As I was eating my dinner I logged on to my twitter and saw a tweet by Criterion. Eric Rohmer, French New Wave director and Cahiers critic, passed away today. The news was quite surprising because just before I got home from my Italian cinema class (a screening of Fellini's La Dolce Vita) I stopped to see what the Film Studies Center has planned for this quarter. They started the quarter with Hôtel du Nord (Marcel Carné, 1938). The first three weeks of the quarter are part of French series. This Friday they will be showing Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966), which I will be attending despite the Chicago premiere of Araya with an introduction by Jonathan Rosenbaum taking place at the same time across campus (the Bresson screening is for a class). But I've digressed just slightly. Anyway, the week after next the Film Studies Center will be showing Eric Rohmer's most recent film, Romance of Astree and Celadon (2007). It was quite a jolt to come home and read that Rohmer had passed away after seeing the screening schedule and thinking how great it is that he, the oldest of Cahiers bunch, was still an active filmmaker.
I got my first taste of Rohmer through the first and second films of the Six Moral Tales. I found The Bakery Girl of Monceau quite charming and totally in the spirit of the early films of his Cahiers colleagues. After seeing the next film in the series I did not return to Rohmer until last winter. One of the perks of winter vacation at my undergraduate university was the length. We were given a month off. Obviously, this month encouraged me to watch and read as much as possible. I decided to watch some more of Rohmer's Six Moral Tales. I distinctly recall sitting in my room and being totally enamored with Claire's Knee. I was so enamored that I had to watch Love in the Afternoon immediately. More often that not I find films with too much dialogue dull, which is due partially to the trite dialogue in a lot of American films. What really bothers me with dialogue-heavy films is that it runs the risk of being a crutch for the filmmaker. Dialogue has the tendency to shift the viewer's attention from the eye to the ear. Rohmer's films are notoriously talky, yet he never degrades the visual. His work (at least what I am familiar with) is centered on human relationships but is intimately tied to the space of encounters. Just as one, as I openly admit, can fall in love with his characters, it is equally plausible to fall in love with his landscapes. It does not matter where Rohmer is -- be it the heart of Paris or a village off of Lake Annecy. The relationship of character to space is every bit as intimate as it is between characters.
His work departs from the "New Wave" style visually but it (again, in what I have seen) respects one of its underlying principles. Nothing in Rohmer ever seems forced. His dialogue is bound with a freedom and spontaneity that resists a specific trajectory. Anything seems possible. Ideas, tones, gestures emerge out of nowhere and take conversations (or internal monologues) into different directions.
This scene from Love in the Afternoon (1972) is a great example of the Rohmer style.
Adieu M. Rohmer.
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