Actor · Director · Screenwriter · 1938–1981

Jean Eustache

3: briefs
13:00: average
39 min: in total

On film.briefs3

The American Friend

Wim Wenders · 1977

Wim Wenders’ 1977 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game stars Bruno Ganz as a terminally ill picture framer drawn into murder by Dennis Hopper’s enigmatic American, Tom Ripley. Shot in Hamburg and Paris by Robby Müller, with a sparse score by Jürgen Knieper, the film treats the thriller form as a vessel for existential portraiture — prioritising texture, hesitation, and linguistic nuance over plot mechanics. Its power lies in accumulation, not revelation.

13:00

The Mother and the Whore

Jean Eustache · 1973

Jean Eustache’s 1973 debut is a 217-minute French arthouse drama following three Parisians — an unemployed intellectual, his partner and her rival — through conversations, silences and small betrayals. Shot in real locations with no musical score, it builds meaning through accumulation of speech and gesture rather than plot. Though labelled a comedy, its tone is unsparing and its structure anti-dramatic. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes and has since been canonised as a pinnacle of post-New Wave realism.

13:00

Weekend

Jean-Luc Godard · 1967

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 Weekend follows a bourgeois couple’s disastrous road trip through a hallucinatory French countryside, where narrative collapses into allegory, history bleeds into farce, and revolution ends in cannibalism. Shot by Raoul Coutard and edited by Agnès Guillemot, it is a formally radical, politically abrasive essay-film that treats cinema as a site of ideological combat — not storytelling.