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You are here: Home Leisure Arts & Culture Remembering Eric Rohmer: A cinematic maverick who never...

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14/01/2010Remembering Eric Rohmer: A cinematic maverick who never compromised

Remembering Eric Rohmer: A cinematic maverick who never compromised The New Wave film director who died in Paris on Monday was best known for producing films that were intrinsically French and full of bright, often improvised dialogue.

Eric Rohmer, a pivotal member of France's New Wave film movement that changed the history of the art form, has died aged 89, leaving behind an immense yet subtle and sensitive body of work.

An intensely private and modest man, Rohmer was also a highly influential figure in postwar cinema, first for his work as a film critic, then throughout his long career as a director.

In his most popular works, such as Ma Nuit Chez Maud (My Night at Maud's) and Pauline a la Plage (Pauline at the Beach), he displayed a lightness of touch and delicious sense of irony, proving cinema could be absorbing without complex story lines or resorting to bloodshed.

Invariably intimate, but never minimalist, his films were meticulous explorations of moral conundrums, shot in a naturalistic manner without use of a soundtrack.

Intrinsically French and full of bright, often improvised dialogue, Rohmer's films were frequently compared to the work of the 18th century dramatist Marivaux.



But he had his critics, their view encapsulated in a comment by a tough detective played by Gene Hackman in Arthur Penn's 1975 film Night Moves, in which he complained that watching a Rohmer film was like watching paint dry.

Born Jean-Marie Maurice Scherer on 4 April 1920, in the eastern French city of Nancy, Rohmer began life as a journalist and then a teacher and gave early notice of his liking for anonymity when he published his 1946 novel Elisabeth under the pseudonym Gilbert Cordier.

Moving to Paris and joining the staff of the influential film journal Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s, where he worked alongside other New Wave directors Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette, Scherer settled into the assumed identity of Rohmer.

Rohmer directed his first feature Le Signe du Lion (The Sign of Leo) in 1959 just as the New Wave was emerging, but unlike the celebrated responses to the films by Godard and Truffaut, his was a flop.

It was not until his friend, Barbet Schroeder, set up the production company Les Films du Losange, that Rohmer could begin to work freely, never demanding high production costs to retain his artistic autonomy.

AFP / EPA PHOTOTheir lifetime producer-director partnership is one of the most productive in cinema to date.

Often working in cycles, Rohmer first embarked on his most celebrated series of films, Six Contes Moraux (Six Moral Tales), which began with the short La Boulangere de Monceau (The Girl at the Monceau Bakery) in 1962 and La Carriere de Suzanne (Suzanne's Career).

His real breakthrough came in 1966 with the third of the cycle, La Collectionneuse (The Collector), a controversial study of female promiscuity, and established himself internationally with 1968's Ma Nuit Chez Maud (My Night at Maud's), a subtle film about sex, romance and religion which won an Oscar nomination for best foreign film.

Rohmer's cinema, which he has described as one of "thoughts rather than actions", dealing "less with what people do than what is going on in their minds while they are doing it", remains a vital antithesis to Hollywood.

AFP / Expatica


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