal | Box Held in the Box | Foyer Held in the Foyer | Out & about open air & other venues
Nothing scheduled right now — as soon as something is coming up, the programme appears here automatically.
In August, we will be screening his two feature-length films: La Maman et la Putain (1973), his monumental masterpiece about a ménage-à-trois in post-1968 Paris – three and a half hours of dialogue as a means of survival, which was virtually impossible to see for decades and is now back on the big screen, having been restored. And Mes petites amoureuses (1974), his autobiographically inspired portrait of youth in the French provinces, characterised by both tender precision and quiet cruelty.
In September, we continue the series with three short films: Du côté de Robinson (1964), Eustache’s early portrait of two young men wandering through the Parisian suburbs; Le Père Noël a les yeux bleus (1966), featuring Jean-Pierre Léaud as a young man working as Father Christmas in wintry Narbonne; and Une sale histoire (1977), his unsettling and ambiguous late work, which recounts the same obscene confession twice – once in a documentary style, once as a staged narrative – thereby blurring the line between truth and fiction.