In the French countryside it's the day for peasants to kill a big fat pig. The slaughter goes on for a great part of the day as they work to store 140kg worth of meat.

Jean Eustache (1938-81) was clearly obsessed with remakes. Not only did he remake his 1968 documentary about his home town, LA ROSIÈRE DE PESSAC, in 1979; he also remade his 1977 documentary UNE SALE HISTOIRE twice—first as a fiction film, and then, less literally, as a documentary about Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthy Delights” two years later.
Let me explain. The first version of UNE SALE HISTOIRE, designed to be shown second, and shot in 16mm, features Jean-Noël Picq recounting a supposedly real-life “dirty” story to a group of people, mainly women (although also including Eustache himself, visible in the foreground of a couple of shots)—a tale about peering for hours through a hole in the wall of a café into the ladies room in order to watch the snatches of women seated on the toilet. (He calls the women’s snatches their “holes,” and the word trou is repeated incessantly throughout his monologue.) The second version, shot in 35mm and designed to be shown first, adds a short prologue with critic Jean Douchet as a film director (an apparent stand-in for Eustache) asking Michael Lonsdale to tell the same story, this time to a different group of people (again mainly women, but not including Eustache)—which he does, using virtually the same words, while the women listeners make precisely the same comments. (The only previous time I saw this film, in Paris soon after it was made, these separate versions were shown respectively in 35mm and 16mm. In the Eustache retrospective currently touring in the U.S., they’re both shown on 35mm, which obscures some of the visual differences.)
As for HIERONYMOUS BOSCH’S “THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS”, this shows Picq again, in a different living room, describing and discussing Bosch’s famous triptych (see photo below), mainly the middle panel, to a group of young people, again mainly women, who again add a few comments of their own. The main emphasis here is on various body orifices.
An obsessive-compulsive filmmaker and clearly a tormented one who wound up dying by his own hand, Eustache was clearly experimenting with his variations as well as goading viewers into examining their own reactions to them. The monologue in both versions of UNE SALE HISTOIRE evokes many of the interminable monologues of Jean-Pierre Léaud in THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE (1973), all of which were reportedly real-life monologues that Eustache delivered to friends or lovers and then transcribed shortly afterwards.

2003 film by Jean Eustache

Two men in their twenties spend their time in Parisian cafes trying to pick up women. They take one girl dancing, and then steal her purse when she prefers to dance with another man.

Daniel needs some money to buy a duffle coat that is in fashion, so he agrees to work for a photographer by dressing up as Santa Claus. He discovers that it is much easier to meet girls when he is in his costume.

Ostensibly an informal guided commentary through personal photographs taken by Alix Cléo Roubaud for a young interviewer (Boris Eustache), Jean Eustache's Les Photos d'Alix ingeniously explores the nature of reality and perspective within the framework of documentary filmmaking. This sense of trompe l'oeil is prefigured in an early double exposed photograph of Alix's husband, novelist Jacques Roubaud taken from a London hotel room, explaining that the duality had been intentionally developed in order to simulate an elongated profile that more appropriately conforms to the traditional notion of a Hollywood style bed, a manipulation of image that is also illustrated in a subsequent photograph of an induced sunset created by selective masking. Eustache's approach to the film similarly expounds on Alix's photographic experimentation, juxtaposing the curious image of a smiling, shirtless man seemingly disembodied below the rib cage against Alix's comical, if askew anecdote on plying a friend with alcoholic beverages in order to look more relaxed as she takes his picture on a couch. In another humorous episode, Alix conveys the fond memories her father through what she describes as the most iconic image of him from her childhood, revealing a shot of a driver's ear and receded hairline taken from the back of a car, his face partially visible only through the reflection of the rearview mirror. Soon, the conversation grows even more puzzling, as the young man apparently fails to recognize himself in a photograph, Alix incongruously points out the admirable physicality of an unknown man who was accidentally captured on film, as a naked, overweight man stands on the side of the frame, and her revelry on the coincidence of having two former romantic interests converging in the same shot is seemingly reduced to the banal image of a pair of worn boots. As Alix's insights into her sources of inspiration and creative process become increasingly dissociated from the images, Eustache illustrates the point of rupture between the visual and aural, where filmed storytelling lies, not in the symmetry of information, but in its chance intersections and disjunctions.
---- from strictly film school

1974 film by Jean Eustache

Aimless young Alexandre juggles his relationships with his girlfriend, Marie, and a casual lover named Veronika. Marie becomes increasingly jealous of Alexandre's fling with Veronika and as the trio continues their unsustainable affair, the emotional stakes get higher, leading to conflict and unhappiness.