LAST STOP FOR THE CIRCULAR TICKET

THE THEATER OF THE MATTERS & TAUFIC PRESENT: JEAN-CLAUDE ROUSSEAU’S ‘THE PASTORAL CONCERT’ + ‘LAST STOP FOR THE CIRCULAR TICKET’ This book launch event celebrates the release of Jean-Claude Rousseau’s unclassifiable, long-unavailable film text, The Pastoral Concert, published for the first time in English this October by Taufic. The evening will culminate in a special premiere screening of Rousseau’s new feature film, LAST STOP FOR THE CIRCULAR TICKET (winner of a Jury Special Mention at this year’s FIDMarseille), alongside his 2006 short, FAUX DéPART.

The Pastoral Concert marks the first English translation of Rousseau’s early written work Le Concert champêtre, begun in 1968, some fifteen years before his debut film. Rousseau continued shaping the work as a screenplay until its rejection by the Centre National de la Cinématographie in 1983. Unrealized, Le Concert champêtre became the matrix from which Rousseau’s subsequent films would emerge.

Taking its title and three central characters (A, B, and C) from the eponymous painting long attributed to Giorgione and now to Titian, The Pastoral Concert begins as a letter written by a young man to his cousin in the countryside on the eve of her wedding, before mutating into a diary entry, a screenplay, and finally a film imagined through the failure of its own realization. In this restless fluctuation between registers, The Pastoral Concert expresses, in the words of Jean-Marie Straub, “something magnificent [and] entirely different from a screenplay or a découpage.”

Translated from the French by artist and filmmaker Kevin Weil, this edition includes an extensive appendix of extra-diegetic materials written by Rousseau, as well as correspondence with contemporaries such as Dominique Noguez, Marcel Hanoun, and Jean-Marie Straub, which form a picture of the work’s early reception.

For more info about The Pastoral Concert visit: https://taufic.org/the-pastoral-concert

Jean-Claude Rousseau LAST STOP FOR THE CIRCULAR TICKET / DERNIER ARRêT POUR LE BILLET CIRCULAIRE 2026, 87 min, DCP. No dialogue. Rousseau’s longest film since THE ENCLOSED VALLEY from 1995 (the summit of his 8mm era), LAST STOP FOR THE CIRCULAR TICKET refers to the looped ferry route that plies the waters of Lake Como in Northern Italy. Firmly grounded in place, Rousseau’s solitary camera finds desolate poetry in the void of the spectacular landscape and in the anonymous crowds of passengers seemingly entranced at the edge of an abyss. Musical chords and voices magnify their gestures and the movement of the vessel on the lake. Closing the circle, the specter of the end looms: “On the ferry, among the travelers, I recognized Mrs. Death…”

Preceded by: Jean-Claude Rousseau FAUX DéPART (2006, 13 min, DCP. No dialogue.)

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