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The book aims to provide a balanced appraisal of Eric Rohmer's oeuvre in historical context. Although interpretation of individual films will not be its main objective, representative examples from the director's twenty-five features and fiction shorts will be presented throughout. The focus is on production history and reception in the mainstream French press. This key stylistic editing trait cannot be appreciated without reference to André Bazin's concept of ontological realism, of which Rohmer was a major exponent at
motifs. For all their formal rigour, his Contes moraux (1962–72), Comédies et proverbes (1981–87), and Contes des quatre saisons (1990–98) are unburdened by programmatic constraints of the kind that Krzysztof Kieslowski, a selfdeclared admirer of Rohmer, employs in his ten-part Dekalog (1988), inspired by the Holy Commandments (Amiel 1997 : 100). Rohmer’s series titles themselves are inviting and capacious: in place of the restrictive genres
coherence. The six Contes moraux (Moral Tales, 1962–72), six Comédies et proverbes (Comedies and Proverbs, 1981–1987), and four Contes des quatre saisons (Tales of the Four Seasons, 1990–98), together with sketch films (4 Aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle, 1987), literary adaptations (Die Marquise von O…, 1976; Perceval le Gallois, 1979), and costume dramas (Triple agent, 2004) present a
marginalised figure. He started writing and making short films before any of the other critics turned directors that he met through Paris cineclubs and at Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s. From the late 1940s, while working as a teacher, he wrote literary prose texts which later formed the basis of the Six contes moraux / Six Moral Tales shot between 1962 to 1972. 30 In the preface to the literary texts
editor-in-chief. He had missed the crest of the New Wave by a good two years. Les Films du Losange and the 16mm Contes moraux Early commercial failure was perversely to enable long-term viability for Rohmer at the margins of the French motion picture industry. If he wished to continue directing, budgetary austerity and a keener sense of subject matter were clearly in order (Williams 1992 : 376). As
auteurism further than most, creating cycles that endlessly rearrange basic motifs in patterns both familiar and unique. While any given series instalment may fall short of what most cinema-goers construe as ‘greatness’ – a threshold attained perhaps only in Ma Nuit chez Maud –, what matters ultimately is its place in an interlocking whole. Consequently, the Contes moraux, Comédies et proverbes, or Contes des quatre saisons
(see figure 3 ), or in the sidewalk scenes of L’Amour l’aprèsmidi , all but disappear in work after the Contes moraux , like an item of clothing gone out of fashion or a newfangled toy that restricts the imagination instead of stimulating it. The director’s point in privileging the 50mm lens is not to efface the traces of the camera – a task that the frame and the splice make impossible – but to instate a comfortable
– Marxism and psychoanalysis – in the name of ideology critique. Conclusion After his split with Cahiers in 1963, Rohmer turned to full-time direction, working on his Contes moraux cycle and preparing documentaries for French television. While he was not to return to regular film criticism thereafter – the 1972 thesis on the uses of space and movement in Murnau’s Faust is an
, 1970) and L’Amour l’après-midi ( Love in the Afternoon , 1972), the series was considered by Rohmer to constitute variations on a single theme: in each film, a man pursuing one woman inadvertently comes across another before finally returning to the first. But unlike the récit form, the ‘Contes moraux’ do not present authoritative male narrators. Although based on Rohmer’s own first-person, male
feature contemporary characters who lead modern lifestyles and use up-to-date language. On several occasions, the director has turned the clocks backward, looking to moments as remote as the high Middle Ages and Revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe, and as recent as the 1930s and 1940s. Die Marquise von O… (1976) and Perceval le Gallois (1979), shot in the interim between the Contes moraux and Comédies et proverbes, are