Jean-Claude Rousseau

The title is playing with us, claiming that the film is a detective story. Witch in a way it is not untrue. The camera is peeping tom and it does not lose a thing (almost) in its surveillance: every movement, people coming and going, sounds, a sudden shot... A crime ? Maybe. Some phone calls and nobody answering: another crime ?

Jean-Claude Rousseau's Jeune femme à sa fenêtre lisant une lettre is not only his first medium-length film, but a chance to discover this filmmaker whom Jean-Marie Straub has called, along with Frans Van de Staak and Peter Nestler, the greatest working in Europe. With this newly restored print there is also a possibility to discover the relationship between Rousseau's art of filming and Jan Vermeer's famous painting. As Prosper Hillairet wrote in 1988, four years after Rousseau had finished Jeune femme ... (for the first time as we know today): «Without adopting the usual systematic spirit and form of cinéma structurel, Rousseau presents us with simple images and leaves it at that. Keeps the image in hand. A minimalist and ascetic expression of cinema: a shot that lasts.»

A double bed with untouched sheets. A man is sitting in the room, hat and coat placed next to him. He is waiting. He gets up and walks into an adjoining room. Background sounds turn into voices emerging from the next room, with the places steadily getting closer to each other. The man's waiting is directly communicated to the viewers. It's a waiting for the next discovery, which needs no looking for, because it can be made anywhere.

A hotel room and a few sweets, their wrappers stacked like gold leaf... An interview with Chantal Akerman and ongoing coverage of the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, and what emerges is a genuine tragedy, as simple as Racine's.

Jean-Claude Rousseau homage to Michael Snow’s film Wavelength.

The loneliness of the white fish in the goldfishes’ aquarium.