A Dirty Story / The Pig

A DIRTY STORY : Deceptively simple in form and content, Eustache’s Une Sale Histoire is a fascinatingly complex investigation of the relationship between fiction and documentary, verbal and visual storytelling, and personal and universal desires. The film’s two sections mirror each other: in the first Michael Lonsdale acts in the role of a man explaining to a roomful of friends his past voyeuristic obsessions, while the second section shows an unscripted recording of Jean-Noël Picq, the man Lonsdale has played, recounting the same real-life tale. Eustache presents dramatic and authentic versions of the “dirty story” without authorial commentary and thus encourages the viewer to untangle a web of structural correspondences between the two sections as well as the sexual and moral implications of Picq’s candid confession.

THE PIG : 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 La Rosière de Pessac (1968) but also develops the tough yet compassionate lens he would soon apply to his feature narratives.`