Odette Robert, the condensed version of Numéro Zéro, is the lucid project of a director filming his grandmother for four hours — two full rolls of film: no more, no less. In this setup of splendid simplicity, it's hard to be more biographical; we grasp what determines a life and a destiny in a way that is complex yet succinct, and how they are written by historical or social movements that go beyond the individual. With Jean Eustache in the foreground of the shot, a mirror game also unfolds with Odette Robert: we inherit the lives of our ancestors. Their lives seep into us, whether we want it or not. It's evident that this is a very significant film for the spoken word in cinema; Jean Eustache shows that a movie can unfold based on the spoken word thanks to the people in the image but also because the words themselves are images – strong, striking and overwhelming images… There is a disturbing and "eloquent" anecdote about Wang Bing who went on to direct Fengming, A Chinese Memoire (2007) after watching Numéro Zéro… without having understood a single word of it.

Arnaud Hée
Programmer, teacher and critic