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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
reconstruction, Rohmer’s first three costume films seek historical authenticity through dialogue with pre-cinematic art forms capable of enriching the medium’s expressive range. Triple agent (2004) continues this search for a critical authenticity in a new key, since its action is set at a time when motion pictures are themselves woven into the fabric of daily life. After the credit sequence, over which we hear a recording of Dimitri
and so many weeks for another. The script was not just an outline of events and the marking out of dialogue and of character but a découpage, a pre-editing of the film into sequences and sub-sequences and at times even into shots and suggestions of placement and movement (of actors and of camera) that determined the building of sets and the provision of decor and of costume. Films (and production schedules) were organised according to relatively fixed genres or types of film not unlike fashions or models of motor cars. One of the qualities that these films had was
features associated with poetic realism and its status as a spectacular costume film, both of which stress to varying degrees the art/entertainment dichotomy. One of Les Enfants du paradis ’s distinctions is that it has been seen as the culmination of poetic realism. Even at the time of the film’s release, it was being marketed for its ‘poetic’ and its ‘realist’ qualities, as indicated by this passage from
dramas and historical films are different from each other. Historical films deal with real people or events: Henry VIII, the Battle of Waterloo, Lady Hamilton. Costume film uses the mythic and symbolic aspects of the past as a means of providing pleasure, rather than instruction.’ 42 By making no such claims to instruction, The Tudors was immediately attacked for its unapologetic use of history
- Enlightenment Romanticism’.38 Notes 1 Andrea Arnold cited in Amy Raphael, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, Sight & Sound, 21: 12 (2012), pp. 34–6; p. 36. 2 The author loosely defines heritage film as a genre, although this is a term applied to a group of films whereby heritage is commodified. For further reading on issues of genre and heritage see Andrew Higson, Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), and for more recent debates Claire Monk and Amy Sargeant (eds), British Historical Cinema: The History, Heritage and Costume Film
for explorations of general and gendered viewing and their historical specificity particularly acknowledged. Some explorations of audiences and their viewing pleasures are organised around generically specific films. Sue Harper’s examination of the British costume film seeks to explore this particular genre of films and the cultures of production and reception which led to their creation. She identifies that these particular films not only deal with and mediate the past for audiences, but in doing so they indicate what kind of past is being preferred by those
, identity, and opposition that lend each cycle a complex, musical texture. The art or, rather, the difficulty of representing the past is the subject of Chapter 5 , ‘Literature and history’, which pays close attention to four of the director’s costume films, each of which rethinks the cinema in relation to the artistic imaginary of past epochs. The volume concludes with a brief excursus on le rohmérien – that inimitable
Representative of their approaches are Jeffrey Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain 1930–39 (Basingstoke and London: Routledge, 1989); Sue Harper, Picturing the Past: The Rise and Fall of the British Costume Film (London: BFI, 1994). 11 Arthur Marwick, Culture in Britain since 1945 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell
Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983 ); Kara McKechnie, ‘Taking liberties with the monarch: the royal bio-pic in the 1990s’, in Claire Monk and Amy Sargeant (eds), British Historical Cinema: The History, Heritage and Costume Film (London: Routledge, 2002 ); and Jeffrey Richards, ‘The monarchy and film 1900–2006 ’, in