Jean Eustache’s La Maman et la putain: A film maudit twice over?

Abstract

This article examines the reasons why the label of film maudit is all too applicable to Jean Eustache’s nowadays little-known masterpiece La Maman et la putain, offering a succinct overview of the director’s career and the film as well as situating it within the time of its making and release and analysing its subsequent distributional vicissitudes. Along with a brief scrutiny of what exactly might be meant by the term film maudit, it offers an analysis of the reasons why the film’s accessibility is so restricted and a summary of available (and not-so-available) secondary sources dealing with it.