April 13, 2008

4:30 pm

La peine perdue de Jean Eustache
Numéro zéro
April 13 at 4:30
East Building Concourse, Large Auditorium
Arguably one of the most intelligent biographies of a filmmaker ever produced, La peine perdue de Jean Eustache (The Wasted Breath of Jean Eustache) presents the artist through a series of interviews and readings by close friends and colleagues. Jean-Pierre Léaud leads the procession, reciting a text by Eustache from 1971. Eustache’s revolutionary ideas about his art, his background, and the major events of his life (he comitted suicide in 1981) are portrayed throughout the film. (Angel Díez, 1997, French with subtitles, 53 minutes)
In Numéro zéro Eustache set out to make a portrait of his aged and nearly blind grandmother. He simply placed her in front of a camera and asked her to recount her life. This deceptively straightforward premise became a stirring portrait of a strong woman. Eustache never released Numéro zero in its original format; instead, a truncated version was exhibited on French TV with the title Odette Robert. The longer original version was not released until 2003, nearly twenty years after the director’s death. (Jean Eustache, 1971/2003, French with subtitles, 35mm, 104 minutes)

http://www.nga.gov/programs/film/jean_eustache.shtm

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