Figures of Dissent : Jean Eustache

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8 May 2014 20:30, KASKcinema, Gent. In collaboration with Courtisane.

Numéro zéro (FR, 1971, 35mm, b&w, 107′)

“You have to record things; whether they’re pretty or not, they’re important, they’re essential.”
– Jean Eustache

Luc Moullet once described him as a “blue collar dandy”. Legend has it that he aimlessly roamed the streets of Paris, regularly spending his nights in the Montparnasse bars, continually venturing into new romantic liaisons, but the self-conscious Rimbaudian artist was also an autodidact filmmaker whose work was steeped in an artisanal ethos and a penchant for sharp observation and ruthless provocation. This apparent paradox, which was at the heart of many of his films, never sat easily with the French film culture that came after the heyday of the Nouvelle Vague, which all too often succumbed to ideological blindness and bitter antagonism. That is how La Maman et la Putain, arguably his most autobiographical project, was dismissed as “deeply reactionary” on the pages of Cahiers de Cinéma, who put it on the same level as other “petit-bourgeois” movies such as Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe and Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris. But Eustache’s character study of the lost children of post-’68 did not rest on ideological premises, but on his intimate understanding of the tremors of disquiet and anguish that ran through the streets of his city. Always the “ethnologist of his own reality”, as Serge Daney wrote in his obituary. Always the artisan who took on everything as it came, memorized everything as it presented itself. Always the non-conformist whose films followed their material right to where it led them, and never to where conventional guidelines were pointing them to. Always the renegade who resembled his times too much to be comfortable or contended. A constant struggle he eventually ended up losing. The film at show here, which has remained unseen for so long, is what he considered to be his “numéro zero”, his tabula rasa with everything that had come before. A film that is unsure of itself, a manifesto without a program, made without any intent or pretense, only answering to a single desire: the desire for cinema.

“There are many reasons why one makes a film. However, as we proceed with the preparation (calling the technicians together, buying the film, hiring the lighting equipment, deciding the day and time to begin shooting), the actual filming (action, cut), the finishing process (synchronizing the images and the sound, editing, post-synchronizing), ninety nine percent of the time we forget what urged us to make the film in the first place. Sometimes we remember once we emerge from the darkness of the editing room and the film laboratories. Without being able to justify the existence of Odette Robert, I can speak of why I made Numéro Zéro, of which Odette Robert is but a fragment. I don’t know whether Numéro Zéro was a film. To say that I was urged to shoot it by the torment I was enduring at the time is not very revealing. I remember walking through Paris, from Montparnasse to the 17th arrondissement, thinking whilst I walked as if I were walking back through time. When I arrived back home, my grandmother spoke to me for quite a long time, and I had the impression that she was telling me extremely important things. When I said to her, “Listen, we should record this”, she said to me, “But really, these aren’t nice things”. “It doesn’t matter,” I replied, “it’s important to record these things, nice or not, they’re important, they’re essential”.
I found a bit of money to buy some black and white 16mm film, hired two cameras, and asked Théaudière to be the cameraman and Jean-Pierre Ruh to do the sound. The duration was as long as the reel of film, with the two cameras working alternately, in relays, without ever cutting. The picture was therefore the story of the film, from beginning to end. At the same time, as I was working as a filmmaker at the time, this was a film by a professional filmmaker, as well as being a family film, like an amateur 8mm film shot on the beach. The two were therefore not compatible. I then asked director Adolfo Arrietta to take a few street shots, and film my grandmother and my son doing their shopping in the nearby street. I wanted this to be the beginning of the film, with no sound or anything, completely separate from the rest, which has sound and where the image remains static.
I had the impression it was a manifesto, but of what, I didn’t know. Perhaps of the fact that, at the time, I couldn’t make films. After this, some well-meaning people introduced me to someone in television who viewed my work. But Numéro Zéro was not suitable for the television of the time, 1971.
To answer the question as to whether Numéro Zéro was a film, I still can’t tell you. I maintained that it was, without actually being very sure of myself.
It is about a journey through time by an old woman, moving between her great grandparents and her great grandchildren, during which we see six generations of
the history of France, told through the eyes of Odette Robert, my grandmother. In the original Numéro Zéro, I didn’t cut anything. As to what I later called Odette
Robert, fragments of the original film, I don’t know whether this has become a film in the meantime. Numéro Zéro was an anomaly, limited by the length of the reel of film. To split it in fragments meant deciding what to edit, as editing implies a choice. I had to decide upon the editing and make a choice. However, I don’t think that the original anomaly has disappeared though. I just cut out a few people, as I had to reduce the length by half. I strongly doubted that it was a film at the time, in February 71, as I had never seen anything like it before. Since then, I have discovered things that resemble it a little, namely Godard’s video programmes, which, a few years down the line, were the only things you could compare it to. Of course, I had no prior intention when making this film, I was simply eaten up with suffering, and this film was a response to that suffering.”
– Jean Eustache

“It happened in 2001. It was a beautiful winter afternoon. At a bistrot Jean-Marie turns to me: ‘There’s this film by Jean Eustache… I was one of the eight chosen schmucks that he invited to the screening… He was always so unsure – he kept telling us how he thought the film was a useless piece of shit… And when the lights came on, we were all stunned! I told him it was one of the greatest films about the history of France, as great as Renoir’s La Marseillaise. Perhaps the only film ever that you can call an important piece of sociology, without trashing the words film and sociology. I think it’s a film for you.’ Well, that did it. Of course, I had always admired and loved Eustache’s films, and out of the blue comes this mysterious Numéro Zéro: I had to find it! One or two months later, a miracle in Paris: Eustache’s son Boris on the phone, ‘Yes, I think there’s a working print of Numéro Zéro under my bed.’ I called my friend João Bénard da Costa, the late great director of the Portuguese Cinémathéque: “Bring it over, ASAP!” So, the Lab at Film Archives in Lisbon proceeded to restore this magnificent 35mm negative and one day we all sat in the theatre to watch it… and it was my kind of movie all right.”
– Pedro Costa

In the context of the research project “Figures of Dissent (Cinema of Politics, Politics of Cinema)”
KASK / School of Arts

Response to an invitation

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One fine day you find yourself being invited to propose some films for a program of screenings and discussions dealing with the “return of Marxism”. How can one who has never read Marx respond to this kind invitation? Indeed, the notion of Marxism seems to have regained a new force of attraction and legitimacy, even – or especially – for those who have come after the insurgence and the subsequent dissolution of the emancipatory movements in the period of the “long 1968”. Even for those who decided early enough in life to dedicate some humble time and energy to the cultivation of cinema, this bastard art that one particular adept of Marxism once proclaimed to be “the most important of all arts”, the time has come when, for them too, politics becomes the order of the day. How does one who has always preferred the darkness and safety of the cinema space to the obscureness and uncertainty of that strange place called society, deal with the realization that this constant struggle that is politics concerns him, and has perhaps always concerned him? You do what you can: you relate everything you don’t understand to what you know and love. And even when so much of what you thought you knew starts crumbling down on you, and your whole world view with it, the love does not wither. It only grows stronger.

One night you find yourself in the company of a great filmmaker, who reminds you that it’s allright to let yourself be vulnerable, that it is something to work with. And he talks about the fear that we are all experiencing, a fear that is caused by that which we are told we do not have and can never have, a fear so great it freezes us away from the things we care for the most. We stall it whenever we can, taking refuge in the certainties that are laid out before us, continually following the paths that define what is generally accepted as common sense, sometimes cuddling up in the dark spaces where fabricated dreams of light and shadow instill us with a sense of comfort. Against the pervasive sense of anxiety and conformity, the filmmaker points out the need to invent other worlds, to take risks and explore pathways that might enable us to exceed our limitations and suppressions. In life as in cinema. And he expresses his love and admiration for two filmmakers who have persevered in doing so, creating an exceptional cinema that makes us perceive life in all its possibilities, makes us feel the torrent of the world in all its intensities. A feeling that is seeing and not only recognizing. One that confronts us with the sense that we do not live in the best of possible worlds. And you start to see that too.

One day you come to realize that your sense of disorientation and disquiet is shared by many, and you begin to understand that the narratives of lost illusions and shattered dreams you have been passed on for so long no longer say much about our world. And you feel that, for those who do not know how to live in this broken world, to act has to become a matter of putting trust in what is uncertain, in that unknown space of possibility for which we desperately want to take responsibility. Realizing that, perhaps, it is the only thing for which we are confident we have a responsibility. To act can no longer start with projecting an ideal destination in some faraway future, but with producing a break in the present, a shift in how we choose to perceive its coordinates. Without maps, without a dictionary or directory to guide our search, we begin to look towards the emotions and sentiments that might comprise a world of affects to be shared, and less at the visual evidence of the state of the world as we know it. This is how cinema can give us courage: by reframing what is given as evident, by proposing a world that resists the pronunciation of the vanity of all action, by participating in the constitution of a new collective sentiment. For those who feel out of place, undignified, exploited, humiliated, a search for trust inevitably involves a negotiation between one sense and another, between the intelligibility of our world and the sensibility of an other. And isn’t that, after all, one of the tensions animating Marxism?

24 April 2014 19:30
Université Populaire de Bruxelles, Brussels.
At the invitation of Arenberg Cinémas Nomades.

Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub
Sicilia!
IT, 1999, Italian with French subtitles, 66’

Based on Elio Vittorini’s Conversations in Sicily, narrating the return of an intellectual to his native Sicily after a long absence. Moving beyond the original’s immediate context—the increasing oppression of pre-war Italy—Straub/Huillet offer a touching look at the state of permanent exile common to all of those who can’t go home again.

Umiliati (Humiliated)
IT, 2003, Italian with French subtitles, 34′

The survivors of World War II wander throughout liberated Italy, searching for their past and a future. Tired of wandering, a group of men and women who’ve lost everything, decide to try to restore something from among the rubble and to set out on a new life. Based on extracts from Le Donne di Messina by Elio Vittorini.

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Par un beau matin, je me suis vu invité à proposer des films pour un programme de projections et de débats autour du « retour du marxisme »….

Comment quelqu’un qui n’a jamais lu Marx peut-il répondre à ce genre d’invitation ?

Il semble en effet que la notion de marxisme retrouve aujourd’hui une nouvelle force d’attraction, une nouvelle légitimité, même – ou plus spécialement – envers ceux qui sont arrivés après l’insurrection , et la dissolution suséquente des mouvements émancipateurs en ’68.
Même pour ceux qui ont choisi assez tôt dans leur vie de consacrer une humble partie de leur temps et de leur énergie à la culture du cinéma , cet art de bâtard qu’un adepte du marxisme a un jour défini comme « le plus important de tous les arts » , même pour ceux-là, le temps est venu où la politique revient à l’ordre du jour.

Comment, celui qui a toujours préféré l’obscurité et la sécurité d’une salle de cinéma à celle, plus incertaine, de ce lieu étrange appelé «la société », comment peut-il gérer cette prise de conscience que cette lutte constante qu’est la politique le concerne, et l’a sans doute toujours concerné ?
On fait donc ce qu’on peut : on relie tout ce qu’on ne comprend pas à tout ce qu’on apprécie et connaît….et même si beaucoup de certitudes commencent à s’effondrer, et avec elles notre regard sur le monde, notre amour ne se flétrit pas. Il se renforce.

Un beau soir, vous vous retrouvez en compagnie d’un grand cinéaste qui vous rappelle qu’il est intéressant de rester vulnérable, qu’il faut travailler avec cela. Il vous parle alors de cette peur qui nous touche tous, la peur causée par ce qu’on nous dit qu’on n’a pas, et qu’on ne pourra jamais avoir. Une peur si forte qu’elle nous glaçe et nous éloigne de ce que nous avons de plus cher.
Cette peur, nous la mettons de côté et nous nous réfugions dans des certitudes préexistantes, suivant inlassablement le « bon vieux sens commun », doucement bercés dans des espaces sombres, par les rêves d’ombres et de lumières pré-fabriqués qui nous offrent un sentiment de confort. En réaction contre ce sentiment diffus d’angoisse et de conformisme, le cinéaste insiste sur la nécessité d’inventer d’autres mondes , de prendre des risques et d’explorer les voies qui pourraient nous donner la force de dépasser nos limites.
Dans la vie comme au cinéma.
Il exprime alors sa grande admiration pour deux autres cinéastes qui ont choisi cette voie et qui ont créé une cinématographie exceptionnelle, capable de nous ouvrir à une nouvelle perception de la vie et de ses infinies possibilités. Un cinéma qui nous donne à ressentir toute l’intensité de la marche du monde, qui nous donne le sentiment de voir et non pas seulement d’aperçevoir, qui nous montre que nous ne vivons pas dans « le meilleur des mondes »…. Et ça, vous aussi vous commencez à le voir…

Un jour, vous réalisez alors que votre inquiétude et votre impression de désorientation sont partagées par beaucoup. Et vous commencez à comprendre que les histoires de rêves brisés et d’illusions perdues qui vous sont racontées depuis si longtemps ne disent pas grand-chose du monde dans lequel nous vivons. Vous sentez alors que, pour ceux qui ne savent comment vivre dans ce monde déglingué, agir devient une manière de mettre de la confiance dans ce qui nous semble incertain, dans cet espace inconnu de possibles dont nous voudrions tant prendre la responsabilité.
Et vous rendez compte que c’est peut-être la seule chose dont vous être sûrs d’être responsables.

Agir, c’est arrêter de se projeter dans un futur idéal et lointain, agir c’est créer une rupture dans le présent, une manière décalée d’en déchiffrer la carte. Sans plan, sans dictionnaire ou répertoire pour nous guider, nous explorons les émotions et les sentiments et nous partageons ces « affects » plutôt que de simplement proposer une illustration visuelle évidente de l’état du monde que nous connaissons.

C’est ainsi que le cinéma peut nous donner du courage : en recadrant ce qui est donné pour évident, en proposant un univers imperméable à l’expression de la vanité de nos actes et en contribuant à la naissance d’un nouveau sentiment collectif.

Pour tous ceux qui ne se sentent pas à leur place, les indignés, les humiliés, une recherche de confiance implique inévitablement la confrontation des avis et une négociation entre l’intelligibilité de notre monde et la sensibilité d’un autre.

Après tout, cela n’est-il pas aussi l’une des lignes de tension qui anime le Marxisme ?