Éric Rohmer

A name and a date he would not give

The director known as Éric Rohmer was born Maurice Schérer, in Tulle in the Corrèze, in 1920. Beyond that, the record is what he chose to allow.

He gave his date of birth variously as 21 March 1920, 1 December 1920 and 4 April 1923, and his birthplace sometimes as Nancy rather than Tulle. The pseudonym is generally explained as a joining of the director Erich von Stroheim and the thriller novelist Sax Rohmer. He adopted it partly so that his mother, a devout Catholic, would not learn that her son made films; by most accounts she died without knowing.[3]

He came from a provincial Catholic family, took a degree in literature, and taught school in Clermont-Ferrand and then in Paris. In 1946 he published a novel, Élisabeth, under yet another name, Gilbert Cordier.[3]

Cahiers du cinéma

Rohmer came to films late and through writing. In the late 1940s he ran a film club in Paris where he met Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol, all of them roughly a decade younger than he was.[4]

He began writing criticism, joined Cahiers du cinéma, and in 1957 published Hitchcock with Claude Chabrol, one of the first book-length studies to treat Alfred Hitchcock as a serious artist. In the same year he became the magazine's editor.[1]

He held the post until 1963, when the younger critics — Rivette chief among them — removed him. They wanted the magazine to be political; Rohmer, a Catholic and a conservative, did not. He left and did not return.[5]

The long start

Rohmer made his first feature, The Sign of Leo, in 1959, with money from Claude Chabrol's production company. An American musician in Paris expects an inheritance, does not get it, and slides into destitution over a summer. The distributor recut it and it disappeared.[1]

For most of the 1960s he made short films and educational television programmes for French schools broadcasting, on subjects from Louis Lumière to Pascal to Stéphane Mallarmé. He was in his forties, teaching and filming, while Godard and Truffaut were internationally famous.[3]

In 1962 he founded a production company, Les Films du Losange, with Barbet Schroeder. It gave him what he needed for the rest of his career: the ability to make films cheaply enough that they did not have to succeed.[1]

The Six Moral Tales

Rohmer had written six stories on one plan: a man committed to one woman meets a second, is tempted, thinks about it at length, and returns to the first. He filmed them over ten years, but not in the order he had numbered them. My Night at Maud's is third in the cycle and reached cinemas fourth, because Jean-Louis Trintignant was not free to play the lead when Rohmer wanted to shoot it.[2]

The first two, The Bakery Girl of Monceau and Suzanne's Career, were shorts made in 1963. La Collectionneuse followed in 1967. My Night at Maud's, in 1969, is the one that broke through: a Catholic engineer in Clermont-Ferrand spends a night arguing about Pascal's wager and Marxism with a divorced doctor, in her flat, and does not sleep with her. It was nominated for the Academy Award for best foreign-language film and, the following year, for best original screenplay.[1]

Claire's Knee followed in 1970 and Love in the Afternoon in 1972. The word moral in the series title does not mean the films deliver a lesson. Rohmer used it in the older French sense of the moralistes: writers who describe how people actually behave and what they tell themselves about it.[2]

How he worked

Rohmer's method was fixed and unusual. He shot on location with a crew that could fit in a car, used natural light and direct sound, worked with young and often unknown actors, and rehearsed for weeks so that heavily written dialogue would sound like people talking.[3]

He kept his own costs down to the point of eccentricity. He never owned a car and travelled by Métro. He worked from a small office at Les Films du Losange and typed his own scripts. Several of his films cost less than a single week of a normal production.[3]

The result is a body of work that looks like documentary and is not. Almost every line is written. The films are full of weather, holidays, beaches, mountains and provincial towns, and nothing much happens in any of them except that people explain themselves.

Comedies and Proverbs

The second series, six films made between 1981 and 1987, each takes a French proverb as its starting point. The Aviator's Wife, A Good Marriage, Pauline at the Beach, Full Moon in Paris, The Green Ray and Boyfriends and Girlfriends.[2]

The Green Ray, in 1986, is the most admired. A young woman in Paris loses her summer holiday plans, drifts miserably from place to place, and finally sees the optical effect of the title at sunset. Much of the dialogue was improvised by the actress, Marie Rivière, within Rohmer's structure. It won the Golden Lion at Venice.[2]

The films of this series are about younger people than the Moral Tales, and the talk is less philosophical and more anxious. Rohmer was in his sixties and filming people in their twenties, and he did it without condescension, which is the reason the series has aged as well as it has.

Tales of the Four Seasons

The third series ran from 1990 to 1998: A Tale of Springtime, A Tale of Winter, A Summer's Tale and Autumn Tale. Each is set in the season of its title and turns on a chance encounter or a misunderstanding that a conversation could have solved.[2]

A Tale of Winter, in 1992, is the one that carries the most weight. A woman who lost the address of the man she loves refuses to settle for anyone else for five years, on no evidence at all, and Rohmer takes her faith entirely seriously.

Period films

Alongside the contemporary series Rohmer made films set in the past, each shot in a deliberately artificial way. The Marquise of O, from Kleist's story, won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1976. Perceval le Gallois, in 1978, staged a medieval verse romance on an obviously fake studio set with gold skies and toy castles.[1]

The Lady and the Duke, in 2001, tells the French Revolution from the viewpoint of a royalist Scottish woman in Paris, with the actors filmed against painted backdrops assembled digitally. It was attacked in France for its politics. Triple Agent, in 2004, concerns a Russian émigré general in 1930s Paris who may be working for the Soviet secret police.[1]

His last film, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, came out in 2007, when he was in his late eighties.

Death

Éric Rohmer died in Paris on 11 January 2010. He was eighty-nine. He had received the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at Venice in 2001.[1]

He made roughly fifty films across half a century, almost all of them profitable, because they cost so little that they did not need to be popular.

Why Éric Rohmer matters

Rohmer proved that a film could be built entirely out of talk and still hold an audience. His characters reason aloud about what they should do, at length and often dishonestly, and the drama is the gap between what they say and what they want.

He also solved the economic problem that ends most directors' careers. By owning his production company, working with small crews and paying almost nothing for locations, he made films for fifty years without ever having to make one he did not choose. Directors from Hong Sang-soo to Richard Linklater and Noah Baumbach have worked from his example, and the modern low-budget conversation film is largely his invention.

Bazin's Cahiers

The magazine Rohmer joined and later edited was André Bazin's Cahiers du cinéma. Before it, in 1950, he had founded a short-lived journal of his own, La Gazette du cinéma, where the young Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette also wrote their first criticism.[4]