Over five decades, the French artist Jean-Louis Costes has constructed an immense body of work. A prolific songwriter, musician, performance artist, writer and filmmaker, he is perhaps best known, if he is known at all, for his music, especially his synth-driven industrial noise, though his musical output, like his film work, is impressively and deceptively varied. The comparison “the French GG Allin” comes from the bodily confrontation and audience provocation in their respective live performances. It can offer a rough orientation for viewers unfamiliar with Costes, but does nothing to explain his artistic project. Inside of France, his books are respected, while his incendiary satirical lyrics have made him the target of lawsuits and criminal investigations.
Abroad, some will know his collaborations with Lisa Carver (Suckdog, Rollerderby), his former wife. Film viewers may recognize him from Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi’s BAISE-MOI (2000) and Gaspar Noé’s IRREVERSIBLE (2002). Yet his own film work is rarely screened, sitting at the bottom of his public reception, as unhinged as it is underseen. In fact, this program is the first serious retrospective of his films in the United States. The majority of the subtitles in English were created specifically for this program.
“The people who come to my shows are the outsiders of their own groups. It will be punks who are no longer totally satisfied with punk, goths although those won’t admit it. So they’re people who break away from their groups. It’s the anti-social people from everywhere.” – Jean-Louis Costes
“Costes is the ultimate French absurdist, and he and Lisa Carver wrote operas together and performed them at punk clubs. The mixture of personality and identity was fierce and mind-boggling and far more complex and intelligent than just accidental genius.” – Thurston Moore
Costes did not set out to make films, just as he did not set out to make music alone. He tried to play in bands, but nobody would take him. He set up a reel-to-reel in his flat and started alone. Piano on one track, vocals on the other. The one-second delay between the record and playback heads produced a chaotic style. He refused to choose between melody and noise, between pop and weird sounds, between lyric and texture, and he refused to give up making the unlikely thing of all of those at once. He wrote his own songs, recorded them himself, dubbed his own cassettes, and invented his own label. By 1984 the synthesis held. The home studio he built in his Saint-Denis basement gave him the freedom to produce music on his own terms.
The camcorder was bought to archive performances for VHS sales. He turned it on himself in his ruined loft. The first film, ONLY GOD SEES ME (DIEU SEUL ME VOIT), featured in Program 3, was a solo recording with no crew and no editing experience. The films in this retrospective come out of that lineage. The films were made because the camcorder, the basement, and the body were already there, and because he could take the camcorder on the road. No audience was presumed in advance. The result is a body of films that moves from Saint-Denis to Tokyo, New York, and the Amazonian jungle, and remains outside traditional circuits of exhibition, with no label, no distributor, and no institutional support.
This retrospective gathers a representative selection of short- and medium-length films from 1990 to 2006.
This is a retrospective for viewers willing to meet explicit, confrontational underground work directly. The films are formally and emotionally unhinged, and the lower register is fully present, staged through fiction and performance. Scatological content recurs. Often in revolting detail. Sexual content is unembarrassed and frequently violent. Sexual frustration runs through. But none of this exists, Costes claims, without dramaturgical necessity. The films remove the usual aesthetic protections. A romantic and playful streak runs through the work, although usually against all evidence. The slapstick humor, beauty, tenderness, frailty, weakness, and failure are part of the mechanism.
Program 1 is the clearest entry point, built around travel, media panic, and street romance. Program 2 turns inward: DEADLY GAS IN TOKYO is lonely and stylized, and I LOVE STUFF is the joyous, deranged pressure point. Program 3 is the wildcard, built around solitude, private ritual, and mystical collapse.
PROGRAM 1: WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE
THURSDAY, JULY 16 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JULY 20 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JULY 24 – 10:00 PM
TUESDAY, JULY 28 – 7:30 PM
“You’re in a kind of niche where nobody wants to touch anything related to failure. You know, everything about shame, failure in a person. That’s something that’s not show business at all… I deal with everything that is the hidden side of humanity.” – Jean-Louis Costes
MORPHO
Dir. Jean-Louis Costes, 1998
In French with English subtitles, 26 min.
A female scientist ventures into the Amazonian jungle in search of a legendary butterfly. A hunter offers to guide her to a remote spot where the creature is said to appear. But the hunter, played by Costes himself, turns out to be a dangerous sexual maniac. Pulp jungle exploitation shot almost entirely at remote locations in French Guiana. Reedited for DVD in 2007.
THE HEZBOLLAH VIRUS
Dir. Jean-Louis Costes, 2001
In French with English subtitles, 8 min.
Put in perspective by the September 11 events, a critique of the desensitization at work in media exposure, and the numbness produced by repeated exposure.
CRACK KISS
Dir. Jean-Louis Costes, 1991
In French with English subtitles, 23 min.
Costes in New York, hooked on crack because of a woman (Lydia Zamm). Shot on location in New York City, with an eclectic cast. Early-90s New York City sleaze in loose camcorder form: hotel rooms, street romance, and a ravaged downtown that refuses to stay in the background.
PROGRAM 2: THE MAD MASTER OF SAINT-DENIS
THURSDAY, JULY 16 – 10:00 PM
TUESDAY, JULY 21 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, JULY 25 – 10:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, JULY 29 – 7:30 PM
“Yes, I think I make operas. Well, in my head, they are operas, because there is a script. People think it is performance art, that we do whatever… work with the body, roll around in filth. But no: in my head, it is a romantic narrative. I couldn’t act like an idiot, or even drop my pants, without a narrative justification.” – Jean-Louis Costes
DEADLY GAS IN TOKYO
Dir. Jean-Louis Costes, 1995
Silent, 17 min.
A short film about loneliness and lost love. Costes in a shady Tokyo hotel room, surrounded by bars and love hotels. The woman he met won’t return his calls, so he fills the time playing with himself, his keyboard, and a plastic bag.
I LOVE STUFF
Dir. Jean-Louis Costes, 1996
In French with English subtitles, 51 min.
A couple struggling to pay the bills kidnaps their impotent neighbor’s wife and mails torture videos to her husband as ransom to get out of their financial hole! Costes plays the couple’s sadistic transvestite half, while his partner plays its dominatrix other half. Instead of paying the ransom, the impotent husband finds the ransom tapes arousing and asks for more videos, and from there things get a little more slippery.
PROGRAM 3: I LIVE ALONE
FRIDAY, JULY 17 – 11:55 PM
SATURDAY, JULY 25 – 11:55 PM
“I live alone deep in the countryside. Three hens and a rooster are my only friends. I’m out of money and will have to eat my hens. Then I’ll commit suicide.” Jean-Louis Costes
KILL & FUCK (excerpts from SEVEN DEADLY SINS AND A GRACE)
Dir. Jean-Louis Costes, 2005
In French unsubtitled, 4 min
From the SEVEN DEADLY SINS AND A GRACE collection.
NOOKY
Dir. Jean-Louis Costes, 1990
In French with English subtitles, 13 min.
Left alone, a man reverts to infancy: diapers, toys, and a deposit on the carpet. Every adult hides a child who just wants to be held. With Lisa Suckdog Carver.
DISCO COW
Dir. Jean-Louis Costes, 2025
Silent, 1 min.
In the Pyrenees Mountains, cows dance in the pastures and ring bells night and day.
ONLY GOD SEES ME (DIEU SEUL ME VOIT)
Dir. Jean-Louis Costes, 1990
Silent, 30 min.
Solitary home performance. The title is a Haitian expression for what one does in private when no one but God is watching.
SAUL AND THE SORCERESS
Dir. Jean-Louis Costes, 1997
In French with English subtitles, 22 min.
After yet another fight with his girlfriend, a man obsessed with the biblical story of Saul flees halfway across the world to Saül, a town in the Amazonian jungle of French Guiana, gets drunk, and walks into the night with a machete. His wife follows and finds him too late. One of the director’s strangest and most mystical films. Domestic collapse becomes biblical fatalism: a man mistakes escape for destiny, and discovers love only as regret after repair proves impossible.
Special Thanks to Jean-Louis Costes
Translation and Subtitles by Benjamin Pequet