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.
