‘Born in Osaka, Japan in 1928, Shozo Shimamoto is a very influential member of the famous Gutai Group, formed in 1954 by other well-known figures such as Yoshihara Jiro, Kanayama Akira, Murakami Saburo and Shiraga Kazuo, in the Kansai region.
‘A forerunner of European movements of the 1950s, Shimamoto conceived a type of action painting or happening. His performances go beyond the limits of the usual spaces reserved for art and directly address the audience-participant. The characteristics of his work use a combination of material-color and sound. A famous work from 1956 – he threw paint-filled bottles on to the canvas to the accompaniment of cannon shots – was also later presented at the 1993 Venice Art Biennial.
‘In 1992 he presided over an association of artists with handicaps. In 1994 he was invited to the exhibition, “Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York at which the curator Alexandra Monroe discovered that Shimamoto’s “holes” dated to 1950, igniting the Fontana-Shimamoto controversy.
‘In 1996 he was considered among the candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize because of his pacifist activities. In 1998 he was chosen – together with Pollock, John Cage and Lucio Fontana – as one of the four greatest post-war artists in the world for an exhibition at MOCA in America. In 1999 he was again invited to the Venice Biennial of Art at the urging of David Bowie and Yoko Ono. New York Times art critic Roberta Smith has noted him as one of the most daring and independent experimentalists of the postwar international art scene in the 1950s.
‘Shozo Shimamoto’s action painting works are created by filling bottles with paint — or, as he prefers to call them, dyeing substances — and hurling them at various types and sizes of canvas, objects, and sometimes people, all of which are never touched by the artist. As in many Gutai works, the artist’s control over the work is limited, mediated by the arbitrariness of throwing the liquids and thus by pure chance.’ — Berengo Gallery
_______
Certain works
Untitled Action, 1956 Shozo Shimamoto making a painting by hurling glass bottles of paint against a canvas at the “2nd Gutai Art Exhibition”, Ohara Kaikan, Tokyo.
Please, walk on here, 1955 The photo documents the work at the outdoor exhibition of Gutai held in 1955. This work has been acquired by Pompidou Center.
Cannon, 1956 This photo shows the striking performance Shimamoto did in 1956 using a 5-meter long cannon to throw the paint onto a huge canvas. The cannon was set in an almost vertical position and the paint described a parabolic trajectory before reaching the canvas.
Helicopter performance Work, 2004 In 2004, Shimamoto did a performance from a helicopter in anticipation of the forthcoming 2005 Venice Biennale, where, suspended from a helicopter he dropped balls full of paint onto a canvas on the ground below.
Untitled, 2008 Resin, paint
Bottle Crash, 2008 In 1956 at the 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition in Tokyo, Shimamoto produced his first ‘Bottle Crash’, where he placed a rock in the centre of a large canvas on the floor, against which he hurled bottles containing various coloured paints. This experiment produced a technique which would significantly affect his future work. “I think the throwing of bottles as a method of painting is a form of study of the unknown,” Shimamoto once said. “More than anything else, I find stimulation in the materialisation of an unpredictable expression.” Often produced during performances in various locations either within Japan or abroad, through the act of throwing, Shimamoto produced highly charged and dramatic works based on randomness and chance. Bottle Crash, 2008, was the largest of his bottle crash works.
______________________________ Reenactment of a 1955 Shimamoto work
_______________________ Aimed to banish the Paintbrush by Shozo Shimamoto (1957)
People usually think that colors and paintbrushes are necessary to paint. Till now a form of painting deprived of these two elements has never existed. In fact paintings, paintbrushes and colors have been always considered tightly linked one to the other. In spite of that, their relationship is not so pacific and quiet.
Dyeing substances have usually been subordinated to the paintbrush’s existence. And then the dyes’ course is no more than the story of a long challenge between them and the paintbrush itself. This story of paintbrushes and colors begins at the same starting point. When paintbrushes and dyeing substances began to be used, tones were not considered by artists as virtually necessary.
When I began using dyeing substances, I knew nothing about the paintbrushes employed during Renaissance, but I have always been sure that everywhere in the world the paintbrush is considered uniquely necessary to express color, depriving dyeing substances of their power and causing them to become the brush’s slave with the goal of creating colors for which the dyeing substances are no more than a tool. But just as a line without thickness does not exist, a color without its matter does not become concrete. In every situation and place, dyeing substances offer resistance to the paintbrush. And whoever the painting’s author is, whether Rembrandt, Pissarro, Van Gogh, Utrillo or somebody else, they will be always clear through the technique that the picture has undergone.
Romantic artistic production or the Surrealist one show how a powerful and active paintbrush can be used to capture dyeing material and subject it to the author’s narrative intent. But, although their results were magnificent, their relationship with coloring substances had not changed with respect to the past experiences already mentioned. Today, on the other hand, we don’t want to use dyeing materials quality by distorting them. I just said it: a color without matter does not exist. I think the first thing to do is to free color from the paintbrush. If you do not throw away the paintbrush when creating something there is no way to bring the dyes themselves into existence.
To begin, you can use whatsoever kind of tool: instead of paintbrushes you can use your bare hands or a paint scraper. Then you can continue using objects, used also by Gutai members such as watering cans, umbrellas, vibrators, abaci, skates, toys, feet, weapons, and others. And in Gutai performances it is also possible that a paintbrush will appear again. In fact, in our innovative representations, something can also come from past. But paintbrushes must be used, now, not to kill dyeing matters’ quality but to make them more vivid.
___________________
Letter to Jackson Pollock
_________________
Five paintings/actions
Palazzo Ducale, Genova 2008
Espace Felissimo, Kobe (2007)
Ladonia Biennial (excerpt, 2009)
嶋本昭三 (excerpt, 2007)
Performance al Magi’900, Italy, 2008
*
p.s. Hey. ** Steve, Oh, that sounds like a most excellent solution vis-a-vis the time slot. Congrats and relief. Yeah, nice to be able to use your translation. That was a cool find. ** Steeqhen, Will do. That new ‘Donkey Kong’ looks very sweet. I haven’t gotten a play report from Zac yet. I loved and read all of the Oz books where I was a kid. They need a revival. Your current Labor government almost makes the previous Labor government seem utopian. If I can get my French resident visa renewed next year. I’ll get the great costless French healthcare by default, which would be, like, whoa. ** lotuseatermachine, I highly recommend Kay Gabriel. She’s great, just to name one. I need to read that Hedva. Noted, thank you. Exactly, I’ll take promising. That’s often as good as we’re ever going to get. ** Misanthrope, Okay, right. I’ve known a couple of trainers, and, yeah, they did okay financially, although I don’t know what your current money input situation is. Early happy birthday to Alex! ** jay, The porn ban thing is truly shocking. Even the US hasn’t laid down that law yet. Too many very horny fascists in charge over there, I suspect. We’ll see what the blog’s UK fate is. One of the reasons I stopped labelling the escort and slave posts as that in the headline is because my hosting site’s tech workers, which are largely based in India, I think, refused to work on the blog because of those posts. But, luckily, they only seem to check the posts’ titles and not the things themselves. Well, well, heady war gaming experience you had there. Nice that Bataille is proving to be such a good host. Thursday is the slaves post, so fingers crossed when the time comes. ** _Black_Acrylic, You might quite like his stuff, the early 70s films especially. ‘Irreversible’ virgin no longer. And you seem okay. The first time I saw it in a theater, one of my friends I went with had to un to the restroom and throw up. ** Jack Skelley, Well, I’m glad you don’t have the time or my permission, haha. Well, maybe my permission if you asked me very nicely and slipped me some bills. ** Tosh Berman, Hey. Well, luckily art itself isn’t getting worse, but that’s just about the only thing that isn’t. ** julian, ‘TMatW’ is considered his masterpiece, and it might be. Otherwise, the early 70s films are kind of his best, I think. ‘Mes Petites Amoureuses’ is very good. Oh, I hadn’t actually thought about what dark ride I would personally live in. Huh. Rain check as I scroll through my voluminous memory bank. So cool about your childhood drawings. Me too, of course. I wish I still had them. I’ve still never played any of those amusement park building computer games. I wonder if there are any that are really, really flexible. I would pay top dollar to ride a ‘Inland Empire’ ride. If you designed it, of course. ** Uday, Did I forget to paste in your name yesterday? Sorry. So much to think about indeed. ** Carsten, Ah, apples and oranges, as always. Limp Bizkit still packs them in for some godforsaken reason, but I’m assuming those seas of jock rockers are gray haired and thick waisted. Sounds valuable indeed. ** politekid, Yeah, how about that. Oh, gosh, books on the French New Wave. I’ll have to think and look around. Serge Daney’s writings on them from that period are great. And they’re fairly newly in English. Oh, right, Jarman’s gone kind of viral recently. You just never know. I looked at what, at the time, for violent porn when I was, like, 10 years old, and look at me, I’m sweet as pie. I never play games on my laptop, or hardly ever, only platform games. I desperately need to get away from my laptop. I will look into ‘Desperados’ though, thank you. Speedrunning tactics in writing makes total sense to me, yes, of course, or, if not ‘of course’ then … naturally? ** Alice, It was fun. Any disruption to my neighborhood’s normality is exciting. Even Covid lockdown was exciting for a while. But I don’t follow Tour de France. A bit samey for me. ‘Too esoterically’: In theory I would pay people I know to be too esoteric. Famous last words maybe. Jarman was interesting and very funny, even about his death which was already looming in his mind when I interviewed him. I’ve never seen ‘Splendor’. Let me know if it’s worth a gander. Here’s hoping our respective weeks start picking up as of now. ** HaRpEr //, Hi. Cool. Gosh, I don’t know, I’m pretty high on the first gen Nouvelle Vague. Not that the second generation is anything to shake a stick at, of course. I do like ‘My Little Loves’ a lot, yes. I think ‘TMatW’ and it are probably his best maybe. Interesting that ‘Adolescence’ might have helped trigger the banning mania. Boy, people can be so shallow. It never ceases to amaze me. I have a bad or good habit of looking on the bright side, but I can’t see the ban sticking. I feel like that machine will make enough mistakes that it’ll break and get shut down by default. But I would have thought Trump would be assassinated by now, so don’t listen to me. ** Hugo, I had one of those nights the other night. Yeah, urgh. How curious about your friend’s reaction to ‘Thomas the Obscure’. I mean, I guess it is a downer, but it seems like a curious book to read for content, but then again I so rarely read anything for its content. Rare pretty much totally lost it when they bailed on Nintendo for Xbox way back when. But, yeah, they were gaming royalty there for a while. I am way bogged down, and my mind is bigger than my eyes, but you never know. Are Tuesdays inherently mediocre? Interesting. I intend to find out. ** Justin D, Hi. There are tons of films thought great by the wise that leave me cold. So, yeah. Oh, hm, a film deliberately anti-nostalgia. Huh. Interesting idea. I think maybe in a way our films try to fuck with any nostalgia that their characters and settings might provoke in viewers. The romanticising of youth, for instance. Or subvert it at least. I don’t know, I need to think about it, But, yes, interesting idea. And thank you very much for the kind words. I think, if push came to shove, I’d say ‘My Little Loves’ is probably my favorite of his. Happy day, pal! ** Darby 🦇, Hey! My weekend was okay, can’t complain. We’re having this non-summer weather over here which is so, so nice. I can’t even watch people cook, I get too antsy and bored. Uh, I’m a diehard smoker, but even I can warn you not to smoke. It’s such a drag. It does give the brain this nice little jolt of concentration though. That’s the only good thing about it really. I haven’t actually watched ‘La Cochon’, yet anyway. Mm, it depends on the film and the depiction of animal death and meat preparing. If it’s fiction, it doesn’t really get to me. If it’s a documentary that shows animal murder, I do tend to duck and cover. If they’re already dead, I can usually look even if I don’t like it. That said, one of my favorite films ‘In a Year of Thirteen Moons’ has a long scene where the characters walk through a real slaughter house where cows are killed and hoisted up to an aerial conveyer belt while the main trans character talks about all the horrors inflicted on them in their life. It’s intense and amazing. So, I guess it’s complicated. You? All the luck you might need at the job interview today! ** Sarah, Hi, Sarah. It’s so nice to see you! Going to readings and writing sounds pretty and good and valuable. I think I was probably going to Efteling, and in fact I still haven’t gone, and in fact I think I am finally going to go in a couple of weeks. I was supposed to go for my birthday but then complications arose. I do go to amusement parks as often as I’m able to, which isn’t hugely often. Efteling is my all time favorite park, so that should be cool. Do you like/go to amusement parks? Again, happy to see you. ** chris dankland, Hey! Mm, no, I’m not entirely sure what the controversy was. The French are pretty ‘liberal’ about sex in films, so maybe it was the slant or attitude in the film towards sex? I don’t know. There are so many French films worth seeing even if most of them were made quite a long time ago. Sweet, I’ll look for the interview soon. Thank you, pal! I can’t wait for you to see the film, seriously. ** Okay. Today the opportunity the blog is hoping to provide to you is a look at the artist Shozo Shimamoto. Thank you in advance for taking the time if you do. See you tomorrow.
‘The death of Jean Eustache shocked but it didn’t surprise. His friends said he was suicidal. He held on to life only by a small number of threads, so solid that one thought them unbreakable. The desire for cinema was one of these threads. The desire not to have to film at any cost was another. This desire was a luxury and Eustache knew it. He would pay the price.
‘It’s not much to say that he was born to cinema with the Nouvelle Vague, a little bit after it, but with the same refusals and admirations. It’s not much to say that he was an “auteur,” his cinema was mercilessly personal. That is to say, mercilessly tied up with his experience, to alcohol, to love. Filling up his life in order to make the material of his films was his only moral code but it was a moral code of iron. The films came when he was strong enough to make them come, to bring back what he made in life.
‘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.
‘The audience was with him once, when he made the most beautiful French film of the decade, THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE. Without him, we would have no face to set to the memory of the lost children of May Ô68: lost, already aging, talkative and old-fashioned. (Bernardette) Lafont, (Jean-Pierre) Léaud and especially Françoise Lebrun, her black shawl and her stubborn voice. Without him, nothing would have remained of them.
‘An ethnologist of his own reality, Eustache could have made a career, become a good auteur, with fantasies and a vision of the world, a specialist of some sort in himself. His moral code prohibited it: he only filmed what interested him. Women, dandyism, Paris, the country and the French language. It’s already a lot.
‘Like a painter knowing that he’d never quite finish, he never cased returning to the same motif, using cinema not like a mirror (that’s for the good directors) but like the needle of a seismograph (that’s for the greats). The public, one moment seduced, would forget this perverse ethnography that had the bad manners to keep coming. An artist and nothing but an artist (he didn’t know how to do anything except make films), he held to the contrary the speech of an artisan, simultaneously more modest and proud. The artisan weighs everything, evaluates everything, takes on everything, memorizes everything. Thus Eustache worked.
‘One year, some Moroccan friends had organized a complete retrospective of his work in Tangier. A strange idea. A brilliant idea. All the reels, the heaviness, the age, the rust, the incredible number of kilograms that THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE represents were put into a diplomatic case, crossed the sea and found themselves in front of assiduous Moroccan cine-clubgoers. Would Eustache come? It was difficult to make him leave Paris, we thought. But he came and remained two days. The projection of the Eustachian opus took place, outside of time, for this audience, unprepared for all these stories of sex and desire, of the French countryside and the fauna of Montparnasse, was disconcerted. Eustache would disconcert them even more. His mildness, his patience and his manner of responding to questions with an indecipherable mix of irony and gravity, surprised everyone.
‘Tangier wasn’t Paris nor the port cafes the Closerie de Lilas, but we searched for a late bar to have a beer and talk about cinema. Eustache spoke of his masters, with whom he didn’t compare himself, of Pagnol and Renoir, these other artisans who came before him. I will never forget the way in which he made them live again in his language, shot by shot, with his accent. It shocked but didn’t surprise. Eustache resembled his times too much to be comfortable. He ended by losing. Too bad for us.’ — Serge Daney (trans. Steve Erickson)
Les cafés narbonnais à travers les films de Jean Eustache
) Naissance du Cinéma Narbonnais : Jean Eustache
Jean Eustache – Interview (1966)
_______ Interview from La Revue du Cinéma (1971)
You’ve made four films that to me seemed to indicate a personal path in our cinema. Now, you want to do something completely different. Where does this break between the films you directed before and the last one come from?
JEAN EUSTACHE: I decided to break with the films that I was making because they were suffocating me.
Why were they suffocating you? Wasn’t it a kind of cinema that had already broken away from the system, as much in terms of how it was made (production and direction) as by its choice of subject matter?
JE: Yeah, but as I was working more in an artisanal manner, I didn’t really feel like I was challenging the system. Instead, I felt like I was always doing the same thing but, above all, it’s less in relation to the cinema than in relation to myself that the problems were presenting themselves. Each film was making life more difficult. When I’d finished one, I was always thinking I was going to be able to see things differently, to live a little better, and it was the opposite that was happening, I was living worse and worse…
From what point of view? From a financial point of view or from the point of view of what you had wanted to make or express?
JE: Well, I was making films in a very egotistical way, to be able to free myself in some way and to try to live a bit more casually. In fact, I had, instead, a heavier and heavier weight on my shoulders. That’s why I was shooting so few films. I was thinking a lot and, between the films that I was making, a certain number of ideas would come to mind that I’d abandon along the way. I would only finalize one of them about every two years. And, each time, I didn’t manage to find a path that let me live and work at the same time because, for that, making a film that means a month or two of work every two years isn’t sufficient. And then, every time that I attempted something, I wasn’t managing to go further in the chosen direction; I felt like I had to change direction.
You mean you were disappointed with the results? Unsatisfied?
JE: But you’re always a little disappointed, you always hope to do better. You achieve something and, yet, you had hoped it would be better… Most of the films I’ve done have pleased my friends, have been pretty well liked around me, which cut off my need to make something else immediately. If I had only been met with incomprehension, I would maybe have insisted, I would maybe have fought. Since everything was going simply outwardly, since people liked them, each time I thought I’d achieved my goal, but, at the same time, by my own standards, I wasn’t very satisfied, however I told myself: since the main thing is fine, since they say so, it should be enough…
It seemed too easy to you that your films were liked without any problems?
JE: That’s it, I didn’t really try to do better. And, at the same time, as I was going to the movies less and less and I was very disappointed when I did go, I was very happy to be outside what was being done everywhere. In the end, I no longer felt like being a filmmaker, like making films. And the questions that I was asking myself for more than a year came to this: why do we make films? What is it for? I found myself in the most total confusion and I considered giving up movies. I had always enjoyed working on other people’s films more than my own. For what is in other people’s films, when I edited them, I felt like I thought more deeply about them, that I brought more to them. The work I’m most happy with in cinema is that which I’ve accomplished on other people’s films and not on my own ones…
What do you call “fun”?
JE: Fun? Well, there are people who feel the need to take a vacation or who have one of Ingres’ violins, if they work all week… Before, quite a while ago, I was seeing 3 or 4 films a day, I was going back to see the films I liked 7 or 8 times, and I could completely lose myself in these films, only think about them. Now, I can’t anymore, I watch films worse than an ordinary viewer. I have as much trouble seeing a film as reading. I think about other things. Sometimes, when you’re reading, you suddenly notice that you were absent minded and you have to start over. For films, it’s the same thing. I see something and I don’t know what I saw. I have to go back to know, because I have a vague impression of something, but nothing more… But, to go back to your question, if I tried to make films for “fun,” the actual direction wasn’t a part of the enjoyment, it was, instead, a considerable effort and, in fact, a lot more difficult than enjoyable. Above all due to the lack of money. The first two films that I shot, with actors, might have been very enjoyable to do but, for financial reasons, the undertaking was very perilous. Then, for the documentaries, I had less need for money. I shot La Rosière and Le cochon in a day each, but I still had to do an hour long film in a day. That requires effort, spending considerable energy in a short amount of time. I caught up with myself a bit while editing. Okay… But, still, I find that these films, whatever is interesting about them, come from a clear conscience. You’re very happy when you do the opposite of what others do, when you do better, when you think you do better or when people say, “It’s very good.” And, in fact, it’s demobilizing.
But, still, doesn’t anxiety let go of you?
JE: No, it moves a bit. Paradoxically, you notice that you’re not understood at all. I would have been better understood if they had told me that it’s bad or it’s worthless. Because I would have maybe tried to prove more, to go deeper. Instead I was thinking, “I’ve got a hell of a nerve and they’re still being fooled…”
Do you not think that in France, in 1971, you are practically alone against millions of viewers. There are friends who support you, morally more than anything else, but you’re alone in front of this mass because, at the most, everyone or almost everyone doesn’t take cinema seriously…
JE: I agree. But I defined my position as utopian from the start. I don’t know where I’ll go, but I know where I am. Whatever the price of my attitude, as there’s a financial problem – spend money making films and keep them without getting anything back – this position is, for me, the only one possible, and not even from a moral point of view, it’s my only chance of succeeding at something. I don’t have a choice. If I show it, I won’t earn more money and the film will be like dead, ineffective, whether or not it is liked. I want out. One of my films, Le Père Noël a les yeux bleus, was liked, according to what I could read and hear in film clubs and theaters where it was shown. The release of my films in theaters or underground theaters has cost me money. I don’t want to talk about money, but, still, you have to…
Absolutely. When you talk about cinema, you have to talk about money…
JE: You have to talk about that only. Okay. I’ve always been glad people like Le Père Noël. I said to myself, “Here, I didn’t do it for nothing, I tried expressing something and people understood it.” So, Le Père Noël was liked by certain teenagers, which really pleased me. Besides, this film was conceived from my own memories, I felt very alone, an adolescent, and I wasn’t finding myself at the movies or elsewhere: so I made this film out of this frustration and I was very happy when 16 or 17 year olds, who maybe didn’t know exactly why, found something in it. And then, there were also people my age who remembered their adolescence and even the oldest people sometimes, but there was, in the first place, those who it spoke to now. And that was a huge joy for me… But I’m not a “Good Samaritan,” I didn’t make this film to help others, but to live. I was delighted my film was liked this much, but I still need to live.
And to use pretentious language, while admitting that I brought something, no one brought me anything in exchange, in any case, so it’s like I was robbed and suffocated at the same time. I gave something until I was suffocated, until I was destitute, until I had nothing more to say and nothing to do. And nothing in exchange. It’s was like vampirism. I sucked my own blood. My blood was pumped out and that’s all, I was left there. So, I reacted, I don’t want any more, so be it…
_________________ 12 of Jean Eustache’s 14 films
______________ La soirée (1963) ‘Unfinished short film by Jean Eustache (1961, or ’63), with Jean-André Fieschi, Chantal Simon, Paul Vecchiali and André S. Labarthe. 7 minutes – No sound.’— Koyaanisqatsi
the entire film
________________ Les mauvaises fréquentations (1963) ‘Two friends who are not letting their lack of cash get in the way of their attempts to chat up the filles de Paris. Settling their gaze on one in particular, they begin to woo her in tandem, until a rebuff sparks revenge. Shot in typical nouvelle vague style with unknown actors, the most striking thing is how much energy it has considering it is, for the most part, a study of ennui. Eustache keeps his camera on the move for much of the film, walking with the three main characters as they wander the district looking for a place to grab a drink, the men operating as a ‘charm-offensive’ tag-team with the woman – at least in their minds.’— Spectacle
Trailer
___________________ Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes (1966) ‘Made with leftover film given to him by Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Eustache interwove the stock from the former director’s ‘Masculin/Feminin’ with his own 52-minute study of a group of young men in a small French province and their attempts to earn money and meet girls. Jean-Pierre Leaud (who starred in both films) is Daniel, the protagonist/narrator. As in the Doinel films by Truffaut, Leaud acts as a sort of alter ego figure for Eustache. Desperate to buy a stylish winter coat, Daniel accepts a local photographer’s offer to dress up as a sidewalk Santa Claus to pose for photos with passerby. Once his identity is concealed in costume, Daniel discovers, the town’s inhabitants treat him far differently; namely, attention from the girls who’d earlier brushed him off.’ — Karina/IMDb
__________ Le cochon (1970) ‘Le Cochon, which Eustache co-directed with Jean-Michel Barjol, records the slaughter and dismemberment of a pig and the process of transforming the dead animal into various food products. It’s Eustache’s most beautiful film because it’s his most curious and graceful. He and Barjol filmed the movie over the course of a single day, shooting footage separately and then editing together; their purpose was primarily to observe, to record. There’s a great affinity between this film and the documentaries of Frederick Wiseman-a similar directness (there are no voice-overs, explanatory titles, or interviews) and a similar luxurious freedom from preconception or interpretation. Wiseman, passionately and with an almost missionary desire, shows us things neglected by almost all other filmmakers-the banal, allegedly undramatic daily experiences of cops, teachers, welfare workers, hospital workers, judges, soldiers, and so on (experiences that of course prove to be almost ridiculouslydramatic and full of interest). The same attitude radiates from every moment of Le Cochon – the delight of making a faithful record of an experience, both the experience of the filmmakers over the course of one day and the daily experience of the farmers. The movie begins with the slaughter of the pig, a wrenching thing to witness-but instead of passing judgement on the farmers, it opens out into something much more generous and understanding, a portrait of a way of life, an appreciation of physical work, of daily toil, of the process of transforming one thing into another.’— Senses of Cinema
____________ Numéro zéro (1971) ‘Almost the entire hour and three-quarters of Jean Eustache’s 1971 film Numéro Zéro is filled with the director’s interview of his grandmother Odette Robert on Feb. 12th of that year. Eustache includes in the film the conditions of its production—the director himself is seated at the table with her, pours her some whiskey, speaks with the camera operator, manipulates the clapboard at the head and tail of the reels, and even takes a phone call from a foreign firm that wants to distribute one of his early short films. Odette Robert had come from her home in the provinces to live with Eustache in Paris and help care for his son Boris (who is seen, at the beginning of the film, helping guide her through the streets of Paris—she had recently had eye operations and had to wear dark lenses, including on-camera). In the light of Numéro Zéro, Eustache seems like something of a cinematic archeologist, who looks into and through the images of his times to extract the living history in a desperate attempt to confront, honor, and exorcise it—and perhaps even to revive it, to the extent that, even in its agonies, he acknowledges the unlikeliness that life would ever be so full again.’— The New Yorker
_________________ The Mother and the Whore (1973) ‘The Mother and the Whore is considered Eustache’s masterpiece, and was called the best film of the 1970s by Cahiers du cinéma. It won the Grand Prix of the Jury and the FIPRESCI prize at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival. The film created a scandal at the Cannes Film Festival, as many critics saw the film as immoral and obscene or, in the words of the broadsheet Le Figaro, “an insult to the nation”, while Télé-7-Jours called it a “monument of boredom and a Himalaya of pretension”. After gaining little public recognition despite receiving praise throughout the years from critics and directors, such as François Truffaut and other members of the French New Wave, Eustache became an overnight success and internationally famous after the film’s Cannes premiere. He soon financed his next film. The critic Dan Yakir said that the film was “a rare instance in French cinema where the battle of the sexes is portrayed not from the male point of view alone”. James Monaco called it, “one of the most significant French films of the 1970s”. Jean-Louise Berthomé said, “I am not sure that La mama et la putain, with its romances of a poor young man of 1972, doesn’t say something new.” Pauline Kael praised the film, saying it reminded her of John Cassavetes in its ability “to put raw truth on the screen – including the boring and the trivial”. The film’s reputation increased over time. In 1982 the literary magazine, Les Nouvelles Littéraires, celebrated the tenth anniversary of the film by publishing a series of articles on it.’— collaged
Trailer
Excerpt
Excerpt
__________________ Mes Petites Amoureuses (1974) ‘Eustache told Luc Moullet he wanted Mes petites amoureuses “to reconstruct [my] childhood: every wall section, every tree, every light pole.” But the film’s actual relationship with nostalgia is ambivalent. Much of it is a vision of adolescence-as-purgatory, with 12-year-old Daniel uprooted from his familiar, bucolic life with his grandmother to live in Narbonne with his mother (Caven) and her lover (that Eustache would become a trenchant critic of sexual permissiveness should be understandable—it apparently wrecked his childhood). The domestic existence he finds with her is an entombment; the “boyfriend” is a Spanish émigré farm laborer, José (Dionys Mascolo), who seems almost mummified by disappointment. Caven has a wet, waxen pallor and a mortician’s makeup job. The couple sit and tobacco-stain the gaudy wallpaper; the one time they leave the apartment together, they silently sit across the canal from the teeming life on the town’s main promenade and smoke. They’re afraid to be seen out: José’s divorce hasn’t been finalized, it’s explained. The film touches abstract, private feelings with in the most discreet of gestures: a pan over the reassuringly familiar objects on a mantelpiece; a first long train journey seen through dozed-off ellipses. The soft-edged, plein air cinematography—Néstor Almendros channeling Claude Lorrain—is crushingly picturesque.’ — Moving Image Source
________________ A Dirty Story (1977) ‘In this short film from Jean Eustache, a group of friends sit down and, with little prelude, listen to their friend (Michel Lonsdale) recite a story about when, as a young man, he discovered a peephole in the ladies toilet at a small cafe. He describes the etiquette surrounding this peephole for the resident perverts in the cafe, and relates how viewing female vaginas soon became his sole obsession, and, finally, how he overcame this obsession. His friends listen, discuss, and the movie ends. At least, the scripted portion does. Then we see the same story, with nearly identical dialogue, related by Jean Noel-Picq, for real. This second monologue is actually a documentary filming: the first monologue was actually filmed second, with professional actors this time. Naturally, hearing the exact same story twice in a row takes much of the edge off. At first, it’s a hilarious, oddly compelling story. The second time, we are subjected to it because, according to the introduction to the screening, Eustache wants to show that there’s no such thing as objective truth.’— edwartell
_______________ The Virgin of Pessac 79 (1979) ‘Eleven years after the first La Rosière de Pessac, Jean Eustache filmed another documentary about his hometown’s annual coronation of a young woman of upstanding moral integrity. The differences between the ritual in 1968 and in 1979 are subtle yet telling: the selection process is slightly more fraught in ‘79 than in ‘68, while local leaders are more concerned with the current economic depression than wide-scale social upheaval. The ceremony also provides a stage on which progressive changes are made official, with a local order, the Fellows of Pleasant Pessac, inducting their first female member. Finally, this time around Eustache employs color photography to capture the ceremony, an appropriate choice given its verdant outdoor spring setting.’— Janus Films
_____________________ Le Jardin des délices de Jérôme Bosch (1980) ‘C’est l’évocation qui fonctionne dans Le Jardin des Délices de Jérôme Bosch, confirmant l’importance qu’Eustache accorde à la parole. Mais, comme dans ses grands films, la parole se fait ici visuelle, picturale. Pour venir en appui des mots de Picq, il vient faire de fréquentes coupes sur le tableau lui-même, mais jamais pris dans son ensemble, plutôt abordé comme une sorte de chaos d’éléments étranges qui viennent presque heurter le calme du discours. Très belle idée d’avoir choisi un des tableaux les plus explosifs qui soient pour le charger d’une telle sérénité. Du coup, Bosch sort de ce cliché de punk du Moyen-Age auquel on le cantonne souvent : il devient un sage joyeux et concentré, élégant et finalement simple d’abord. Ce petit film qui ne paye pas de mine rend au final un hommage vibrant et subtilement intelligent à la peinture dans toute sa force d’évocation.’— shangols
the entire film
________________ Offre d’emploi (1980) ‘Voilà le dernier film de Jean Eustache, celui qu’il a réalisé juste avant de se faire sauter le carafon, et c’est vrai que quand on le regarde on a quelques tendances suicidaires qui jaillissent. Dans la lignée d’Une sale Histoire, ce court-métrage pratique un humour tellement pince-sans-rire qu’il en devient privé d’humour, ce qui est remarquable. C’est juste de la colère, ou plutôt du désespoir, mais qui a encore le dernier sursaut de la critique politique. On suit le cheminement d’un homme qui postule pour un emploi, et Eustache dissèque soigneusement chaque étape de la chose : on souligne la petite annonce dans le journal, on a un premier entretien, on écrit la lettre de motivation, qui se retrouve entre les mains d’une graphologue, etc. Offre d’Emploi est assez mystérieux, sûrement trop court pour qu’Eustache parvienne à aller au bout de la critique acerbe qu’on sent poindre. Visiblement le projet est de démonter la déshumanisation complète des rapports entre offre et demande dans le monde de l’entreprise. A force de scruter avec des méthodes artificielles la psychologie des demandeurs, le processus devient monstrueux, privé d’affect. Le dernier plan, montrant un premier de la classe vanter les mérites de l’analyse sémantique des entretiens d’embauche, fait froid dans le dos. Le monde décrit ici est glacial, totalement désabusé, et Eustache met bien le doigt sur la monstruosité des rapports professionnels si aboutie aujourd’hui. La mise en scène est sèche mais inspirée (alternance de gros plans qui enferment les personnages chacun dans leur univers, un magnifique travelling lattéral lors du premier rendez-vous qui dévoile subtilement le malheur de ces chômeurs en attente), le ricanement est omniprésent, mais on aurait aimé que pour son adieu au monde, Eustache ait la possibilité d’aller plus loin, de montrer cet engrenage de dément jusqu’à son aboutissement.’— shangols
Excerpt
Excerpt
________________ Les Photos d’Alix (1980) ‘Alix leafs through her photo album with a friend. She shows him the pictures and tells how and when they were taken. Gradually her comment becomes less realistic and her descriptions take on a more poetic and imaginative character. Eventually her comment bears no relationship anymore to the photographs. Les photos d’alix is a cinematic essay, with a light-hearted starting point, enabling director Jean Eustache to examine the way we represent reality. Photos and film may be able to capture reality, but reality does not have real meaning until the artist gives his interpretation of it. For Eustache the relationship between reality and its representation is the starting point for his total oeuvre. Therefore, the traditional dividing line between documentary truth and fiction is not really interesting to him. But as he was backed up by a positive response to his works he was never forced to make any concessions in order to make his feature films less ‘real’ or his documentaries less playful. Les photos d’alix was his last film. Eustache committed suicide in 1981.’— IDFA
p.s. Hey. ** Malik, Hi. Right. Yeah, performing shouldn’t interfere with your writing, I can’t imagine. If anything they should feed each other interestingly. Exciting! xo. ** Mark Timothy Hayward, Well, hey there! I didn’t know about it either until Ben reared its mysterious head. You good? ** julian, Hi. Yeah, the Chicago thing will happen in late-mid September. Awesome if you can come. I have exactly your dream, or a dream in the exact same camp. My long time dream is to buy dark rides from traveling carnivals and old fashioned amusement parks and create a small town where every building would be a dark ride — private homes, city hall, hotels, restaurants, supermarkets, etc. People could add things to the rides’ interiors — beds, tables and chairs, shelving, etc. but they would still be functioning dark rides, and tourists could visit and ride all of them. That’s my hopeless dream. ** Misanthrope, One relent is a start anyway. But, yeah, find something easier and worthy of you, for sure. Any ideas? ** Carsten, The last hurrah of the excessive testosterone set. I’ve never seen that Deren. I think I’ve seen every other of her films. I know nothing of the topic so it might be a gateway or something? ** Steve, Wait, so your new episode isn’t up? The link seems to work. I’m going to pass it along just in case. Everyone, Here’s Steve. ‘Listen’ up and get your fingertips angled accordingly. ‘The July 27th episode of “Radio Not Radio” is now up. Tune in for children improvising a lullaby on toy percussion, a song performed with human bones and skulls, gamelan, Ukrainian punk and Larry Levan remixes!’ Seriously, about the censorship thing? What is going on with the UK right now? They seem to be trying very hard to start some new Victorian Age or something. Were they willing to move your slot? ** _Black_Acrylic, Thank you, sir! It seems to have reached far and wide. Oh, wow, about his son. How curious. ** Justin D, It’s a list addition for me too. Yeah, take the compliment, and I’ll remember not to hug you too affectionately (i.e. your teeth -> my throat) whence we eventually meet. ‘News from Home’ is beautiful, right? Chantal’s last triumph. ** Justin D, Nice Sontag quote, and interestingly not immediately Sontag-like in some way. Thanks, pal. ** politekid, Hey, O. Did he have a moment? In my neck of the woods, it feels like he’s been kind of forgotten. The UK porn thing … what the fuck. This might be truly neanderthal of me to say but using shame to control people seems so British to me somehow. Well, glad the blog has evaded the powers that be over there, but the slaves will be here in a couple of days, and I guess that’s when we’ll find out for sure. Awesome about the performance. No, I don’t know Crossness, but I’ll look into it. Whoa, now there’s a coincidence for you: Eustache -> Eustache! I can watch your performance. Holy moly, and I will when I’m freed of here. Everyone, Polite Kid is also Oscar Nearly, and Oscar Nearly is a brilliant writer/artist, and a recent performance he devised has occurred in the UK, and there’s a video of the piece, and you (and I) can watch it, and you so should! Go here. So cool! And about the ghost story. A perfect subject for you somehow even if I can explain why I think that. Great! I’m just in the world of getting our film out. It’s a very consuming job, I must say. I’m good though. We got rejected by the London film festival, no surprise, so we need to figure something out re: showing it there. We’re just so swamped, but we’re on it. Big up! ** HaRpEr //, Yeah, definitely chase the extant writing spurt as hard you can. I was in one recently when working on the script, and it was a heady, very upswinging headspace. I haven’t read that Peter Weiss: interesting. I’ll look into it. I love ‘Zero For Conduct’. Vigo’s best, I think. Comparing it and its offshoot ‘If’ is very interesting. ** chris dankland, Hey, Chris! I was hoping you’d find out that I raised your thing from the relative dead. So good to see you. People saw the post and were asking about you. ‘Room Temperature’ is gradually making its way out into the world. So far so good. And thanks a ton for hosting the related blab with Skelley. So appreciated. Paris is very nice. We’re quite freakishly hardly getting a summer here. Apart from two or ultra-hot days, it’s like April here. Weird and wonderful. I miss talking with you too, my buddy. Please do hang out whenever you have the inspiration and time. Biggest hugs for now. ** Alice, Hello there to you, Alice. My weekend was okay. Saw friends. Started trying to answer very piled-up emails. The Tour de France passed right by my building so my whole neighborhood was blocked off like a war zone. That was interesting. My guess is you’re radiating things that potential friends will sense without you even knowing it. The things one doesn’t know about oneself are legion despite one’s best efforts to fully self-identify. ‘Funeral Rites’, my favorite Genet, so I say go for it. Yes, I actually interviewed Jarman in person one time akin to the release of ‘Wittgenstein’ so I not only saw it but studied it too, although I can barely remember it now, which means nothing re: its values. My week’s a bit hazy too. But not for long, right? ** Hugo, Hi. I’m fine, thank you, and you? Crazy that your mom not only read ‘I Wished’ but didn’t reject it offhand. Cool. Thank you for infecting her with it. Yeah, that new UK law is madness. Jesus. Like I said to Polite Kid, I think the upcoming slaves post will be the test. Yikes. I trust you’ve woken up sans frustration. ** Steeqhen, I used to have a DS ages ago. I guess I still do in the back of a closet somewhere. Yesterday was Zac’s birthday and he got a Switch 2 as a present. So I think he’s now headlong into the new Donkey Kong. I would play a Wizard of Oz game in a heartbeat. I even own a Wizard of Oz pop-up book. It’s good. ** Nicholas., Well, now you sort of are a character even if I’m not constructing you myself, which is probably ideal. Uh, there have been zines with beaucoup sex stories in them but nothing as suave and focused as STH. Oh, I never think that newer people are missing out on anything by being newer. I always things are getting better and more interesting. So, I don’t think new people are missing anything, really, and they can look over the detritus of past cultural moments with their own eyes and even, if they’re lucky, hands if they really want to know. Nostalgia is one of my biggest enemies, and if you manage to rid yourself of nostalgia, everything is just out-of-date evidence that either maintains a certain power or doesn’t. That’s my theory. Haven’t seen ‘Superman’, no. It’ll probably be a plane movie. I usually save big movies to use as time passers on plane flights. I do hear it’s charming though. ** Okay. If you don’t know the films of Jean Eustache, here’s your chance. They’re worth your time, not that I know what’s worth your time, I know. See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 