““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, www.kask.be.
Jean Eustache considered the making of his first feature film Numéro zéro as a return to the beginning of cinema, of stripping the medium to its essence. A crew consisting of him and his son — a two-camera setup, cutting irregularly between the two angles only when one ran out of 16mm film. Eustache referred to it as “the prototype for a film.” “It’s something like L’arrivée du train en gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station — Auguste & Louis Lumière). Maybe cinema could advance from this film.” It is a reduction of space to a single kitchen, a single figure facing the camera throughout the duration. Composed of long, stationary takes of Odette seated opposite her grandson at his kitchen table, it presents at once an engrossing — and by design, unabridged — account of a woman’s abundant life story and a transparent record of its own spare production, clapperboard markers and all.
This return to zero was not just a technological reset, but also brought Eustache, the so-called ‘blue-collar Dandy’, to his own working-class roots. It is an encounter with his grandmother — a key figure in his life and principal caregiver in his youth. Despite its stripped-down setup, the film is expansive, with the two discussing the harshness of her rural upbringing, her troubled marriage, the deaths of her children, and the deprivations of World Wars I and II. Jean-Marie Straub referred to the film as “perhaps the only film ever that you can call an important piece of sociology, without trashing the words ‘film’ and ‘sociology’.” It is a history underneath, not just a personal history but also that of France throughout the 20th century, told by those who are rarely able to narrate their own reality.
