Éric Rohmer

• 1. Introduction

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  Éric Rohmer wore a false moustache to the New York premiere of one of his films. The man who would be called "the most durable filmmaker of the French New Wave" by The Daily Telegraph was so committed to guarding his private life that he routinely gave reporters different dates of birth. His real name was Jean Marie Maurice Schérer, or possibly Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer. He was born in Nancy, though some records say Tulle, in the Meurthe-et-Moselle department of Lorraine, France. He kept even his pseudonym a secret from his own family. He chose the name from two artists he admired: actor and director Erich von Stroheim, and the writer Sax Rohmer, author of the Fu Manchu series.

  What made Rohmer's career so remarkable was not just its length but its shape. He came to cinema late and reluctantly. He spent years writing criticism before he ever directed a feature. He held the editorship of the most important film journal in France while his colleagues were becoming world-famous. And when he finally made his own films, he made them on the smallest budgets possible, with minimal crews, relying on weather reports and long conversations.

  How does a man who once jogged two miles to his office every morning, refused to ride in cars, and lived without a telephone for years become one of the defining figures of French cinema? That question carries through every chapter of his life.

• 2. A Reluctant Cinephile

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  Rohmer received an advanced degree in history and studied literature, philosophy, and theology alongside it. He was, by his own account, not particularly interested in film. That changed when he began attending screenings at Henri Langlois's Cinémathèque Française in Paris, where he first met Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette. Around 1949 he abandoned journalism for film criticism entirely.

  Before arriving in Paris, he had worked as a teacher in Clermont-Ferrand. In 1946 he published a novel, Elisabeth, under the pen name Gilbert Cordier. He was a man with several identities. His family did not learn he was involved in the film world until much later; he began using the name Éric Rohmer in 1955 precisely so they would not find out and disapprove.

  His critical voice was distinctive from the start. Fellow Cahiers contributor Luc Moullet later observed that Rohmer's writing favored a rhetorical style built on questions and rarely used the first person singular. This set him apart from the more aggressive and personal writing of Truffaut and Godard. He was also known as more politically conservative than most of the Cahiers staff, and his opinions shaped the magazine's direction during his editorship from 1956 to 1963.

  His best-known critical work was the 1955 article "Le Celluloïd et le marbre" ("Celluloid and Marble"), which argued that film is "the last refuge of poetry" and the only contemporary art form from which metaphor can still spring naturally and spontaneously. Two years later, in 1957, he and Chabrol co-authored the earliest book-length study of Alfred Hitchcock, focusing on Hitchcock's Catholic background. That book has been described as one of the most influential film books since the Second World War, and it contributed to establishing the auteur theory as a critical method.

• 3. The Six Moral Tales

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  The structure Rohmer chose for his central cycle was deliberately repetitive. Each of the Six Moral Tales follows the same story: a man committed to one woman is tempted by a second and eventually returns to the first. Rohmer explained the repetition directly: "I was determined to be inflexible and intractable, because if you persist in an idea it seems to me that in the end you do secure a following."

  The inspiration came from F. W. Murnau's 1927 film Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. The word "moraliste" in the title does not carry a moralistic judgment in English. Rohmer drew a careful distinction: "a moraliste is someone who is interested in the description of what goes on inside man. He's concerned with states of mind and feelings." He cited Blaise Pascal, Jean de La Bruyère, François de La Rochefoucauld, and Stendhal as his models.

  The first two Moral Tales were made in 1963, were never theatrically released, and Rohmer was disappointed by their poor technical quality. They were largely unknown until the later four films gained attention. The third, La Collectionneuse (1967), was funded by Rohmer and Barbet Schroeder selling the rights to two short films to French television, raising $60,000. Its budget went only to film stock and renting a house in St. Tropez. It won the Jury Grand Prix at the 17th Berlin International Film Festival.

  The fourth Moral Tale, My Night at Maud's (1969), was the cycle's breakthrough. Funds came from Truffaut, who admired the script. Filming was delayed a full year because star Jean-Louis Trintignant was unavailable when Rohmer needed to shoot on Christmas Eve. The film centers on Pascal's Wager, received high praise at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival, and eventually earned Oscar nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Foreign Film. Critic James Monaco wrote that the film enlarges the idea of le pari, "the bet," into the encompassing metaphor Rohmer wanted for the entire series.

  Claire's Knee (1970) followed. Vincent Canby called it "something close to a perfect film." Rohmer said color was essential to that film: "The color green seems to me essential in that film. This film would have no value to me in black and white." It won the Grand Prix at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, the Prix Louis Delluc, and the Prix Méliès. The cycle closed with 1972's Love in the Afternoon, which critic Molly Haskell criticized for making a moral judgment of the main character, a departure she saw as a betrayal of the series.

• 4. Making Films Without a Crew

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  By the time he shot The Green Ray in 1986, Rohmer's crew consisted of only a camera operator and a sound engineer. He had spent years systematically reducing the number of people around him on set, beginning during the production of Perceval le Gallois in the late 1970s. He dropped the script supervisor first, then the assistant director, then all remaining assistants and technical managers. On the set of A Summer's Tale he made the sandwiches himself.

  His method for Full Moon in Paris (1984) illustrates how carefully he prepared before stripping everything away. He and the actors discussed their roles and read from the scenario while tape-recording rehearsals. Rohmer rewrote the script based on those sessions, then shot the film on Super 8mm as a dress rehearsal. When the final shoot came, he rarely did more than three takes of a scene. Cinematographer Renato Berta called the film "one of the most luxurious films ever made" because of the preparation invested. Rohmer even encouraged actress Pascale Ogier to design sets for the film because her character was an interior decorator. Ogier went on to win the Best Actress award at the Venice Film Festival.

  The Green Ray went further still. Rohmer allowed each actor to invent their own dialogue after initial discussions. Lead actress Marie Rivière, he said, "is the one who called the shots, not only by what she said, but by the way she'd speak." The film was shot in 16mm chronologically to keep Rohmer's central character blended into the crowd. Its only major expense was a trip to the Canary Islands to film the green rays. Rohmer chose to première the film on Canal Plus, a pay-TV station that paid $130,000 for it, one fifth of the budget. The theatrical release followed three days after broadcast and was a hit. He reflected: "Cinema here will survive only because of television. Without such an alliance we won't be able to afford French films."

  Rohmer was also direct about weather. "My films are based on meteorology," he said. "If I didn't call the weather service everyday, I couldn't make my films because they're shot according to the weather outside."

• 5. Themes, Style, and Obsessions

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  Rohmer said he preferred to deal "less with what people do than what is going on in their minds while they are doing it." His films concentrate on intelligent, articulate protagonists who frequently fail to own up to their desires. The contrast between what they say and what they do drives the drama. Gerard Legrand observed that Rohmer was "one of the rare filmmakers who is constantly inviting you to be intelligent, indeed, more intelligent than his (likable) characters."

  Many of his films have a circular structure. A character seems to escape one trap only to enter another, and the film closes with the protagonist leaving in roughly the same way they arrived. This pattern is most visible in Pauline at the Beach and A Summer's Tale.

  Rohmer avoided non-diegetic music, which he saw as breaking the fourth wall, though he inserted occasional soundtrack music in The Green Ray. He also avoided the full-face closeup, seeing it as failing to reflect how people actually see each other. And he spent considerable screen time showing characters simply moving from place to place: walking, driving, cycling, commuting by train. He considered mundane travel part of ordinary life.

  Half a dozen of his films are set in summer. He depicted that season as a time of beauty, leisure, and also "stagnation and aimlessness," giving characters the time and space to reveal their self-consciousness and anxiety. He preferred nonprofessional actors and usually shot chronologically, often at the actual time of day a scene takes place. Melvil Poupaud, who played the protagonist in A Summer's Tale, said no other filmmaker could write dialogue like that and make it ring true.

  Rohmer was highly literary. His films reference Jules Verne, William Shakespeare, and Pascal's wager, among others. He considered filmmaking "closer to the novel , to a certain classical style of novel which the cinema is now taking over , than the other forms of entertainment, like the theater." In the 1975 film Night Moves, Gene Hackman's character describes watching Rohmer's films as "kind of like watching paint dry." Rohmer would likely have found that more apt than offensive.

• 6. The Man Behind the Pseudonym

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  Rohmer's brother was the philosopher René Schérer. In 1957, the year his Hitchcock book appeared, Rohmer married Thérèse Barbet. The couple had two sons; the elder, René Monzat, born in 1958, became an author and investigative journalist whose work focuses on critiquing the French far-right.

  Rohmer was a devout Catholic, a monarchist, and what one account calls an "ecological zealot." He had no telephone for years and refused to ride in cars, calling them "immoral pollutors." He was known to jog two miles to his office every morning. His need for privacy was intense enough that he occasionally wore disguises in public. His mother died without ever knowing her son was a famous film director.

  His late-career period drama The Lady and the Duke provoked considerable controversy in France. Its negative portrayal of the French Revolution led some French critics to call it monarchist propaganda, a charge that aligned with what was known of his political convictions. The film was well received elsewhere for its cinematic style and performances.

  Rohmer died on the morning of the 11th of January 2010, at the age of 89, after a series of strokes. He had been admitted to hospital the previous week. Former Culture Minister Jack Lang called him "one of the masters of French cinema." At the 2010 César Awards, a tribute by Jacques Fieschi, read aloud by actor Fabrice Luchini, described Rohmer as a "sensual intellectual, with his silhouette of a teacher and a walker" who made "luminous and candid films in which he deliberately forgot his perfect knowledge of the cinema." The Cinémathèque Française, where Rohmer had first encountered the cinema that changed his life, held its own tribute on the 8th of February 2010, screening Claire's Knee alongside a video tribute from Jean-Luc Godard. Rohmer is buried in district 13 of Montparnasse Cemetery.