A few weeks ago, Les films du Losange, the production company and distributor founded by Ăric Rohmer and Barbet Schroeder in 1962, announced that it had acquired the entire filmography of Jean Eustache, whose The Mother and the Whore (1973) is widely regarded as an underseen masterwork. This week, mk2 Films announced its acquisition of the bulk of work by Jacques Rozier. In 2011, Ed Howard called Rozierâs Adieu Philippine (1962) âa forgotten classic of the French New Wave.â The revival of these two oeuvres will fill in some fairly significant gaps in the commonly accepted history of French cinema since that movement rerouted its course.
Rozier, now ninety-five, carried on working sporadically into the 2000s, and then last summer, he faced eviction from his home in Neuilly-sur-Seine. His wife was ill, and the couple had nowhere to go, but fortunately, filmmaker and writer Paul Vecchiali came to his aid. Itâs heartening to know that heâs alive to see the rescue and renewed appreciation of his work.
In his outstanding 2016 article on what is sometimes called the Second New Wave or the post-New Wave for New Yorkâs Metrograph, Nick Pinkerton noted that Eustache, talking to Cahiers in 1978, âstated that the âtwo or threeâ films that had given him reason to love the cinema since 1968 were from [Maurice] Pialat and Rozier, citing in particular Pialatâs The Mouth Agape (1974) and Rozierâs The Castaways of Turtle Island (1976).â Pinkerton opened his piece with Eustache first showing up âwithout great fanfareâ in the Cahiers offices in 1962. Luc Moullet, noted Pinkerton, later recalled Eustache, a skilled editor who had worked for French television, âas being haunted by a film that he hoped to get underway, The Mother and the Whore, with the screenplay in part based on surreptitiously taped conversations and arguments with girlfriends.â
Eustacheâs son, Boris, had been keeping his fatherâs films out of distribution for decades before Les Films du Losange was finally able to strike a deal. Charles Gillibert, who took over as the companyâs president last summer, tells Screenâs Melanie Goodfellow that the immediate aim is to undertake 4K restorations, beginning with The Mother and the Whore. A complete retrospective should follow. As Dave Kehr, a film curator at the Museum of Modern Art, tweets, âThis is a pretty big deal.â
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