For the cinephiles who came of age in the 1960s and ’70s, the late French director Jean Eustache was a towering figure to stand with his countrymen Godard and Rivette. To younger filmgoers he is merely a rumour. None of the 11 films he produced between 1963 and 1980 (Eustache committed suicide in 1981 at the age of 43) are readily available on DVD, which raises the stakes of Cinematheque Ontario’s retrospective considerably — it’s a massive blind spot filled in.

Most viewers will probably be inclined to start with Eustache’s most famous feature, 1973’s The Mother and the Whore (?????; July 11, 7pm) despite its forbidding particulars: it’s a three-and-a-half hour 16mm black-and-white drama that unfolds in dingy cafés and cramped apartments, building to the most famous vomiting scene this side of Team America: World Police.

It’s also a masterpiece. Eustache’s Cannes Grand Prix Winner, a sensation on its release and an art-house touchstone to this day (catch the vintage poster in Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale) is a curdled, gender-switched variation on Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, in which two women — 30-ish bookshop owner Marie (Bernadette Lafont) and pretty young nurse Veronika (Francoise Lebrun) — are driven to distraction and far worse by fatuous, philosophy-spouting motor-mouth Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud).

The echoes of Truffaut’s movie — an early, exhilarating triumph of the New Wave — resonates because The Mother and the Whore positions itself as a valedictory work for French cinema’s most fecund period: a dark, despairing communiqué from the countercultural aftermath. Its sullen, self-destructive, endlessly chatting characters bear the scars of post-’68 disillusionment as they go about inflicting new psychological wounds on one another. Eustache, who reportedly based the screenplay on personal experience (and whose ex-girlfriend committed suicide after seeing the film) had a scarily keen ear for the language of emotional terrorism, and yet the film resonates beyond its cruelties.

Eustache’s 1974 follow-up, Mes petites amoreuses (????; July 14, 7pm) doesn’t have its predecessor’s lacerating intensity or heft, but it’s similarly revealing of its creator’s inner life; where The Mother and the Whore purged the hard-living director’s recent past, Mes petites amoreuses reached back to Eustache’s childhood, rendering a country boy’s (Martin Loeb) coming-of-age in a series of precise, faintly troubling episodes.

The film hits some familiar marks — there’s the idyllic provincial village crawling with cute provincial girls, the move to the city with its more sophisticated and glamorous female inhabitants, the daily visits to the local cinema as a means of staving off boredom and stoking erotic imagination — but nary a trace of sentimentality. Nor does the film exaggerate the small indignities and hormonal torments of adolescence: formative events are rendered with a matter-of-factness that only heightens their intimacy. The specific quality of these moments at once confirms their personal significance for Eustache and imbues them with powerful, universal impact.