Filmed by Jean Eustache for the television program, Les Enthousiastes, Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Delights presents a series of unstructured observations, free associations, and interpretations on the third panel of Bosch’s well-known oil on wood triptych by Eustache’s friend, Jean Frapat before a small captive audience. From the onset, Eustache creates a wry and playful […]
Composed as an uninterrupted conversation with Jean Eustache’s sprightly, talkative, nearly blind, septuagenarian maternal grandmother, Odette Robert, Numéro Zéro prefigures the studies in narrative construction of Une Sale histoire in its illustration of performance and interpenetrating film reality. Inspired by their conversation during an afternoon stroll, the film reflects Eustache’s assumed role as archivist, creating […]
Something of a germinal template for Raymond Depardon’s Profils Paysans films on a dying way of life in rural (and largely forgotten) France, Jean Eustache and Jean-Michel Barjol’s reverent, vital, and painstakingly observed ethnographic documentary Le Cochon chronicles a day in the life of peasant farmers in the mountainous region of the Massif Central. In […]
In the autumn of 1990, renowned Spanish artist Antonio Lopez Garcia enters his Madrid studio and begins to assemble a large canvas for his new painting. The subject of his still life is a fruit laden quince tree in the courtyard. Lopez proves to be a meticulous craftsman. He drives three long poles into the […]
Incited by increasingly prophetic remarks from the international community that the Darfur crisis is reaching the level of genocide, Sudanese native and British immigrant Taghreed Elsanhouri returns to her beloved homeland to create the provocative, insightful, and illuminating documentary, All About Darfur. Consisting of a series of interviews with ordinary citizens, government officials, displaced, often […]
In an interview with Scott MacDonald for A Critical Cinema 2, Su Friedrich comments that the inspiration for her first feature film arose from the idea of her mother’s seeming uprootedness despite having settled in the United States since after the war. This sentiment of an elusive home suffuses her mother, Lore Bucher Friedrich’s candid, […]