Jean Eustache films his grandmother, Odette Robert, who in turn questions him, making the film a self-portrait and a document about the filmmaker’s working-class origins.
EN
“Grandparents played an important role in the lives of many French filmmakers during this period. The generation born in the Twenties often sent their children to the countryside to live with their grandparents: this allowed the children to be better fed during the German Occupation, and the parents to enjoy life immediately after the war. The result was a reverence for grandparents and a rejection of the father and mother - a crisis that fertilized a number of artistic careers.”
Luc Moullet1
Jean Eustache: I made this film in order to prove myself to myself and to lay out around me certain ideas that have nothing to do with cinema, that concern my private life. Okay. And not only did I not prove anything at all, but today I find it utopian to have hoped that making a film could modify anything in my life. But, on the other hand, as I shot and edited this film - there were 10 days between the day I shot it and when I screened it - I understand quite a few things, notably that, for the first time, I immediately wanted to shoot something else, the next day or two days after I shot this Numéro zéro and I was, in a way, liberated, meaning that, to speak trivially, I no longer wanted to make good films. I want to shoot, I no longer want to make good films, whereas before there was still this kind of vanity that made me want to make good films. This idea completely slipped my mind. I don’t mean that I want to make anything, trashy films for example, I simply want to shoot.
Philippe Haudiquet: Do you mean that the act of shooting is all that counts for you? The activity that this represents?
Eustache: Yes, making films.
Philippe Haudiquet in conversation with Jean Eustache2
- 1Luc Moullet, “Better to Burn Out Than to Fade Away: Blue Collar Dandy,” Film Comment, Volume 36, Issue 5 (2000), 42.
- 2Philippe Haudiquet, “Interview with Jean Eustache,” MUBI Notebook, 24 September 2012. 0riginally published in La Revue du Cinéma, no. 250, May 1971. Translation by Ted Fendt.
