LE COCHON / "Employment Offer” / “Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Delights”

ABOUT THE FILMS:

LE COCHON, 1970, Dir: Jean Eustache, 52 Minutes, Janus Films, France. 

In French with English subtitles. 

Co-directing with Jean-Michel Barjol, Eustache creates for LE COCHON a cinéma vérité record of a farming community’s ritual slaughter of a pig in Pessac, the filmmaker’s rural hometown. The documentary captures in unflinching detail – and in beautifully unpolished black-and-white cinematography – the procedural killing, dismembering, and processing of the animal, resulting in a depiction of both the physical gruesomeness and artisanal craft of such work. LE COCHON not only builds upon Eustache’s ethnographic representation of working class custom and tradition in THE VIRGIN OF PESSAC (1969) but also develops the tough yet compassionate lens he would soon apply to his feature narratives.

“Employment Offer”, 1981, Dir: Jean Eustache, 19 Minutes, Janus Films, France. 

In French with English subtitles. 

Eustache’s final film – commissioned for the French television series “Modern Tales” – is a sharp satire of contemporary man’s dehumanization at the hands of specialized psychology. In the first half an unemployed, middle-aged sales director (Michel Delahaye) seeks a job from the want ads and performs well in his interview. In the second half a handwriting analyst (Michèle Moretti) determines the suitability of each candidate by reading into their cover letters’ various subconscious weaknesses and faults. Like much of Eustache’s later work, “Employment Offer” contrasts different modes of communication, with an emphasis on the considerable blind spots in human understanding and interrelationships.

“Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Delights”, 1982, Dir: Jean Eustache, 34 Minutes, Janus Films, France. 

In French with English subtitles. 

French television series “Les enthousiastes” asked art aficionados to offer their thoughts and interpretations about paintings that they themselves selected. For Eustache’s episode, Jean-Noël Picq (of A DIRTY STORY) chose the third panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, an apocalyptic nightmare-scape that predicted the darkest reaches of surrealism by almost 400 years. Looking beyond its obvious grotesqueries, Picq points out several notable qualities of Bosch’s masterwork, including its near-absence of perspective, its conflation of ontological categories (human and animal, living and dead, time and space), and its objective depiction of sadomasochistic pleasure.