In A Dirty Story Jean Eustache presents the same story of storytelling twice: once in documentary fashion, filmed in 16mm black-and-white, and a second time in 35mm color with actors. Eustache invited his friend Jean-Noël Picq to sit down with a group of people to recount in detail how once, in the men’s room of a Parisian restaurant, he found a hole in the wall and peered through to a perfect view of the ladies’ room. In order to test his contention that the actor (Lonsdale) would prove more convincing than the real-life storyteller, Eustache placed the fictional version first. While the film never shows anything more shocking than a man talking, French censors gave the film an X rating, proving Eustache’s claim that “sex has nothing to do with morals, not even with aesthetics; sex is a metaphysical affair.”

The Pig was shot in one blustery day on a small French farm in the Massif Central. Two separate camera and sound crews carefully recorded the slaughtering, dismemberment, and evisceration of a pig and its subsequent conversion into sausages. Eustache, perhaps more than any other French filmmaker, made it his business to get as much of French culture down on film as he could, and here he records a practice that has all but vanished in the face of industrialization. One of Eustache’s most beautiful films, the work is also notable for its vivid sound track, alive with the thick, unintelligible patois of the farm workers.