Issue 39

Co-editors’ introduction to this commemorative issue on Eric Rohmer.

Like many of his collaborators, filmmaker Jackie Raynal was present at the Cinémathèque Française’s memorial homage to Rohmer earlier this year. Sparked by the occasion, she looks back at her time with Rohmer in this heartfelt reminiscence.

A landmark interview originally published in Cahiers du cinéma in 1970. The journal was in the midst of its Marxist/Leninist era, while Rohmer's Bazinian idealism was vindicated by the success of My Night at Maud’s. A fascinating joust between two entirely opposed views of the cinema

Fellow critic and filmmaker Luc Moullet gives due consideration to Rohmer’s sketch in Paris vu par… highlighting its fidelity to location.

Rohmer was himself a private and reserved individual who, more often that not, shunned the spotlight. Bruce Perkins examines three documentaries on the filmmaker, and concludes that together they offer as vivid and multi-dimensional a portrait of Rohmer as we can wish for.

Former pupil and author of a study on Rohmer, Alain Hertay, offers a reflection on the short films Rohmer made for educational television.

In both content and form, a strong pedagogical endeavour has informed the work of Rohmer throughout his career. Darragh O’Donoghue discusses this inclination, focusing on some of the earlier shorts and made-for-television documentaries.

The topographical tracings of Rohmer’s feature debut reveal a dual motif: the cartographic and the photographic. Roland-François Lack’s insightful essay meticulously traces the unfolding of this dual motif.

Jacob Leigh looks into both the production history and the general cultural influences that inform Rohmer’s first-produced but fourth listed of the feature length ‘Moral Tales’.

Arthur Penn’s 1975 detective thriller contains one of the most noted of references to My Night a Maud’s, but as Bruce Jackson argues, it is more than just a token nod.

Love, morality, fidelity and chance crystallised around Pascal’s ‘wager’. Taken by many to be the key film of the ‘Six Moral Tales’ series, the fascination of this film has not receded with time. Constantine Santas unravels the film’s thematics.

Karen Goodman examines the nature of desire and subjectivity, both male and female, in Rohmer’s first great series of films.

Infused with artifice, Rohmer’s remarkable adaptation of Chrétien de Troyes’ 12th-century verse poem marked a temporary radical shift in style for the filmmaker. But why? Daniel Fairfax looks for answers in the light of post-68 French film theory.

Much of Rohmer’s ‘80s and ‘90s work concerns the myriad of amorous choices his modern heroines face. Moreover, Fiona Handyside argues, they form a meta-text on the representation of love through the ages.

A discursive exploration on the philosophic significance of the figure of ‘the crying woman’ in this most radiant of films.

A selection of individual tributes and short essays by Terry Ballard, Adam Bingham, Conall Cash, John Conomos, David F. Coursen, Adrian Danks, Linda Ehrlich, and Wheeler Winston Dixon.