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Eric Rohmer Tamara Tracz is a filmmaker and writer living in London. |
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| In 1978, in the middle of a career spanning over fifty
years, Eric Rohmer made Percival le Galloise (Perceval). Unlike
anything he had made before, it became his first commercial failure since
the success of La Collectioneuse (The Collector) in 1967.
It would be over twenty years before he would return, with L'Anglaise
et le Duc (The Lady and the Duke, 2000) to anything similar.
In between, Rohmer continued to make the films for which he is most recognized,
included the two series, Comedies et proverbs (Comedies and Proverbs)
and Contes des quatres saisons (Tales of the Four Seasons),
films that bare the “hallmarks” of a Rohmer work: the contemporary
setting, the philosophical discussions, the intimate nature of the crisis
of well off, self-absorbed characters. They seem to have little in common
with the 11th Century French verse found in Percival le Galloise,
nor its forests of metal trees. And yet Percival le Galloise is a
film by Rohmer. American critic Jonathan Rosenbaum calls it his best work,
and positioned as it is, in the center of his oeuvre, it casts an important
light. (1) Rohmer came to filmmaking relatively late. He was a teacher, journalist and writer (of fiction as well as cinema theory and criticism) before making his first short in 1950, and commercial success came seventeen years later. These biographical details are easily available, but beyond the framework of his achievements—filmography, written work—personal information about Rohmer is hard to find. He is notoriously private. The name with which he signs his films is his second pseudonym. This is not to say that he is reclusive. Various myths exist about his “eccentricities” but they are neither verifiable nor relevant. His own reason for not giving interviews or attending festivals is that he values the anonymity that allows him to shoot quickly and cheaply on the streets. (2) The comments of friends and collaborators (more than most directors, Rohmer continually works with the same people, sometimes following them from adolescence through to middle age) (3) reveal an active and much loved man whose only eccentricity was a passion for the environment before it was fashionable. (4) But it is not possible, as with some artists, to look to his life in order to gain a better understanding of his work.
It is hard to separate the word, spoken and written, from Rohmer's work. If he is known for one thing, it is the fact that in his films, people talk. The preeminence given to spoken text, as well as illuminating Rohmer's cinematic vision, reaches back to his roots as a writer. In 1946 he published a novel, Elizabeth. The Contes moreaux (Moral Tales 1963-72) were originally written in novel form, but turned into films because, as the director stated: “I was not satisfied with them because I was unable to write them well enough.”(6) Despite this dissatisfaction, Rohmer continued to write, concentrating on criticism rather than fiction. He was one of the first contributors to Cahiers de cinéma and went on to be Editor that hugely influential journal from 1956 to 1963. His criticism, as well as reflecting his passion for cinema and his intelligence, shows a man who understands the use of language. While he realized his language was not the language of words, but of cinema, his cinema, though profoundly cinematic, is one that acknowledges, or rather, absorbs, text. (7) In 1948, two years before making his first film, in a piece for Les Temps modernes, arguing “For a Talking Cinema” Rohmer writes: In this early article, Rohmer set out the manifesto he followed throughout his career. He sees speech as an integral part of both life and cinema. In his work the word is not used to impart information, (9) but rather as a revelation of world and character—that is, it is used in exactly the same way as the image is used. The dialogue that fills Rohmer's films—its banalities, intricacies and lies, reveal the interior of his characters as much as their silent glances and physical hesitations. Words are never forced—he writes for the specific voice of each actor—they are used cinematically rather than literally. It is through writing that Rohmer's films consistently question the nature of the cinematic. It is shocking sometimes to see these long conversations and not be bored by their simple, often static representation. How can so much talk be cinematic? But these conversations are more than just talk. This isn't radio. Neither is it an interview or televised debate. This is talk visually represented. Word and image work together to create a third thing, cinema. But cinema is a vague term (silent films are, of course, cinema) bringing up the idea of moving images rather than this sound/image combination. Defending his Contes moreaux Rohmer writes: The concept of total cinema is often seen as one of pure image, the meaning so completely contained within that image that words are unnecessary. In his quiet way—within what he describes as “self imposed limitations” (11)—Rohmer is one of the few directors who has managed to arrive at a cinema that is doubly total. His is a cinema where the word is more than a signal post in the plot or a neat catchphrase, but something integrated into the cinematic world. He writes, “a means must be found to integrate words not into the filmed world but into the film…” (12) His work is a concerted and successful attempt to do this.
The Kleist novella is austere in style. The film has a fleshiness and sensuality. The scene where the Count looks at the unconscious Marquise is a good demonstration of this difference. In the book, as in the film, the identity of the father of the Marquise's child is not revealed until towards the end. But whereas the book uses a subtle trick (the inclusion of a dash) to indicate that something has happened, in the film we see the reality of a living body, abandoned in unconsciousness on a bed, and the gaze of a man surprised by it. While Rohmer stays true to the sprit off the book (in both one can guess but not be certain of the identity of the child's father) what he creates is something else. These are real people being filmed, real faces, each different, real feelings, acted or true. There is real blood in the woman's body, hers are real breasts, and there are real thoughts passing behind the eyes of the man who watches. While the book is controlled, the film, with all its characteristic attention to framing and construction, cannot quite contain the warmth and mess of human feeling and flesh. Film can't, as books can, create for the viewer/reader an empty space they can fill with visualization and consideration of what they have read, and possibly re-read. (16) When Rohmer states he does not say but shows, he is articulating one of the most essential differences between written text and filmed image.
Why does an arch-realist such as Rohmer use the profoundly non-naturalistic elements found in Perceval le Galloise? He could have gone to the remains of 11th century castles and towns in France, had he wanted. But he would have been filming the 1978 version of those places, and no doubt he considered that this was doubly false because it masqueraded under the banner of truth. By de-truthing fake truth, by being honestly fake, he makes a world that, while it is not fantasy, creates and sustains its own reality, a reality based in the poem that was written in the 11th century. It is not possible, in the 21st century, to know what the 11th looked or felt like. The formalization used in Perceval le Galloise, and the rigorous adhesion to the original text, not only acknowledges this, but brings us closer to the spirit—the essence—of that time than any other method of representation has managed. (18) There is much that could be called fake in Perceval le Galloise. There is the chorus that sings a commentary as well as taking on various subsidiary roles, the forest of abstract metal trees, the castles made of painted wood. There are also characters that not only say their lines but describe their interior thoughts and exterior actions—an interesting extension of the habit Rohmer's characters have of talking so much about themselves. It is no doubt this strangeness, along with an unusually long running time, that account for the film's lack of commercial success. Perceval le Galloise is not an easy film to watch. But, as Rohmer argued in the early days of Cahiers du cinéma, cinema is an art, and thus shares art's obligation not just to entertain but to challenge. (19) Perceval le Galloise certainly challenges. Unlike in Die Marquise von O, we are never allowed in to the human drama. There is no intimacy. Even the intimacies that are hinted, the mother's love for her child, the love of men for women, are ritualized almost in order to exclude emotion. For all its power, and indeed, its importance, Perceval le Galloise is not seductive, as is much of Rohmer's work. Its strangeness creates a distance that fascinates more than moves. And yet, Perceval le Galloise is absolutely a Rohmer film. One of the many startling things about the film is that it has no real ending. None of its three separate stories, those of Perceval, Gawain and Christ, are brought to conventional conclusions. The film ends in the middle, with Perceval riding through landscape, the quest ongoing and almost unnamed. It is an abrupt and initially confusing ending, but also just. Stories and incidents exist, but endings rarely exist. While death can be seen as one definitive ending, it is only the ending for the individual involved. Life is a series of interconnected and overlapping stories and this is reflected in Rohmer's films. While they frequently have the spirit of fairy tales, they never end as fairy tales do, with a full stop. The ending is always open, always part of another beginning, always touched with ambiguity. Because Rohmer insists on filming real people, moving and talking, he cannot allow himself to indicate that their lives stop with the film.
There is no neatness either in Rohmer's characters, who frequently contradict themselves, both with words and actions as they circle endlessly around their private predicaments and desires. Rohmer is frequently criticized for making films about the machinations of the lives of self-obsessed people. It is certainly true that in the majority of his films the characters spend much of their time discussing themselves. This leads to further accusations that the films are banal—or rather, that they celebrate banality. Unlike many of the films of Rohmer's Nouvelle Vague comrades, Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol and Rivette, there is rarely any high drama in his work. The only films that contain such drama are the three based on the books of others. He has no cops and robbers, no killers or pimps or thwarted lovers. Even his adulterer in L'Amour l'apres-midi (Chloe in the Afternoon/Love in the Afternoon, 1972) doesn't actually commit adultery- he barely even kisses the woman who tempts him. (21) Rohmer's films reveal what it is to be alive without narrative fireworks—or rather, what it is when the fireworks of ones life are as small and simple as finding a companion for the summer holidays (Le Rayon vert, Conte d'été) or feeling desire for someone other than your chosen partner (Contes moreaux). The majority of people live lives without car chases. What may seem like banality becomes, when looked at with Rohmer's compassionate yet distanced eye, a revelation, through the quotidian, of the profound. He looks inside the intimate action of movement, train rides, car journeys, walks by the sea, intimate conversations about “me”, “my thoughts,”, “my desires” and uses these things as a conduit to reach the soul. He sees through what may strike some as petty, banal, even annoying, (Delphine's endless crying in Le Rayon Vert, Gaspard with his silly song in Conte d'été) to the living person underneath, whose pain is real, and thus always worthy of pity—whose struggles, however small, are real, and thus always worthy of our attention. You never sense that he is mocking his characters, no matter how ridiculous their behavior. It is his refusal to fall into such cheap stratagems that give his films depth, and lift what may otherwise seem like the self obsessed traumas of the young and middle class into something more important. Accusations of banality also ignore something critical in all Rohmer's work—the moral and philosophical element. Morality is central to Rohmer; his first film series was, after all, the Contes moreaux. This forces a critic to consider the nature of Rohmer's moral universe, of exactly where, if at all, one finds the boundaries of right and wrong. There seems to be a certain element of moral judgment in many of the films. Louise is punished for her infidelity in Le Nuits de plein lune and Sabine's humiliation with Edmond in Le Beau Marriage seems like a punishment, both for her affair with a married man, but more for her disdain for the importance of marriage.
And yet, this quote talks of Hitchcock's universe, not Rohmer's—whose personal beliefs are as unknown as his private life. As frequently as he is accused of being banal, Rohmer is accused of being conservative. Such comments can only be based on a surface reading of the films. (23) Rohmer insists that his work is the product of his imagination, and the ideas contained within them are not drawn from his life. (24) By doing so he places its importance out of the realm of personal experience and into something wider. Morality is a central issue, but what the films reveal is not an intention to define morality, to make clear the boundary between right and wrong, but an exploration of the nature of morality itself. You never get the sense that any of Rohmer's characters are evil, in the way a Bressonian character can be. Rohmer doesn'tcondemn his characters, though they frequently lie to both others and themselves, and sometimes, as in La Boulangère de Monceau (The Girl at the Monceau Bakery, 1963) use other people quite cruelly. The films do not make moral judgments, neither on the characters nor on the issues that face them. Their concern is the exploration of the dilemma, and what it reveals of the human. The only accurate comment that can be made on Rohmer's own morality is his consistent refusal to judge his characters. Just as he never makes fun of them when they are foolish, so he never damns or lauds their choices. It is this that makes his films so deeply humane. It is also what makes them adult. The respect Rohmer shows his characters extends to his viewers, whose intelligence, perception and patience are generously presumed upon. He places himself, not above, as the author, but alongside. The audience does any judgment that takes place, though one would hope that the films might encourage them to do otherwise. As Rohmer writes, in the Hitchcock book: “It is not the tragic poet's business to judge his characters, not any man's business to judge his fellows.” (25) The complexity of Rohmer's work constantly brings the viewer up against such ongoing contradictions. He seems a traditionalist with his simple camera angles and constant reworking of themes, yet he has consistently embraced new technologies. Along with other Nouvelle Vague directors, he was enthusiastic about the introduction of 16mm. More recently, in L'Anglaise et le Duc, he embraces digital technologies in a way more radical than George Lucas could ever imagine. And so, after acknowledging elements of conservatism in his work, one is confronted with a scene in Die Marquise von O which shocks in the powerful and overt nature of its social commentary, and which is described in detail to make clear how inaccurate and misleading many of the accusations against Rohmer have been.
One of the reasons why Rohmer is often accused of things that on deeper investigation seem unjustified, is because, like his characters, he is in permanent transit. While his themes remain similar his attitudes are more fluid. In an interview with Jean Narboni that forms the introduction to a collection of his critical writing, he says: Rohmer's ability to continue exploring, changing his mind as times change and thought develops, is part of his work as a filmmaker. No doubt it is one of the things that keep him so young. (28) Just as his characters talk in prolonged dialogues, so his films are an ongoing dialogue that needs never end because its purpose is not the revelation of a solution. The problems of living, which is really what all of the films are about, are problems without end. In order to really know ourselves we have to be ready to change our minds and reconsider, to remain open to whatever time and experience can show. Later in the interview, Rohmer says “Well, I've changed, and then again I haven't changed.” (29) Perhaps the only way to know ourselves is to also know that we know nothing.
Such vulnerability is a thing of mystery. Just as Jeanne can never explain why she can't be alone at her lover's house, it is impossible to really understand how Felicie could give the wrong address to her lover. This is the secret heart of us. This is the mystery, Perceval's holy grail, whose importance we sense but whose reality it is impossible to truly understand. Rohmer's films are seeped in such mystery, which manifests itself in the lies people tell, to each other and themselves, and in the always-present absences in his films. So often there is a missing person- Jeanne's boyfriend, Jerome's fiancée, the absent Charles, the aviator's wife. Characters also choose to absent themselves, Jeanne in Natasha's house, Delphine in her constant attempts at a holiday, Louise from almost everybody as she searches a solitude she can't negotiate. In the light of this sense of absence, this mysterious center that no one can describe, all the talk in the films takes on a new light. While it is, of course, part of the realism of Rohmer's word, revealing so much, it is also, suddenly, a form of whistling in the dark, a desperate attempt to create enough noise to drown the silence, and the darkness at its core. Such complex and difficult concepts work in Rohmer's films because they are so rooted in realism. Their physicality grounds them, and it is not surprising that ground- place and space- are important in his work. Many of his silences take place in moments of transit, Gaspard's wanderings in the opening sequence of Conte d'été are an obvious example. Driving is central is Ma Nuit chez Maud, and Conte d'hiver, train journeys are found in Le Beau marriage and L'Amour l'apres-midi, the bus in La Femme de l'aviateur (The Aviator's Wife, 1980), the speedboat in Le Genou de Claire (1971). Movement is so important in Perceval le Galloise that it constitutes the final image and words of the film: “The knight rode on through the forest.” Traveling does more than give a space for the characters to be silent. It shows us the space in which life is lived. So much of life is taken up in the simple necessary movement from one place to another. Instead of dispensing with these moments Rohmer underlines them. He tells of people that move and speak; and movement, the passage through space in which nothing seems to happen, but in which we still breath and think, is given its just importance.
When talking about Ma Nuit chez Maud, Almendros writes: Such rigorous preparation is more than a reaction to the low budgets within which Rohmer tends to work. (31) His habit of long rehearsal and very few takes (often no more than one) reflects a man who knows exactly what he wants. Rohmer's late start, especially after years of writing about film, can perhaps account for this. While his films are sometimes radical (though quietly so) they are not experiments. They are the product of someone who has thought long and thoroughly about what he wants to say and how to say it. All his films, even the historical ones, share a similar shooting style, one that is pared down to the essentials. There are rarely impressive or dramatic camera moves. Framing is direct, and movement always has a reason behind it—and typically for Rohmer, a human reason. In Ma Nuit chez Maud, for instance, Rohmer uses a close up only once, when Maud relates the story of her lover's death. And even this shot is a close up in which, by leaning forward, the movement inwards is on the part of the actress, not the camera. It is impossible when writing about Rohmer to not continually find oneself returning to his own definition of his work: “I do not say, I show. I show people who move and speak.” Rohmer has been described as a director who is loved or hated. He has been accused of various crimes from celebrating banality to being an arch conservative. It seems initially odd that such gentle work as Rohmer's can excite these strong reactions. But these accusations are less surprising the deeper one explores the work. The loneliness and vulnerability of his characters, the detailed scrutiny of moral issues of the everyday while refraining from making a moral conclusion, and the refusal to provide neat or conclusive endings all force the viewer to both work with the film, and look inwards. This can be uncomfortable, and when done while watching such urbane and beautifully put together works, very disconcerting. And yet, if I had to find one word to sum up Rohmer's work, the word would be generous. Generosity in the way he treats his characters and the way he treats his audience, and generosity which extends even to the size of his oeuvre. (32) At 82, he continues to work. Like Perceval, he continues in search of an un-findable mystery, casting light through the act of searching. © Tamara Tracz, December 2002 Endnotes:
Filmography Journal d'un scélérat (1950) shortPrésentation ou Charlotte et son steak (1951) short Les Petites filles modèles (1952) short Bérénice (1954) short La Sonate à Kreutzer (1956) short Véronique et son cancre (1958) short Le Signe du lion (The Sign of Leo) (1959) La Carrière de Suzanne (Suzanne's Career) (1963) short La Boulangère de Monceau (The Girl at the Monceau Bakery) (1963) short Nadja à Paris (1964) short Le Celluloid et la marbre (1965) television Carl Dreyer (1965) television
Une Étudiante d'aujourd'hui (1966) short Fermière à Montfauçon (1967) short La Collectionneuse (The Collector) (1967) Ma Nuit chez Maud (My Night with Maud) (1969) Le Genou de Claire (Claire's Knee) (1971) L'Amour l'après-midi (Chloe in the Afternoon, Love in the Afternoon) (1972) Die Marquise von O... (The Marquise of O) (1976) Perceval le Gallois (1978)
Le Beau mariage (A Good Marriage) (1982) Loup y es-tu? (1983) Pauline à la plage (Pauline at the Beach) (1983) Les Nuits de la pleine lune (Full Moon in Paris) (1984) Le Rayon vert (The Green Ray) (1986) Quatre aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle (Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle) (1987) L'Ami de mon amie (Boyfriends and Girlfriends) (1987) Conte de printemps (A Tale of Springtime) (1990) Conte d'hiver (A Winter's Tale) (1992) L'Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque (The Tree, The Mayor and the Mediatheque) (1993) Les Rendez-vous de Paris (Rendezvous in Paris) (1995) Conte d'été (A Summer's Tale) (1996) Conte d'automne (Autumn Tale) (1998) L'Anglaise et le duc (The Lady and the Duke) (2000) Triple Agent (2004) 
Select Bibliography Nestor
Almendros, A Man with a Camera, translated by Rachel Philips Belash,
Noonday Press, 1986
Articles in Senses of Cinema Rohmer
Talk
Web Resources Compiled by author and Albert Fung Eric
Rohmer
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