June 26 - 30, 2025 at Anthology Film Archives
Since the 1980s, Jean-Claude Rousseau has created a quiet yet formidable body of lyrically materialist films, forged from the substance and habits of his solitary and deliberate life. Starting without a subject or a script, Rousseau trains his vision on himself, the things he finds around him, and the places he dwells in or passes through—whether it’s in France, Italy, Japan, or New York, often in the liminal space of hotel rooms—and out of this accumulation of cinematographic matter he fashions his films, ordering these blocks together with profound respect for the singularity of time and space contained in each durational shot. For Rousseau, it’s not about seeking, but finding, and nothing he finds is taken for granted: the most everyday view from a window or the minutest relation of sound and image can be a site of explosive discovery. “With each stroke, I risk my life”—this is a phrase often heard from Rousseau, a quotation from Paul Cézanne. The apparent modesty of this method extends to his choice of formats: his early work was shot in Super-8mm, while his films since the early 2000s have been exclusively made on video. While the scope and means of his films couldn’t be slighter, the object of Rousseau’s cinema is nothing less than the mystery of movement, time, color, and light. And for all its ascetic rigor, there is a latent, lingering romanticism to everything he’s made, founded in his love for popular cinema and old sentimental music.
In this rare and long-overdue series, we are proud to present the entirety of Rousseau’s Super-8mm output for the first time in New York, the majority of which will screen on 16mm prints directly from the filmmaker, while his first film, Jeune femme à sa fenêtre lisant une lettre, will be shown via a new 2K DCP. Also in the program are two films shot on video, including the 2022 short Welcome, the most recent work he’s made in New York, where he’s lived sporadically during his life (and where he’s been a frequent patron of Anthology Film Archives). Finally, as a counterpoint to Rousseau’s own films, we offer a screening of Ruggles of Red Gap by Leo McCarey, a director who, for Rousseau, rivals Robert Bresson in importance.
Program 1
Jeune femme à sa fenêtre lisant une lettre
Dir. Jean-Claude Rousseau
1983. 47 min. 2K DCP.
In French with English subtitles.
Rousseau’s first film, shot in Super-8mm, is an experiential meditation on vision via an encounter with Johannes Vermeer. For this rare screening, we present a new 2K digitization of the film’s sole copy, preserved on a single roll of Kodachrome color-reversal film. The DCP was supervised by Rousseau himself in collaboration with a group of students and teachers at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, led by Manuel Asín and Carlos Saldaña.
“In Jeune femme..., the reels follow one another like the exhibition of a lack, that is to say, like an evocation of desire. No project to accomplish, no editing to follow. Each reel remains whole.... It is hard to see the landscape through the window. A street, a canal, the view of Delft, the port maybe. We are indoors, bathed in daylight. On the wall, the maps are bigger than the paintings, but we do not know where we are. The woman is by the window. She is standing, reading a letter. She has forgotten what the landscape is about after staring at the letter for too long. It could be any landscape, any pinpoint on the map...” –Jean-Claude Rousseau at New York University, February 12, 1988
screening with:
Keep in Touch
Dir. Jean-Claude Rousseau
1987. 25 min. 16mm.
In English and French with English subtitles.
“Keep in Touch explores waiting periods. The filmmaker sits at a table in a room in New York, blank stationary paper in front of him. He turns on a lamp, leafs through an erotic magazine. Meanwhile, we hear various messages left on an answering machine: whispers punctuated by “love, love, love”; switching French to English, the voice tells of a move back into an old apartment. Another, in English, surprised by the answering machine, half-heartedly solicits a second date. The film explores this pause; the time between the initial encounter and the waiting period. The persistent hum of the city is perceptible, pierced by an ambulance siren.” –Érik Bullot
Program 2
Les antiquités de Rome
Dir. Jean-Claude Rousseau
1984. 105 min. 16mm.
In French with English subtitles.
Rousseau’s first feature-length film, a work of oblique views, ellipses, and absences in the Italian capital, is made up of seven parts, plus one.
“Each of the first seven moments consists of a view, or rather a vision, of a Roman monument or one of its aspects, captured from a hotel window or from the street, in several shots, with vehicles or human beings passing by, or not. The seventh ends with one of the characters closing the shutters of the two bedroom windows, eyelids lowering and hiding the world from us, or what we believe it to be.” –Bertrand Ogilvie
“I often use poetic texts because they imply the liberation of the elements, the liberation of words. Poetry is already about seeing more than understanding; it is already about seeing the elements.
Newcomer, who looks for Rome in Rome,
And little of Rome in Rome can perceive
This is seen, and at the same time, we feel the meaning intuitively, without the need for discourse. It is through the very positioning of the elements, as with words in poetry, that this intuition becomes possible. Thus, in Les antiquités de Rome, the two lines of Du Bellay’s sonnet gave direction and already contained the film.” –Jean-Claude Rousseau
screening with:
Venise n’existe pas
Dir. Jean-Claude Rousseau
1984. 11 min. 16mm.
From the window of a hotel room, a sliver of Venice.
“Venise n’existe pas deciphers the Italian city in a very paradoxical way. We find the same harshness of appearance, the sharp cut of ambient sounds, the end-to-end of the Super-8mm reels, the window and the variations of light, the comings and goings of the filmmaker from the bed to the window... By concluding with a postcard that remains blurred for a very long time, Venise n’existe pas exposes the difficult crystallization of the image. From the bed to the window, from the bedroom to the journey, the filmmaker attempts to approach an image hidden from view, deferred or even dispatched from one place to another.” –Érik Bullot
Program 3
La vallée close
Dir. Jean-Claude Rousseau
1995. 145 min. 16mm.
In French with English subtitles.
In the mid-1980s, Rousseau visited the Fontaine de Vaucluse in Southern France, a grotto along the Sourgue river where, at springtime, a violent torrent of water suddenly gushes forth. Rousseau would continually return to this site over the next ten years, drawn by the primordial pull of this strange phenomenon, the inspiration for many folktales and legends. He brought along a Super-8mm camera given to him by his parents, and the accumulation of this material resulted in his seminal second feature, La vallée close.
“Every shot (frame, image, light) of La vallée close issues a roll of the dice, and casts into nothingness three-quarters of contemporary film—along with its directors of photography.” – Jean-Marie Straub
“La vallée close emerged from different elements and I was watching the elements orient themselves without being able to say where it was leading. These different vectors were converging at a single place and making the film itself this nexus: Petrarch, a geography book, a Giorgione painting, an erotic photo, an abandoned factory, the fountain at Vaucluse, and then inspiring correspondences between all these, as if validating them, the text by Lucretius on the movement of atoms, or more exactly, Bergson’s summary of it that he did in a book for philosophy students.” –Jean-Claude Rousseau, interviewed by Cyril Neyrat
Program 4
De son appartement
Dir. Jean-Claude Rousseau
1995. 69 min. Digital.
In French with English subtitles.
Alone in his apartment, Rousseau reads excerpts from Bérénice by Jean Racine.
“This film is not an adaptation of Jean Racine's Bérénice: I didn't go looking for Bérénice; Bérénice came to the film. She fills it.” –Jean-Claude Rousseau
“For a long time, I'd wanted to see if I could make a tragedy with that simplicity of action that was so strongly favored by the ancients. There are those who think that this simplicity is a sign of little invention. They don't realize that, on the contrary, all invention consists in making something out of nothing.” –Racine, preface to Bérénice, 1670
“What makes this film distinctive is the way Rousseau explicitly returns to the source of his creative inspiration. So here he is at home reciting Bérénice to himself, whilst going about his household chores. It verges on the comical: there are repeated shots of him obstinately trying to turn off a dripping tap, or the jubilant close up of bare feet carried away in performing a dance step or two. Combining art with life in such a way, that nothing is compartmentalised, nothing lost—that is the goal.” –Jean-Pierre Rehm, VIENNALE
screening with:
Welcome
Dir. Jean-Claude Rousseau
2022. 18 min. Digital.
Rousseau’s second film made in New York, thirty-five years after Keep in Touch. In the solitude of an apartment, a piece of cardboard beats against the window, at the whim of the wind, like a beating heart.
Program 5
Ruggles of Red Gap
Dir. Leo McCarey
1935. 90 min. 35mm.
In English.
Leo McCarey, a filmmaker deeply admired by Rousseau (and by Ozu and Renoir), directs this rowdy and profound romp wherein Charles Laughton plays a British butler brought unwillingly to the American West.
“Laughton’s moment of self-redemption comes in Ruggles when he comprehends his independence while reciting Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address—an American Aeneid in two hundred and seventy one words; no text but the Bible was more sacred. Yet what gives force to this verbal paean to human freedom (this rejection of class status by the lower class rather than through liberation by the upper class), and to Ruggles’ inner revolution, is the way McCarey socializes Ruggles’ individual rite of passage.... Lincoln’s words and Ruggles’ revolution become a ritual in which we all share.” –Tag Gallagher
Speaking of another McCarey film, An Affair to Remember, and evoking Robert Bresson in the process, Rousseau once wrote, “The film carries us there [to a happy ending], in a tension produced by what is not said, by what is not shown, in a formal restraint without artifice because it finds its necessity in the very story that is told to us. And this story, since it is that of the unsaid and the unshown, is none other than that of the cinématographe.”
Special thanks to Jean-Claude Rousseau; Jed Rapfogel (Anthology Film Archives); Carlos Saldaña; Hannah Yang (Doc Films).