This article was published in a comprehensive collection of bibliographical entries on French film directors. The piece explores Jean Eustache’s approach to filmmaking as well as his troubled existence as reflected through his films, with a career cut short after committing suicide at the age of 42. The piece explores his body of work comprising thirteen short films and two feature films, and in particular his seminal 3 hours 40 minutes long film La Maman et a Putain (The Mother and the Whore, 1972) with its central iconic performance from Jean-Pierre Léaud. With particular reference to this film, the piece discusses language and parole as being central to Eustache’s vision and thus the way in which he creates an ‘art of dialogue’, not least through the intensely verbose character of Alexandre.

In particular, the piece examines Jean Eustache as a filmmaker situated on the periphery of the French New Wave who, rather than fully adopting and embracing their improvisational techniques, crafted his own unique filmmaking style based on rigorous scripting, imbued with a deep sense of melancholy and dystopia, symbolic of the post-1968 climate.

As such, the article explores Eustache’s implicit critique of the French New Wave, while also pointing to some commonalities including the literary angle in his work, for example the echoes of Gustave Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale in Le Père Noël a les yeux blues (1966). His work also carries elements of the French New Wave in its reliance on elements of autobiography, whilst developed into a kind of ‘autofiction’, elevating the sense of self and the everyday into a concept of life-as-art and, by extension, the concept of the flâneur.