Mostrando las entradas con la etiqueta Eric Rohmer. Mostrar todas las entradas
Mostrando las entradas con la etiqueta Eric Rohmer. Mostrar todas las entradas
13.1.10
Más sobre Eric Rohmer
Among the films Eric Rohmer directed in the ninth and last decade of his life were “The Lady and the Duke,” set in the embattled aristocracy of 18th-century France, and “The Romance of Astrea and Celadon,” based on a 17th-century French literary pastoral. These were not Mr. Rohmer’s only forays into the past — in the mid-’70s he made “Perceval” and “The Marquise of O ...” — but period dress was hardly this filmmaker’s habitual get-up.
Rather, the name (or the pseudonym) Eric Rohmer conjures a particular tableau of modern Europe, in which generally well-clothed (and occasionally unclothed), nicely spoken men and women converse in picturesque settings, reflecting calmly on the unruly desires to which they cannot help falling prey. His interest always gravitated toward the sexual mores and intellectual preoccupations of the present. And while some aspects of late-20th-century life — most notably, politics — were absent from his palette, he was also free of nostalgia or grandiosity. Meals, conversations, love affairs, excursions to the countryside and trips to the beach: his zest for observing such happenings was inexhaustible.
Still, those two late explorations of an older world don’t seem anomalous when set against earlier, better-known films like “Claire’s Knee” (1970) and “My Night at Maud’s” (1969). Instead, the characters and situations in “The Lady and the Duke” (2001) and “The Romance of Astrea and Celadon” (2007), borrowed from literature and history, appear quintessentially Rohmerian and unmistakably contemporary. Not because the nobles and shepherds who populate the films strike us as anachronistically modern, but rather because most of Mr. Rohmer’s other films can be described as classical.
His principal subject was passion, which he explored in various configurations. Mr. Rohmer, who died on Monday at 89, was interested in triangles, but also in more complicated geometrical patterns. In “Boyfriends and Girlfriends” (1987), “La Collectionneuse” (1967) and “Pauline at the Beach” (1983), desire ricochets between and within various pairings.
Even relatively simple scenarios — an accidental glance at a girl’s leg in “Claire’s Knee,” the more-or-less conventional adultery of “Chloe in the Afternoon” (1972) — yield reversals and paradoxes that defy easy summary. But even at their most feverish and fraught, these situations are diagramed with precision and detachment. Passion may be the subject, but the method is reason.
In an earlier era Mr. Rohmer might have been an exemplary man of letters. And he was, in the first phase of his career, a novelist, a critic and a scholar. But when he embraced cinema, which he saw as the pre-eminent art form of the time, he did so very much in the literary spirit of the 17th and 18th centuries, insisting it was fully compatible with both the medium and the age.
“Believe it or not,” he once wrote, “Diderot is a more modern scriptwriter than Faulkner is.” In the same essay Mr. Rohmer — or rather, Maurice Schérer, as he was then known — declared that “The classical age of cinema is not behind us, but ahead.” The strongest evidence for this contention would turn out to be his own oeuvre.
Mr. Rohmer made his prophecy in 1949, when the French embrace of American novelists and Hollywood filmmakers was at its most ardent. Along with other young polemicists at the journal Cahiers du Cinéma, he championed Nicholas Ray, Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, helping to establish a canon of film history and to lay the groundwork for the art form’s next phase. In the late 1950s Mr. Rohmer’s colleagues went from theory to practice, turning Cahiers du Cinéma’s axioms and arguments into a movement identified (though not by them) as the New Wave.
It is worth pausing to marvel at just how many of them are still around, and still producing work that upholds a tradition of iconoclasm. Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Alain Resnais — all are figures in French cinema’s present as well as in its past.
Mr. Rohmer was the oldest of the group and something of a late bloomer as a filmmaker, hitting his stride with “The Moral Tales,” a cycle of six films (two shorts and four features) that began with “The Bakery Girl of Monceau” in 1962 and concluded with “Chloe in the Afternoon” 10 years later.
“The Moral Tales” and the cycles that followed — the six “Comedies and Proverbs” in the 1980s and the “Tales of the Four Seasons” in the 1990s — are the essential Rohmer. Other filmmakers manufacture sequels or burrow repeatedly into genres. His cycles are unusual in the way that they arrange self-contained narratives around themes, ideas and suggestive anecdotes. They don’t make arguments so much as offer slightly different views of similar problems. What happens when we fall in or out of love? How do accidental occurrences impinge on our plans and ambitions? What happens next?
These are not necessarily timeless questions, at least not in the way that fundamental problems of philosophy are. But they are always part of life, and framing them — in language and in pictures, the constituent elements of Mr. Rohmer’s movies (he rarely used music) — is what art does. Classicism is an approach that takes up these problems as they occur, without worrying too much about their contemporary relevance or their permanence. The cynical lovers in “La Collectionneuse” or their innocent counterparts in “Boyfriends and Girlfriends” are who and where they are, which is to say in French movies, but they would also be recognizable in 18th-century paintings or 17th-century plays, in England or Greece or Arcadia.
So Mr. Rohmer’s movies are unlikely to grow old. Future viewers seeking information about France in the 1960s will have to look elsewhere, to Mr. Godard, for example, who caught the spirit of the age. Social turmoil, sexual anxiety, changes in fashion and popular culture: these are all but invisible in Mr. Rohmer’s compositions, even as his words and images arise naturally from his milieu.
“Art is a reflection of our time,” he mused in 1949, when his own period of creativity still lay ahead of him. “But isn’t it also an antidote?”
Esta nota la escribí en enero de 2006 cuando se armó una retrospectiva completa de Rohmer, obviamente, en la Sala Lugones...
Rohmer, un cineasta generoso
Se verán más de veinte películas del octogenario realizador que fue parte de la Nouvelle Vague. Y se preestrenará su más reciente, "Triple Agente".
Diego Lerer.
dlerer@clarin.com
Uno de los más notables cineastas de la historia, Eric Rohmer siempre estuvo un poco a la sombra de nombres más promocionados de la nouvelle vague como Francois Truffaut o Jean-Luc Godard. Con sus 85 años, aún en actividad, Rohmer es una pieza clave de ese movimiento, acaso el más riguroso e influyente de sus integrantes.
Miembro de esa aristocracia de sobrevivientes del cine francés de los '60 (junto a Godard, Chabrol, Resnais y Rivette), este hombre nacido en Nancy como Maurice Scherer, es dueño de una obra distintiva por su combinación de clasicismo formal y modernidad narrativa, sus precisos conceptos teóricos y su fuerte impronta moral, por la generosidad para con sus personajes y por ser consecuente a un estilo que, con los años, se transformó en marca de fábrica. Hoy es común describir un filme como "rohmeriano", tal el caso del inminente Ana y los otros, de Celina Murga.
La Retrospectiva que se verá en el Malba durante todo enero confirma su categoría como creador único. Allí, además de proyectarse, por primera vez completas, sus tres series de filmes organizados temáticamente (Cuentos morales, Comedias y proverbios y Cuentos de las cuatro estaciones), se verán películas que prácticamente no tuvieron exhibición aquí como El signo de Leo; Perceval, el galo y Cuatro aventuras de Reinette y Mirabelle, y se hará una revisión sobre su "gusto", a partir de filmes relacionados con algunos de sus mejores textos como crítico —y también director, por unos años— de la revista Cahiers du Cinéma.
En el marco del ciclo se exhibirá en calidad de preestreno su último largometraje, Triple agente (2003); se proyectará el fabuloso corto La panadera de Monceau (éste, con entrada libre y gratuita), y se verá el capítulo de la serie Cineastas de nuestro tiempo, dedicado a su obra.
Los Cuentos morales, explicaba el director, son una suerte de "variaciones sinfónicas. Como el músico, varío el motivo inicial, lo amplío o lo reduzco, le doy cuerpo o lo depuro. A partir de esta idea de mostrar a un hombre interesado por una mujer en el mismo momento en que va a relacionarse con otra, he podido construir mis situaciones, mis intrigas, mis desenlaces, incluso mis personajes". Esta soberbia serie de filmes arranca con Monceau y continúa con La carrera de Suzanne, Mi noche con Maud (uno de sus clásicos), La coleccionista, La rodilla de Clara y El amor después del mediodía, todos hechos entre los años '60 y principios de los '70.
La serie Comedias y proverbios, explica Rohmer, se compone de "personajes que quieren vivir algo, que algo llegue con gran fuerza. Al contrario que en otros mundos en los que el hombre es feliz y teme al peligro que pueda avecinarse, en el universo de las Comedias... los acontecimientos no son temidos". Esta serie de filmes incluye a La mujer del aviador, La buena boda, Pauline en la playa, Las noches de luna llena, El rayo verde y El amigo de mi amiga, todos de la década del '80.
En los posteriores Cuentos de las cuatro estaciones, dice Rohmer, "quise concentrarme en jóvenes mujeres atractivas, inteligentes y preocupadas consigo mismas. Son personajes capaces de presentar sus dilemas con claridad y elegancia, y de expresar sus sentimientos en diálogos inspirados e ingeniosos". Esa serie, más reciente, incluye los Cuentos de primavera, verano, otoño e invierno, todos realizados en la década del '90.
En el apartado Las otras —compuestas por películas que no integran series— se verán El signo de Leo, su opera prima; La marquesa de O..., Perceval el galo, Cuatro aventures de Reinette y Mirabelle, El árbol, el alcalde y la mediateca, Los encuentros de París y La dama y el duque.
"Todas mis ideas sobre el cine las tuve siendo espectador, y la práctica del cine no me enseñó nada en ese aspecto", escribía Rohmer, y esa frase explica el apartado Rohmer y los otros, que integran obras que lo interesaron en su etapa de crítico. Aquí se verán Fausto, de F. W. Murnau; Las damas del bosque de Boulogne, de Robert Bresson; El misterio Picasso, de Henri-Georges Clouzot; Désiré, de Sacha Guitry; Psicosis, de Alfred Hitchcock; El maquinista de la General, de Buster Keaton; y Elena y los hombres, de Jean Renoir.
12.1.10
Eric Rohmer, An Appreciation (Los Angeles Times)
By Glenn Kenny
January 12, 2010
Despite being almost universally acknowledged as a master of film, the French director Eric Rohmer, who came to prominence as a member of the so-called New Wave of the late '50s and early '60s (although he was about 10 years older than many of its most famous members, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut among them) arguably stands as one of the most misunderstood of great directors.
Rohmer, who died Monday in Paris at age 89, came to international prominence with the films he made under the rubric "Six Moral Tales" between 1962 and 1972. Comprising two shorts and four features, these quiet but sometimes devastatingly ironic stories of intelligent upper-middle-class types wrestling with love and morality, particularly the likes of 1969's "My Night At Maud's" and 1972's "Love in the Afternoon," found avid followings in a then-burgeoning art-house market.
But the pictures, often praised for being driven by intelligent, erudite and cutting dialogue ("In the Company of Men" director Neil LaBute has acknowledged Rohmer's influence), also had their detractors. One of the most famous was a fictional character: detective Harry Moseby in the 1975 Arthur Penn thriller "Night Moves," played by Gene Hackman in one of his best roles. Invited to see "Maud," Moseby demurs, saying, "I saw an Eric Rohmer movie once. It was like watching paint dry."
Moseby could have watched more carefully. Anybody cognizant of this unfair rap might be surprised to learn that during his tenure as a critic and editor at the famed film magazine Cahiers du Cinema, Rohmer enthusiastically championed such ostensibly "visual" filmmakers as Otto Preminger (master of the long-take traveling shot), the cartoon-influenced Frank Tashlin, and, of course, Alfred Hitchcock.
The influence of such filmmakers is actually felt in all of Rohmer's pictures but subtly. The will-he-or-won't-he-commit-infidelity plot of "Love in the Afternoon" (first released in the U.S. as "Chloe in the Afternoon") is like Billy Wilder's "The Seven Year Itch" played for potential tragedy rather than broad comedy and has moments of suspense that are clearly Hitchcock-inflected. (The picture also has the distinction of having been remade by Chris Rock, under the title "I Think I Love My Wife.") Responding in an open letter to a critic who slagged his tales as being overly literary, Rohmer wrote, "What I say, I do not say with words. I do not say it with images either. . . . After all, I do not say, I show."
In that same piece, Rohmer also wrote, "My characters' discourse is not necessarily my film's discourse." Rohmer's people were, for the most part, in their 20s and early 30s (he once said that he found the problems of young people more interesting than those of the middle-aged). It almost follows, then, that his characters, while in the main almost hyper-articulate, are also incredibly self-deluding. The British critic Gilbert Adair exaggerates only a bit when, considering for the most part Rohmer's work in the '80s, he avers that "Rohmer's characters are . . . among the most foolish, ineffectual and pathetic milquetoasts ever to have graced a cinema screen" and that the "celebrated talk" of his films is "sheer, unadulterated twaddle."
Take, for instance, the character of Marion in Rohmer's "Pauline at the Beach" (1983), one of his most entertaining pictures. Played by the gorgeous then-ingénue Arielle Dombasle, she is quite the object of desire, but when she insists in the middle of a seemingly endless speech to no one in particular that men have tried to commit suicide over her, the viewer suspects that it's not so much her beauty as it is her blathering that could motivate just about anyone in earshot, male or female, to open a vein. That Marion, who boasts to the film's 13-year-old title character of her expertise on all things amorous, soon thereafter falls into the arms of a lunkish gigolo, makes her blithe idiocy as subtly poignant as it is overtly laughable.
The entirety of Rohmer's work is strewn with such gorgeously felicitous touches. And despite his bedrock consistency, this is a director who never stood still. For his 2001 historical film, "The Lady and the Duke," a tragedy of love and honor set in the aftermath of the French Revolution, Rohmer shot in digital video and used meticulously designed CGI backdrops to simulate period detail and give his film a painterly look. He was at the time nearly 80 and completely embracing of a new technology.
For his final film, 2007's "The Romance of Astrea and Celadon," a gender-bending comedy set in a fairy- and druid-populated fifth century (or so) he adopted a style so completely unadorned that some critics scornfully described it as amateurish. Hardly feeling the need to explain himself, he announced that it was likely his final film, and it turned out to be. Misunderstood to the very end: As it happens, "Astrea and Celadon" is one of his most droll, graceful and wise films.
calendar@latimes.com
11.1.10
My Night at Maud’s: Chances Are . . . (Criterion Collection Notes)
BY KENT JONES
“Some people think Rohmer is in league with the devil,” wrote cinematographer Nestor Almendros in his book of autobiographical reflections on the cinema, a man with a camera. He was describing his working experience on My Night at Maud's (1969). “Months before, he had scheduled the exact date for shooting the scene where it snows; that day, right on time, it snowed, and the snow lasted all day long, not just a few minutes.” Later, Almendros makes a curious shift. “It is not just a question of luck; the key lies in Rohmer’s detailed preparation.”
One wonders exactly what Almendros means here. If it hadn’t snowed, would Rohmer’s detailed preparation have paid off so handsomely? Given the fact that he was working with a minuscule budget and a production schedule for which the term rushed seems generous, isn’t it likely that the entire production would have come to a standstill, depriving the film not only of its seasonal atmosphere but of one of its key dramatic elements? (In fact, such a disaster befell the shoot of The Green Ray [1986], when the eponymous phenomenon failed to materialize, and Rohmer was forced to wait an entire year before he got the shot he needed.)
But Almendros was on to something with his seemingly contradictory statements: Rohmer’s meticulous preparation neither dispels the need for luck nor compensates for it. In fact, he creates situations, in his filmmaking and for his characters, in which preparation and chance go hand in hand. Jean-Claude Brialy’s Jérôme, in Claire’s Knee (1970), might be the ultimate Rohmer hero, in that his quest offers a mirror image of Rohmer’s as an artist: to lay the groundwork for a situation in which chance will play the decisive role. No one’s films are more “written,” more narrative based, or more logistically tied to particular places and times of year—Rohmer’s cinema is nothing if not preplanned. On the other hand, Rohmer is just as enamored of the aesthetic felicities of raw, unfolding reality as Jean Renoir or Roberto Rossellini—aesthetic felicities and moral complexities, which are infinitely richer and more . . . complex than in the work of almost any other filmmaker. François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette may have been known as the Jamesians, but while Rohmer is a temperamental world away from the author of “The Beast in the Jungle” and The Wings of the Dove, he is similarly sensitive to the layered proximity of the mental and the physical, the subjective and the objective.
Over the years, Rohmer has received a great deal of attention as a writer of dialogue, or to put it more precisely, as a creator of films structured around talk. He has also been noted as a lover of beautiful young people, as a teller of tales, and as some kind of “moralist.” None of these observations is terribly insightful, least of all the charge of moralism, which seems to rise from a simple misunderstanding of the term “moral tale.” It has often been pointed out that Rohmer is a practicing Catholic, to suggest that his Christianity is at the center of his filmmaking. In fact, while his Jesuit education may very well have instilled him with piety, it also doubtless sharpened his spirit of restless inquiry into the roles played by chance, choice, and grace in life—none of which he ever fully embraces. The Six Moral Tales do not have “morals.” Rather, they are stories of people in the process of making choices that may or may not be moral, examining the basis on which those choices are made, and thus trying to divine the distance between the real and the ideal in the process.
The key ingredient in Rohmer’s cinematic inquiries is the “ordinariness.” When he was a critic, he wrote—rapturously—on Rossellini, and it’s easy to see the link. First of all, Rossellini’s “unreasonable” heroines, like Anna Magnani’s holy fool in The Miracle or Ingrid Bergman’s Irene in Europa ’51, find many echoes in Rohmer’s oeuvre, from Béatrice Romand’s Sabine in Le beau mariage (1982) through Charlotte Véry’s Félicie in A Tale of Winter (1992), not to mention the exceedingly single-minded Jérôme. Rossellini’s penchant for interlacing documentary and fictional imperatives is continued in Rohmer. And Ingrid Bergman’s sudden exclamation of beauty and mystery in Stromboli and the change of heart at the end of Voyage in Italy are very close to the moments of revelation in Rohmer, but with a difference: Rossellini’s films feature dramatically extreme situations (a woman climbing over the top of a volcano to escape from her husband, a couple on the verge of divorce suddenly moved to reconciliation by the uninhibitedly emotional culture around them), and Rohmer’s do not. An engineer forced to spend the night at a divorcée’s house because of a sudden snowstorm in Clermont-Ferrand, a maladroit Parisian finding love on vacation, a middle-aged woman from the south of France in search of a husband for her best friend—this is the stuff of Rohmer’s cinema. The revelations in Rohmer run just as deep as those in Rossellini—that is, we infer that they effect shifts in consciousness just as great—but they arrive via the ordinary, as opposed to the extraordinary. They realign our focus so we can see the wonder of everyday life, realigning our sense of the extraordinary in the process. Jean-Louis Trintignant’s recognition of his wife’s shame at the end of My Night at Maud’s becomes just as wondrous as Francis’s tears before the leper in Rossellini’s Flowers of St. Francis—provided, of course, that one is able to suspend one’s judgment of the intellectually inclined French bourgeoisie and accept the proposition that their uptight little world can provide a window on the infinite.
This is where Rohmer’s intricacy comes into play. Even those who are unable to imagine themselves vacationing with Marie Rivière’s Delphine or Emmanuelle Chaulet’s Blanche—in The Green Ray and Boyfriends and Girlfriends (1987), respectively—or having lunch with Bernard Verley’s Frédéric in Love in the Afternoon (1972), can admire Rohmer’s extraordinary care with dramatic specifics. In My Night at Maud’s, a man (Trintignant) leaves his home in rural France and attends Mass during the Christmas season. He spots a pretty blonde (Marie-Christine Barrault) and, after the service is finished, hops in his car and follows her on her moped. He loses sight of her but soon explains to us in voice-over that this was the day he knew that Françoise was going to be his wife. Next, we see him at home studying mathematics, then at work during his lunch break. He is an engineer at the Michelin plant in Clermont-Ferrand, and when he mentions that he lives in Ceyrat, one of his co-workers remarks on the distance. That night, he stops in at a bookstore and thumbs through a copy of Pascal’s Pensées, and later runs into his old friend Vidal (Antoine Vitez) in a bar. Both men are struck by the fact that they have met completely by chance and quickly embark on a discussion of probability, which segues into Pascal, which in turn eases into philosophy (Vidal is a professor), which is a hop, skip, and a jump to Marxism (Vidal is a Marxist) and Christianity (Trintignant’s unnamed character—we’ll call him Jean-Louis—is a practicing Catholic). Vidal invites Jean-Louis to a Léonide Kogan concert, where there will be “lots of pretty girls,” and then insists that on Christmas night he accompany him to the home of a certain Maud (Françoise Fabian), a divorced woman and good friend with whom, he claims, he occasionally keeps company. His ostensible reason for asking Jean-Louis to accompany him is that he’s afraid that he and Maud will sleep together out of boredom if they’re left alone.
So, we have a sense of place (the Auvergne region) and a time of year (Christmas). We know that Jean-Louis is a Catholic, that he is a loner who lives far from where he works, that he enjoys intellectual pursuits and has a particular interest in theories of probability. We also know, via the curt narration, that he is fairly single-minded (he has decided he’s found the girl of his dreams after a couple of quick glances in church) and that the story we’re watching is in the past tense. We are also primed to accept chance as a major factor, given the manner in which Jean-Louis has spotted Françoise and run into his old friend, not to mention the discussions of Pascal. From there, we’re on to Maud’s house, where everything is turned upside down and inside out.
It is a common misconception that too much dialogue can sink a movie, which is in turn based on the equally common misconception that dialogue is always a forum for direct communication—the kind of dialogue easily found on television or in the majority of commercial films. In Rohmer’s cinema, talk is never just talk and is always a form of indirect action. For Jean-Louis, it is, or becomes, a means of endless postponement. And then there is the crucial matter of the actor who’s speaking the dialogue. There are some things that can be imparted to us easily, without contrivance, by means of narrative exposition. There are other things that cannot. And Rohmer’s knowledge of the difference between the two is one of the many rare qualities that make him such a great filmmaker. Casting is always important, but in Rohmer it is essential. Careful exposition allows us to see all the exterior traits of Jean-Louis—Catholic, intellectual, engineer, former womanizer, etc. But all the exposition in the world would not allow us to see his reticence, referred to in the dialogue long after we’ve noted it (consciously or not) in Trintignant’s comportment, his way of imparting himself one little bit at a time. Rohmer is not the only filmmaker who has mined this trait in Trintignant—it certainly served Bernardo Bertolucci in The Conformist, and it has also worked well for André Téchiné, Truffaut, and Krzysztof Kieslowski. But it is employed in those other films for its sinister edge under extreme melodramatic conditions, while in My Night at Maud’s it is the ordinary trait of a fairly common type of man seen under unremarkable everyday circumstances. Rohmer almost always works with good actors, and Trintignant is no exception. But the core of his presence here is something that is more or less unactable, which puts the film closer to Bresson than one might think. In other words, who Trintignant is, as opposed to his considerable ability as an actor, sits at the heart of this character and this film.
In order for such a strategy to work, nothing can be heightened, and to be sure, nothing ever is heightened in Rohmer’s work. Observation always takes precedence over amplification. A very simple example would be the scene where Maud’s daughter, Marie (played by Marie Becker, Fabian’s own daughter, by Jacques Becker), wakes up and asks her mother if she can look at the lights on the Christmas tree. Maud plugs in the lights, the girl has a look, and then she goes back to bed. Most filmmakers would cut to a point-of-view shot of the lights and back to an expression of wonder on the girl’s face; they would probably also take great care to ensure that the viewer shared in the wonder by framing the shot of the tree so that it became a vision, the Christmas tree. In Rohmer’s film, it’s all done in one medium-shot, and the everyday luminousness of Almendros’s imagery isn’t even slightly jacked up on behalf of the tree or the girl. Rohmer never disrupts the flow of our attention with such shifts, and this allows us an unusual opportunity to scrutinize his characters’ every move. Believability and plausibility at the most minute level are key characteristics of Rohmer’s films—in this case, how single people in their thirties, living in the provinces, behave when they’re alone, how they move, what they talk about, how they draw each other out and defend themselves from self-exposure. As long as you’re not hankering for someone to draw a knife or make a declaration, this provides the way toward a remarkable form of suspense.
What exactly transpires between Maud and Jean-Louis? One way of looking at the film is to see Jean-Louis as a man who plays it safe, rejecting Pascal’s wager by refusing to bet on the possibility of infinite happiness with Maud and banking on a less exciting woman who happens to represent his ideal type. In one sense, this describes My Night at Maud’s to perfection. But on another, deeper level, this is a story of chance—real chance versus ideal chance. “I love surprises,” proclaims Jean-Louis, and just as he is throughout much of the movie, he’s telling himself and the people around him a story. He acknowledges his “reticence,” but he is finally reticent in a way that even he doesn’t fully comprehend. Running into Vidal is a matter of chance. Finding a woman who conforms to his own preconception is not, the probability being exceptionally high that he would eventually meet a woman such as Françoise (especially high in church, since he’s in search of a good Catholic). Maud is not simply a woman of an alternate type—brunette, Protestant (nonpracticing), vivacious, “fast”—she is potentially an agent of transformation. She spends the night listening to two men tell stories about Marxism and Catholicism and Pascal, as articulate as they are indirect in their actions. Vidal tells Jean-Louis that he wants him to come along to save him from sleeping with Maud, but Maud reveals that Vidal is in love with her and that he brought Jean-Louis along as a kind of test; Jean-Louis insists that he wants to go but allows himself to be talked into staying the night because of the snow, then into moving ever closer to Maud’s bed, and finally into it. Jean-Louis thinks he’s revealing himself with all his talk about Catholicism and the sacrament of marriage, but Maud knows that it’s nothing but a barrier, the kind of barrier that men put up in order to shield themselves from the necessity of direct action. By Jean-Louis’ lights, Maud has opened a door through which he is afraid to walk for fear of jeopardizing his resolve. By Maud’s lights, Jean-Louis has already walked through the door and into the room, literally and figuratively, and his resolve and beliefs amount to nothing but impediments to recognizing and negotiating immediate reality. What are the chances that Jean-Louis and Maud will have a life together? Based on her luck with men and his avowed preference for Catholic blondes, not so great. Based on their immediate affinity for each other, not so small. “You are a happy soul, despite appearances,” observes Maud of Jean-Louis—and the essential rightness of this observation is what makes Rohmer a greater artist than Bertolucci and also points to what gives My Night at Maud’s its special spark and effervescence, which, it must be admitted, is not present in every Rohmer film.
Current fashion would favor Maud as the voice of reason when she tartly dismisses Jean-Louis’ prevarications: “I prefer people who know what they want.” Yet there’s something equally admirable about Jean-Louis’ insistence on adhering to his story and fulfilling his own platonic conception with Françoise, a decidedly unhappy soul. The necessity of choice, the pain of choice: no film is better at illuminating these two equally real aspects of living. There are no moments of grace in My Night at Maud’s, at least nothing like Natacha’s discovery of the missing necklace in A Tale of Springtime (1990), the appearance of the green ray, or the unexpected climactic return of the long-lost Charles in A Tale of Winter (such moments, along with the singular and singularly curious case of 1978’s Perceval, are the only indications of Catholicism in Rohmer’s own authorial viewpoint, at least to my mind). Yet there are intimations of grace in the slow, serpentine movement toward intimacy between Maud and Jean-Louis.
Rohmer’s films offer us an exceptionally vivid picture of how we navigate the twists and turns that life throws our way on a daily basis. “All the pleasure of life is in general ideas,” wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes. “But all the use of life is in specific solutions.” No artist has expressed this dichotomy more eloquently, or lovingly, than Eric Rohmer.
Claire’s Knee: Rohmer’s Women (Criterion Collection Notes)
BY MOLLY HASKELL
It’s both hard and not so hard to believe that Eric Rohmer’s six moral tales were conceived—indeed, written initially—as a novel. On the one hand, he’s the grand master of dialogue as an instrument of narrative. His characters muse, reflect, analyze, insult, tease, provoke, skirmish, flirt, philosophize, lie, in an endless round of glittering verbal maneuvers that constitute the late twentieth century’s most literate tales of love, our latter-day Liaisons dangereuses. On the other, the actors seem too perfectly cast, as if they’d been the models for the characters, not the other way around, and Rohmer had used what we know and sense about them to shape roles that seem to emanate from their very skins and psyches. And then there’s the incandescent (and sometimes underrated) imagery—the precise locations, the crucial weather, the endlessly variable expressions of the human face and body, all those seductive surfaces that raise crucial questions about the “morals” that are the heart of the stories and that are analogous to the spell cast by cinema itself, the ruthless geometry of choice and the royalty of sex appeal at the heart of its addictive power.
A girl in a bikini whose coltlike body is dissected as she walks along the water’s edge at the beginning of La collectionneuse (1967); the camera forsaking its neutrality in My Night at Maud’s (1969) to focus on the wittily inviting Françoise Fabian, lying under a fur coverlet as thick and white as the snow outside; Love in the Afternoon’s (1972) happily married Bernard having fantasies about the damsels he encounters in the streets of Paris. And of the six tales, none seems more indigenous to cinema than Claire’s Knee (1970), the joint in question, that of a pretty blonde teenager on a ladder, becoming the fulcrum of an exquisite dissertation on the perversity of desire. The idea and the image are one, forever circling and intertwined in these exquisite meditations on the anomalies of attraction, which seem to be all about the female of the species, even when the central figure, the desiring and rationalizing protagonist, is male.
Of all the (mostly European, or non-American) directors truly interested in women—that is, who put them repeatedly at the center of their work—none has been so fascinated by the spectrum of womankind, and girlkind (a separate breed in Rohmer, and rightly so), and examined our sex with such a fine mixture of dispassion and empathy. Other directors—indeed, male artists in general—when free to express their own sensibilities, almost can’t help foisting their neuroses onto women: they give us femmes fatales who bear the burden of male sexual guilt, pathetic victims whose humiliation provides a salve to the male ego or a target for his rage, idealizations whose beauty confirms their discoverers’ own good taste. But Rohmer goes deeper, examining and gently mocking those very processes, the unconscious strategies by which men use women for their own practical, moral, and artistic purposes.
In My Night at Maud’s, Jean-Louis Trintignant’s character, a practicing Catholic and a bit of a prig, gives women credit for his moral education. “Women aid my spiritual progress,” he says to Maud, and is immediately half-ashamed by the fatuousness of the remark. “I don’t look at the ladies anymore . . . I’m getting married,” says Jean-Claude Brialy’s Jérôme, in Claire’s Knee, when he runs into his old friend Aurora. This is less a vow of chastity than a protective device, avoiding future entanglement should Aurora get any ideas . . . and indeed, he very soon violates his own pledge. The young man (Barbet Schroeder) in The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1962), while committed to another, is attracted to the pretty working girl but also irritated that she doesn’t have “the easygoing quality that would have eased my conscience.” Meaning: to deal blithely with the one-night stand I’d like to have. In the second Moral Tale, Suzanne’s Career (1963), the nerdy pharmacy student needs to despise and constantly belittle Suzanne (he’s attracted to her) in order to retain his male bona fides, which involves the continuing hero worship of the womanizing Guillaume. But in the end, Suzanne wins, because she deprives him of “the right to pity her.”The wills of Rohmer’s protagonists are foiled and their prejudices unmasked—for us if not always for them—by women who, through their cunning or their simple directness, elude their theoretical categories, even (or especially) when they are lower in the social or intellectual order than the men who presume to toy with them.
In Claire’s Knee, set in a shimmering July on Lake Annecy, near the Swiss border, a whole array of Rohmer “types” are on display. The novelist Aurora is one of his worldly women: with too much time, like all of Rohmer’s dangerously ennui-filled vacationers, she assumes the mischievous role of puppeteer, hoping to gather material for a novel by pushing Jérôme, a diplomat whose fiancée is in Sweden, into an affair with the younger Laura. Having had her own amorous leanings toward younger men, Aurora will thereby enjoy from a writerly distance those feelings—acted upon or held in check—she herself has experienced. This fifth Moral Tale follows the pattern of the others in showing a man already committed to one woman tempted by another, only here, Jérôme’s absent fiancée has two teenage rivals.
As Laura, the pawn who refuses to be one, the precocious, bushy-haired enchantress Béatrice Romand is one of Rohmer’s greatest finds. Wise beyond her years, Laura does indeed fall for the older man, suffers the delights and torments of love with an eloquence that far surpasses, in candor and intensity and the sheer poetry of her soul, the niggardly sensibility of her casually lecherous suitor. Her mirror opposite, and eventual usurper in Jérôme’s fancy, is her half sister, Claire (Laurence de Monaghan), she of the knee, one of those knockout blondes who grow less rather than more interesting with time. Claire is a type—“I find it quite difficult to talk to her,” Jérôme admits to Aurora. “I feel absolutely powerless around girls like that.” Which is precisely what attracts this rather conventional womanizer, who usually knows in advance that a certain woman desires him and pursues accordingly. This sort of safe philosophy of love is a characteristic of Rohmer’s complacent males, but the commitment that goes with it can’t be summarily dismissed.
That’s the complexity and the paradox of Rohmer’s radical conservatism: characters’ beliefs must be tested, stretched, but belief itself, whether of the Catholic variety or a commitment to monogamy, represents at its best an integrity that is in opposition to the casual sex enjoyed and promoted by his other, sometimes more attractive, characters. We find our sympathies uneasily shifting: Perhaps the brilliant and provocative woman is a little too brilliant and provocative—or maybe not. Maybe the lesser woman, the “safe bet,” entails the subordination of one’s immediate desires to some greater ideal, a beyond-the-self. Or maybe it doesn’t.
For Rohmer, dull-seeming fidelity can occupy a higher moral plane than the transitory thrills of promiscuity, especially if that dull-seeming fidelity rediscovers in itself a passionate affirmation of marital love, as in Love in the Afternoon, where this yes-to-marriage is made all the more moving by an accompanying marked sense of loss. Jérôme’s brand of fidelity, on the other hand, is too easy and self-serving, his yearnings too tepid, for this kind of Rohmerian epiphany. Nevertheless, through him we see some part of ourselves, image fetishists, drawn perversely to glittering but unsuitable love objects, fixating on the part at the expense of the whole. That small piece of epidermal real estate on an innocuously pretty blonde becomes the focus of an obsession that blots out the glorious child-womanliness that is Laura, and finally, even the insipid Claire shows a certain spirit, obstinately preferring her unfaithful boyfriend to Jérôme. A sophist to the end, he sees his brutish behavior and his “consoling” caress of the knee as a “good deed” and leaves the scene with an ill-deserved sense of satisfaction.
At one point earlier in the film, Laura and Jérôme are discussing love, the latter’s six-year engagement and sense of that relationship’s inevitability. He and his lady friend’s repeated breakups and accidental reencounters have come to feel like predestination, always an important theme in Rohmer; what’s more, the pair are amicable and nonpossessive, they get along—a seriously unromantic view of love that repels Laura even as she despises what love does to her. Glancing at a photograph of the fiancée, Laura says the boyish-looking woman is not what she would have expected. “Lucinde isn’t my type physically,” Jérôme agrees, then, “Though I don’t really have a type. Looks don’t matter to me. It’s the character alone that counts.” This self-serving piety, typical of Rohmer’s deluded protagonists, will be quickly disproved when he finds himself attracted to the fetching Claire, and to a knee that has little to do with moral fiber. It is Laura who articulates the first principle of the Rohmerian world, the connection between outer and inner selves, when she replies, “But the character shows in how a person looks.” (“Perhaps style is more important than beauty,” says one woman to another in La collectionneuse, as they puzzle over what it is in a person that pleases them.) How does beauty or ugliness, virtue or immorality, shape personality? The epiphanies occur when the moral and the physical intersect, when the stubborn integrity of a character suddenly bursts furiously forth, irradiating the face and the landscape with the force of a revelation.
In fact, in Rohmer’s universe, women are instruments of men’s improvement, in the sense that they shake them up, force them to confront prejudices; and in some of his films, men do the same to women. Attraction enlarges and expands us, takes us out of our comfort zone and into the unknown, thanks to someone who surprises our preconceptions, forces us to radically readjust categories and criteria. An intellectual may be attracted to a girl with whom he can’t discuss Pascal or Dostoyevsky; that does not make her an object of ridicule. Possibly she will be fresher and more interesting, less chock-full of ready-made formulations, than he is. But on some level, she must be able to account for herself, leave a verbal signature.
Not being able to talk would be a fatal obstacle, like not being able to act in an action film. In the Rohmerian world, talk is action, talk is eros, the springboard of his stories; and the “talkiness” of his movies is no less cinematic—it moves, exposes and conceals, shows the drama of choice as it is being made, imagines its terrible and wonderful consequences. At the same time, the fates of his characters remain open-ended, subject to further choices and conversations. The possibilities multiply through the sheer range of women in whom Rohmer interests himself: shopgirls and secretaries, those figures on the margins of most directors’ consciousness, move front and center, have problems as deserving of close attention as party girls and divas and more cerebral professionals. He’s as interested (almost) in mothers as in ingenues.
A corollary of this, and one of the great delights of the movies—nowhere more in evidence than in Claire’s Knee—is the relationships among the women. Love-struck females are saved from the total dependency of so many love stories by their bonds with other women. No other director has taken such a voyeur’s relish in those deeply nurturing and furtive ties. Girls exchange secrets and advice, quarrel and make up; and girls stick up for each other, sometimes heroically, in the face of male intimidation. The mother and daughter in Claire’s Knee enjoy a bickering, loving, and mutually supportive (and acutely observed) relationship that is at the heart of Laura’s healthy and original sense of herself, and her need to stay sane. Laura, the mother’s girl who has grown up fatherless, and Claire, a daddy’s girl, are half sisters who might have hated each other but have come to live in close and comradely appreciation of each other’s complementary strengths and weaknesses.
Acerca de Rohmer
La muerte de Eric Rohmer me tomó de vacaciones, alejado de las rutinas formales del trabajo en el diario, ocupado en otras cosas. Recién hace algunas horas que me enteré de su muerte y todavía no consigo armar las expresiones correctas y adecuadas que le harían justicia a su cine.
Al evitar mi obligación usual de resumir vida y obra de grandes cineastas en un par de horas para llegar a un cierre me veo en la libertad de pensar y meditar un poco más sobre Rohmer y su cine. Y me parece que no es necesario apurar esa reflexión, que puede llegar a ser más medida, masticada, analizada. Lo que sigue son un par de apuntes al voleo...
En principio puedo decir que se va uno de mis cineastas preferidos, de esos capaces de capturar tanto los dilemas morales y psicológicos como la gracia y la belleza del mundo. Sus películas son -salvo excepciones- casi un todo indivisible, de una pieza, un largo filme-río sobre el mundo en que vivimos, los problemas que enfrentamos, las dualidades que conviven en cada uno de nosotros, nuestros diálogos, nuestros silencios, nuestros secretos.
Rohmer filmó el amor y el desamor, el encuentro y el desencuentro, la palabra y el silencio, París y el mundo. Casi todo lo que yo pretendo del cine está en las películas de Rohmer: tres, cuatro películas suyas construyen y completan un mundo, abrazan un universo, mezclan realismo con encantamiento, prosa con poesía, lo mundano con lo celestial.
Mi última experiencia Rohmer fue excepcional. Sentado en la segunda fila de un cine de Viena, en el festival de 2008, viendo LOS AMORES DE ASTREA Y CELADON junto a Mariano Llinás. Los dos salimos del cine en silencio y tardamos un par de minutos en ser capaces de decir algo. Y nada de lo que dijimos podía capturar la experiencia de lo visto. Dos charlatanes insoportables como nosotros, en silencio, caminando por Viena, pensando en los amores de Rohmer, en su luz, en su mirada, en su maravillosa liviandad.
Sobre la muerte de Eric Rohmer
Peter Bradshaw/The Guardian
Eric Rohmer's death at the age of 89 is a reminder of the incredible energy, tenacity and longevity of France's great nouvelle vague generation. Rohmer had released his last film only last year, the sublimely unworldly pastoral fantasy Les amours d'Astrée et de Céladon (The Romance Of Astrea And Celadon): a gentle, reflective movie, of course, but by no means lacking in energy or wit. And, meanwhile, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol — at the respective ages of 79, 81, 81 and 79 — are all still with us, all nursing projects.
Rohmer came from the New Wave tradition of critic-turned-director; he was a former editor of Cahiers du cinéma, and became the distinctively romantic philosopher of the New Wave and the great master of what was sometimes called "intimist" cinema: delicate, un-showy movie-making about not especially startling people, people often in their twenties, whose lives are dramatised at a kind of walking, talking pace. He avoided dramatic close-up, and tended to avoid music, except that that is supposed to be heard by the characters in the action from radios, for example — Lars von Trier's minimalist Dogme movement was in the spirit of Rohmer's modus operandi.
What was utterly characteristic was Rohmer's feel for what the real life of a young person — albeit a certain type of middle-class, educated young person — was like: that is, not shiny and sexy or grungy or funny, in the Hollywood manner, but uncertain, tentative, vulnerable and more often than not dominated by a quotidian type of travel: bus travel, subway travel, train travel: travel to get somewhere for the summer, or to see a girlfriend or boyfriend.
The first Rohmer film I saw was Le rayon vert (The Green Ray), with my girlfriend, when we were both students, at the old Cambridge Arts Cinema in the 80s; I thought then and think now that Rohmer's films are quintessentially studenty — in the best possible sense. Young, callow-ish people do a lot of talking, in the way we all did, about what was wrong (or right) with their lives and relationships, and about the perfect place to go for the summer. In this film, a young woman is unable to think what to do for the summer. She tries various places with various people, but always finds herself heading back to Paris, drawn perhaps to a place in which possibilities have not been thinned and options narrowed. Eventually, she finds herself at the beach, about to experience the legendary 'rayon vert', or flash of green light you can see at the moment the sun sets.
Perhaps other twentysomethings, from a later era, would be more excited about finding the perfect beach in Thailand or Vietnam, but to us impecunious 1980s students, the idea of witnessing the 'rayon vert' in Biarritz was a fascinating, exotic notion, and eminently plausible. It was as fascinating as absinthe. Yet everything was filmed in such a straightforward, realist way, and for someone in his mid-sixties, Rohmer himself had a remarkable sympathy and un-patronising interest in young people.
Later, in 1992, Rohmer would make Conte d'hiver (A Winter's Tale), as part of his 'tales of four seasons' series, about a young man and woman who have a passionate holiday romance but somehow manage to mislay each other's details and lose touch. It seems almost inconceivable in our world of social networking sites and mobile phones, but at the time it was entirely plausible, and another demonstration of Rohmer's sure touch for sensing the anxieties and dreams of un-moneyed young people, looking for love and adventure — and, as ever, having to travel banally to get it. I think Richard Linklater, in his movies Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, about a missed love-connection, was trying to channel some of the spirit of Eric Rohmer.
Rohmer's "talkiest" film is probably the one that made his name: Ma nuit chez Maud (My Night with Maud) from 1969, a black and white film that looks a little rickety now. A man is forced through snow to stay the night with an attractive stranger, and finds his resolve to marry someone else severely tested by having to sleep over in her bed. But this is not just about sex, and the lack of it, or the promise of it, but about talk, about the adventure of intimacy, and all the subtle, almost infinitesimal things we reveal about ourselves in talking.
In his later years — though perhaps Rohmer's entire mature career is one long, richly distinctive, 'late phase' — the director turned to period drama, and this is the point at which pub-quizzers may raise the question of what unites Rohmer with Christopher Nolan. The answer is that both have cast the tremendous but under-used and still under-appreciated British actress Lucy Russell. Rohmer made the French-speaking lead in his French revolutionary drama L'anglaise et le duc (The Lady and the Duke) from 2001.
And finally, there is Rohmer's remarkable last film, Les amours d'Astrée et de Céladon, a Shakespearean fantasia, a midsummer noon's reverie, conceived along uncompromisingly classical lines, and a thing of quiet joy. Along with his green ray — that flash of mystical revelation available to idealistic young people unencumbered by middle-aged banality — it is my favourite Eric Rohmer. The cinema has lost a philosopher, a quiet rhetorician and a gentle ally of the young.
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By Michael Phillips/Chicago Tribune
"I was determined to be inflexible and intractable," filmmaker Eric Rohmer once wrote regarding his self-labeled "six moral tales" of love, philosophy and glancing desire, "because if you persist in an idea it seems to me that in the end you do secure a following."
It worked. To the casual American art-house patron of a certain age Rohmer's most widely distributed pictures, beginning with "My Night at Maud's" (1969), "Claire's Knee" (1970) and "Chloe in the Afternoon" (1972, and remade, uneasily, with Chris Rock as "I Think I Love My Wife") crystallized an notion of piquant, verbally obsessive French cinema.
Rohmer's men, chasing illusions of women as often as women in the flesh, were variations on a specific breed of sardonic romantic. His questing, moralizing protagonists acted as vessels for the filmmaker's own observations of life, as he also wrote, where "there's no clear-cut line of tragedy or comedy."
Rohmer died in Paris Monday, a few months shy of his 90th birthday. His career encompassed the journalistic passions and cinematic creativity of many of his colleagues. He wrote for and edited the influential critical journal Cahiers du Cinema. Other fledgling critics and directors, notably Francois Truffaut (with "The 400 Blows") and Jean-Luc Godard (with "Breathless"), broke through with attention-getting masterworks years before Rohmer's more stylistically conservative seriocomedies sidled onto the international stage. Rohmer used to say he found greater favor outside of France than in it, for a while.
But the man born Jean-Marie Maurice Scherer, whose pseudonym took the first name of director Eric von Stroheim and the last of "Fu Manchu" creator Sax Rohmer, knew what he wanted. Natural light. A sense of humor, but a sidewinding one. He lived to rehearse, for months and months, before shooting. His final film, the serenely nutty ballad known as "The Romance of Astrea and Celadon," played Facets Cinematheque in Chicago a year ago this month. Until the end he believed in love, and delighted in how many different ways people could talk about it, or around it, until they came to an epiphany, however small or momentary.
"Rohmer often says that he's 18 at heart," his longtime editor Mary Stephen said of the director in his twilight years. "And he is.
The director asked that audiences look at his final film as a "measured, well-thought-out risk." One could say the same of his entire sun-kissed career.
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BY ROGER EBERT / January 11, 2010
We've lost a gentle and wise humanist of the movies. Eric Rohmer 89, one of the founders of the French New Wave died Monday Jan. 11 in Paris. The group , which inaugurated modern cinema, included Jean-Pierre Melville, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Agnes Varda, Alain Resnais, Jacques Rivette and Louis Malle. Melville, Truffaut and Malle have died, but the others remain productive and creative in their 80s.
Rohmer's characters arrived at moral decisions in their lives, usually through romance, often with warm humor. Few directors have loved people more: Their quirks, weaknesses, pretensions, ideals, and above their hopes of happiness. In 27 features made between 1959 and 2007, not a single Rohmer character was a generic type. All were originals.
Rohmer followed in the spirit of his countryman Balzac, mapping his works around central themes. He made six "Moral Tales," six "Comedies and Proverbs" and his "Tales of the Four Seasons," along with 11 films outside category. His films often illustrated a proverb, but it was impossible to guess which one until he surprised you at the end.
He first made an impression in America with "My Night at Maud's" (1969) and "Claire's Knee" (1970). Those "moral tales" often involved a moment before marriage when a man's thoughts turned to other tempting choices. The choices were revealed through indirection, in films ostensibly about something else. As I wrote in a 1971 review: "If I were to say that 'Claire's Knee' is about Jerome's desire to caress the knee of Claire, you would be a million miles from the heart of this extraordinary film. And yet, in a way, 'Claire's Knee' is indeed about Jerome's feelings for Claire's knee, which is a splendid knee." That unobtainable knee, for Jerome, represents all the delights he is surrendering.
Rohmer was a taste worth acquiring. Arthur Penn gave Gene Hackman this line in his "Night Moves" (1975): "I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry." Some moviegoers might agree with that, but not Penn, whose own "Bonnie and Clyde" has been described as the New Wave washing ashore in America.
Rohmer was born as Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer. He created his professional name by combining those of the Austrian director Erich von Stroheim and the English novelist Sax Rohmer. He was the editor of Cahiers du Cinema, the legendary French film magazine which launched a generation of young critics into filmmaking, and finally followed his proteges into full-time directing in 1963.
His films usually cost little, did not have huge grosses, and were treasured for their delightful sensibility. In 2001, the year he won a rare Golden Lion for lifetime achievement from the Venice Film Festival, I wrote: "A Rohmer film is a flavor that, once tasted, cannot be mistaken. Like the Japanese master Ozu, with whom he is sometimes compared, he is said to make the same film every time. Yet, also like Ozu, his films seem individual and fresh and never seem to repeat themselves; both directors focus on people rather than plots, and know that every person is a startling original while most plots are more or less the same.
"Rohmer is the romantic philosopher of the French New Wave, the director whose characters make love with words as well as flesh. They are open to sudden flashes of passion, they become infatuated at first sight, but then they descend into doubt and analysis, talking intensely about what it all means. Because they're invariably charming, and because coincidence and serendipity play such a large role in his stories, this is more cheerful than it sounds. As he grows older Rohmer's heart grows younger, and at 81 he is more in tune with love than the prematurely cynical authors of Hollywood teen romances."
Among his best-known titles were "Chloe in the Afternoon" (1972), "A Good Marriage" (1982), "Summer" (1986), "An Autumn's Tale" (1998), "Pauline at the Beach" (1983), and "Rendezvous In Paris" (1996).
His final film was "Romance of Astrea and Celadon" (2007). Did he intend it as his last? It was a wild departure, set in 5th century Gaul and involving shepherds, shepherdesses, druids and nymphs. Yet it was a Rohmer, all right, with Astrea and Celadon destined to love but kept apart by misunderstandings, coincidences and second-guessing themselves. As always, there was a satisfactory outcome.
Eric Rohmer, New Wave Filmmaker, Dies (The New York Times)
Eric Rohmer, the French critic and filmmaker who was one of the founding figures of the French New Wave and the director of more than 50 films, including the Oscar-nominated “My Night at Maud’s,” died on Monday in Paris. He was 89.
His producer, Margaret Menegoz, confirmed his death at a Paris hospital but provided no other details.
Aesthetically, Mr. Rohmer was perhaps the most conservative member of the New Wave, the internationally influential movement led by a group of aggressive young critics, among them Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, who parlayed their writings for publications like Arts and Les Cahiers du Cinéma into careers as filmmakers beginning in the late 1950s.
A former novelist and teacher of French and German literature, Mr. Rohmer emphasized the spoken and written word in his films at a time when tastes — thanks in no small part to his own pioneering writing on Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks — had begun to shift from literary adaptations to genre films grounded in strong visual styles.
In a statement Monday, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said of Mr. Rohmer: “Classic and romantic, wise and iconoclast, light and serious, sentimental and moralist, he created the ‘Rohmer’ style, which will outlive him.”
Mr. Rohmer’s most famous film in America remains “My Night at Maud’s,” a 1969 black-and-white feature set in the grim industrial city of Clermont-Ferrand. It tells the story of a shy young engineer (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who passes a snowbound evening in the home of his best friend’s lover, an attractive, free-thinking divorcée (Françoise Fabian).
The conversation, filmed by Mr. Rohmer in a series of unobtrusively composed long takes, covers philosophy, religion and morality, and while the flow of words takes on a distinctly seductive subtext at times, the encounter ends without a physical consummation. But the pair form a bond that movingly re-emerges five years later, when they meet again in a brief postscript that closes the film.
“My Night at Maud’s” was the third title in his “Six Moral Tales,” a series of films that Mr. Rohmer began in 1963, though for economic reasons it was the fourth to be filmed. In each of the six films, a man who is married or engaged finds himself tempted to stray but is ultimately able to resist. His films are as much about what does not happen between his characters as what does, a tendency that enchanted critics as often as it drove audience members to distraction.
“I saw a Rohmer movie once,” observes the Gene Hackman character in Arthur Penn’s “Night Moves” (1975). “It was kind of like watching paint dry.”
On the set, Mr. Rohmer, tall with piercing blue eyes, was a quiet, intensely absorbed director presiding over a hushed atmosphere, his crews and actors engaging in little of the chatter common to other film projects.
In his private life, Mr. Rohmer was reclusive if not secretive. “Eric Rohmer” was in fact a pseudonym, one of several that he experimented with early in his career. According to “Who’s Who in France,” he was born Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer in Tulle, a city in southwestern France, on March 21, 1920; other sources give his birth name as Jean-Marie Maurice Schérer and place his origins in the northeastern city of Nancy.
After publishing the novel “Elisabeth” under the name Gilbert Cordier, he moved to Paris in 1950 and began frequenting the ciné-clubs of the Latin Quarter, making the acquaintance of four other young cinephiles with whom his career would remain intertwined: Godard, Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette. With Mr. Rivette he founded a short-lived film magazine, La Revue du Cinéma. When that initiative collapsed after five issues, he joined the reviewing staff of Les Cahiers du Cinéma, a publication that acquired a fashionable notoriety for the violently iconoclastic reviews of the young Truffaut.
In 1952 Mr. Rohmer made his first attempt to direct a feature film, to be titled “Les Petites Filles Modèles,” but the project was abandoned when its producer declared bankruptcy. No footage is known to exist. Not until his Cahiers colleagues began to enjoy a measure of success as filmmakers — the term La Nouvelle Vague (the New Wave) was coined by a journalist for L’Express in 1957 — was Mr. Rohmer able to mount another long-form production. But “Le Signe du Lion” (1959), a moody tale of an American expatriate who finds himself down and out in Paris, did not capture the public imagination the way Truffaut’s “400 Blows” and Godard’s “Breathless” did, and Mr. Rohmer returned to editing Les Cahiers, a job he held until 1963.
His real breakthrough came in 1962 with the 26-minute short “La Boulangère de Monceau” (“The Bakery Girl of Monceau”). Filmed in 16-millimeter black and white, it was the first of the “Six Moral Tales,” based on fictional sketches he had written, he later said, long before he dreamed of becoming a filmmaker.
After a second short film, “La Carrière de Suzanne“ (1963), Mr. Rohmer returned to the feature-length format with “La Collectionneuse” (1967), the fourth episode of the series but the third to be filmed. The story of a young woman (Haydée Politoff) who systematically collects lovers, the film won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and restored Mr. Rohmer’s place in the front rank of the New Wave. The series continued with three more features: “My Night at Maud’s,” “Claire’s Knee” (1970) and “Love in the Afternoon” (1972).
After experimenting with two stylized period films, “The Marquise of O... ” (1976) and “Percival le Gallois” (1978), Mr. Rohmer initiated a new series, “Comedies and Proverbs,” in 1981 with “La Femme de l’aviateur.” The six films in this group illustrated traditional sayings or quotes from celebrated authors, from La Fontaine to Rimbaud, were largely built around the flirtations and fickle emotions of young people, and incorporated, notably in “Le Rayon Vert” (1986), a new element of improvisation.
Mr. Rohmer undertook a final series, “Tales of the Four Seasons,” with “Conte de Printemps” in 1990, this time providing a philosophical love story for each season of the year. The series ended with the exquisite “Conte d’Automne” in 1998, in which Mr. Rohmer moved beyond his focus on youth to tell a movingly autumnal story of a widow (Béatrice Romand) with a teenage son who finds love in an unexpected place.
Mr. Rohmer’s late career found him moving happily among small projects for television (including “L’Arbre, le Maire et la Médiathèque,” 1993), an early experiment with digital technology (“The Lady and the Duke,” 2001), and a true-life spy story (“Triple Agent,” 2004). His final theatrical film was the 2007 “Astrée and Céladon,” a retelling of a 17th-century love story with magical overtones, filmed in a self-consciously academic style that suggested the paintings of Poussin and Fragonard.
Among his survivors is a younger brother, the philosopher René Schérer. His producer, Ms. Menegoz, said Mr. Rohmer was also survived by his wife and two sons, but she declined to reveal their names. “You understand he was very intent on keeping his personal and professional life separate from each other,” she said.
In opposition both to the intensely personal, confessional tone of much of the work of Truffaut and to the politically provocative films of Godard, Mr. Rohmer remained true to a restrained, rationalist aesthetic, close to the principles of the 18th-century thinkers whose words he frequently cited in his movies. And yet Mr. Rohmer’s work was warmed by an undercurrent of romanticism and erotic yearning, made perhaps all the more affecting for never quite breaking through the surface of his elegant, orderly films.
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