Lessons from Éric Rohmer
Julien Mahon
It is a little known fact that, between 1977 and 2001, Éric Rohmer gave weekly classes at the Institute of Art and Archaeology on the Rue Michelet, in Paris. For him, this was his side of an agreement that the filmmaker had made with the Sorbonne when he was preparing Perceval le Gallois. The university made a rehearsal room available to Rohmer, while he undertook to give free film and art history classes to students. This agreement, which had no specific time limit, lasted for almost twenty-five years. Though very often stubborn if asked to theorize about his work, the director was actually always extremely forthcoming when it came to talking about the practical making of his films, and he readily agreed to give courses in “économie du cinéma” or “film economy.” But let there be no mistake as to what this meant: the title “film economy” was to be taken quite literally, i.e. as the introduction of a method consisting in saving money (faire des économies) in the cinema. So there was no exposition of the more or less complicated financial arrangements for his own films, and even less theorizing about the distribution of auteur films in France; what there was was nothing less than a presentation of tricks and tips helping the filmmaker to make a film for half the budget of a television film.
A few days after Rohmer’s death, France Culture enabled us to listen to the last of these classes—having finally retired from the Sorbonne, he had accepted an invitation from the FÉMIS, on 17 March 2009 1. So people could hear him boasting about a certain shot in A Tale of Summer, because it had not cost anything, and yet it was “very rich” (read: you can see a lot of extras in it); people also learned that, returning from holiday, he had found the locations for My Night at Maud’s in Clermont-Ferrand “which was on the way to Paris,” that he had eaten sandwiches there and had not slept on the spot (it is not known if he took the motorway, but he very likely opted for a canny succession of ordinary roads to avoid paying the tolls). And for the FÉMIS students, Rohmer produced an endless list of cheeseparing savings for almost two hours. At the end of his talk, a brave female student was nevertheless keen to ask him a question about his characters, but the unfortunate young woman was somewhat curtly brushed aside, and Rohmer refused to talk about anything other “economy” and “savings” because, he said, “there wasn’t enough time.” Once over the surprise and a kind of perverse amusement, one question inevitably nagged at the listener’s mind: what was the point of such a talk? What message, year after year, did Rohmer want to get across to the people who went to listen to him? For, at first glance, this course in household economics applied to film seems, with such an audience, thoroughly beside the point. On the one hand, the FÉMIS students have no option, in their initial years spent making films, but to make low-budget ones: it serves no purpose to recommend poverty to future filmmakers who will be acquainted with that state for at least a while to come. On the other hand 1, the issue of shortages of money for auteur films does not come up very much in terms of production, but rather with regard to distribution, the problem for any young French filmmaker being not so much “How am I going to make my film?” (box-office advance from the CNC, regional backing, and advance buying by television channels all answer this question in a fairly satisfactory way), but more: “How am I going to make it exist?” This type of discourse, which is a priori unexpected from an intellectual filmmaker such as Rohmer, probably had a twofold function: first and foremost, to preserve his privacy, in other words, helping him to avoid answering questions about what inspired him, which he might find too intrusive. We are acquainted with the filmmaker’s liking of secrecy . . . for example, while in New York for a screening of Love in the Afternoon, he donned a false moustache to keep his anonymity. Then—and this is more to the point—this kind of discourse enabled him to answer only precise questions, and not take part in any ecstatic logorrhea which he might have indulged in as a critic, but which his profession as filmmaker had caused to view with horror. Those courses and classes were, in a deeper sense, a metaphor of his filmmaking method: whether adapting Chrétien de Troyes, or directing a fifteen-year-old girl, or looking for a way to avoid paying to park the camera car, aesthetic questions were above all, for Rohmer, concrete questions that had to be dealt with.
Because Éric Rohmer’s main concern was invariably precision (Serge Daney, who, in his youth, dreamed of being Robert Musil, rightly described “Rohmer’s world [as] one of precision 2”); and if you look at French film production over these last 30 years, it has to be said that, in spite of his many activities, he spent his time preaching in the wilderness. So young filmmakers of the 1980s usually strictly idolized the image of which, in his day, Serge Daney was one of the better analysts; films of the 1990s and 2000s, seemingly more multi-facetted and less idiotic, were once more well-removed from Rohmer’s influence. In a conversation3 with the filmmaker Vincent Dietschy at the Rencontre européennes du moyen-métrage [European Medium-Length Film Festival] in Brive, Serge Bozon, director of Mods and La France, and an erstwhile critic at La Lettre du cinéma, thus put his finger on two major trends. In the early 1990s, Maurice Pialat seemed to be the overarching figure against whom all ambitious young filmmakers wanted to gauge themselves. Family crises, domestic scenes, and neuroses of the day were the main themes of a cinema (described in the dullest terms by the press as “jeune cinema français” or “young French cinema”) which very quickly ran out of steam. French filmmakers actually soon switched subjects and, in their quest for inspiration, this time around, from such directors as Lynch and Cronenberg, they turned to the very contemporary motif of the body, with all its fits and forms of dysfunction, as well as its relation to technology. Serge Bozon uttered serious reservations with regard to the relevance of these two sources of influence, likening both of them to a step backwards towards a naturalism that, in quoting the critic and filmmaker Jean-Claude Biette, he defined as “a forced identification [. . .] between elementary life and the human race 4.” The issue of cinematographic naturalism has to do with its tendency to think that the more a character or a situation has something primal about him or it, the truer and more real the film will be. So characters in French films made in the 1990s were almost always down-and-out losers (from Valéria Bruni-Tedeschi, who, in a matter of weeks, became the undisputed star of this film form, to the characters in the films of Arnaud Desplechin, for whom neurosis stood in for truth) and those of the 2000s who were very often outright fools (Grégoire Colin in the films of Claire Denis and Éric Zonca, and all the characters in the films of Bruno Dumont). Naturalism, as we can see, culminated in an overall impoverishment of a very considerable chunk of auteur cinema, in the themes broached, the variation of tones actually within the films, and the types of characters depicted (the problem, needless to say, being not making films about idiots, but no longer doing anything but that). The most tragic thing in this wholesale dumbing-down is that it is partly the outcome of a catastrophic digestion of the films of Robert Bresson. There are, to be sure, simple characters in Bresson’s movies, but his style also enables him to present the most eloquent Joan of Arc in the history of film, and invent magnificent figures of dandies and intellectuals in what is probably the finest spiritual record of May ’68, The Devil Probably. In the “young French cinema” we are talking about, what comes across as a kind of aesthetic asceticism is, conversely, a sophisticated approach intent on hiding the emptiness of its idea by a paradoxically elegant stance.
Last year, with his movie Hadewijch, Bruno Dumont, a would-be iconoclastic filmmaker, created a sort of yardstick of contemporary auteur cinema. By way of a portrait of a very young girl filled with an endless love of Christ, this film was supposed to deal with faith. By identifying all over again the elementary and the human race, Dumont turned the Catholic faith into an animal impulse, made his female saint a mentally retarded person, and systematically asked his actress to gaze at landscapes with a stupid but “mystic” look, before making her the first Christian–Islamic kamikaze in the history of film. Naturalist cinema is also a vague cinema in so much as it is incapable of dodging approximations as soon as it deals with issues which are not only related to sheer violence or the most rudimentary sentimentalism. It is with regard to this sort of disaster that Éric Rohmer’s cinema seems so important today. In My Night at Maud’s, his most famous film, Rohmer also depicts a Catholic, no less of a believer than the girl in Hadewijch, and probably no less overwhelmed by the Christlike mystery, but simply never vague, always tangibly true and, on arrival, much more mysterious and ambiguous. The fact is that Rohmer incorporated his character within a precise social setting, a living environment and, above all, a much more complex moral questioning. The issue has to do not so much with defending a credible, realist cinema, versus a cinema of poetry and sensation, but with observing that a filmmaker’s concern for exactness is the guarantee of his or her freedom of expression and, in the same movement, makes it possible to do away with clichés: so in My Night at Maud’s, Jean-Louis Trintignant is Catholic but spends his spare time sorting out mathematical problems, believes in faithfulness but is prone to temptation, and goes to Mass to meet young women there, on the side. The real Catholic is not the one that is filmed staring vaguely out into the void while taking on an earnest look, but a man whose moral quest is described, by showing how it differs from the quest of a Marxist, for example (and rarely has there ever been such a remarkable Marxist character as the one incarnated by Antoine Vitez in My Night at Maud’s).
Within the narrative itself, precision is also that faculty Éric Rohmer has to get the viewer to understand the slightest sentimental, spiritual and existential variations of the characters, or alternatively the ceaseless changes in their relations. Every moment in a Rohmer movie is dense, and full of meanings; every shot in them has a role to play. This rigor is all the more spectacular in the films that are, a priori, Rohmer’s most thankless and unattractive, those where the stories are seemingly the most trivial, and the actors the least charismatic (for example, in the sketch with the punctured bicycle tire in Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle). A shot is never a proof of mastery per se: it is always the means of developing a line of thought in the film’s own economy. Last of all, Rohmer’s hand never seems to waver; he never wagers on a spectator’s momentary inattentiveness, on his or her ability to imagine things which do not exist in the film. The person watching a Rohmer movie must always be concentrated, must always be “present and correct” in terms of the attentiveness being asked of him. In his essay De Mozart en Beethoven 5, Rohmer admits that he never listens to music while he is doing something else at the same time; when he listens to a Mozart quintet, his mind does not wander because the relation to the work is the relation to the work itself, and the latter is not a way of gaining access to another state. Here, precision in Rohmer’s work is above all an antipagan approach. If mystery there be in a work (and a work of art is perforce endowed with mystery), it comes after thought and analysis; it never issues from even a partial lack of understanding, or pure sensation.
The complexity and ambiguity of narrative and psychology alike in Rohmer’s work embodies, last of all, a sort of ideal classicism, the most capable of depicting the modern world. Critics, moreover, have always got a little lost here. Is Rohmer classical or modern? Serge Daney, who was far from being the most incompetent of his commentators, wrote in 1982, when A Good Marriage was released: “As a classical filmmaker, Rohmer comes up against the major problem of classicism:he goes faster and faster [. . . ] but the faster he goes, the less he goes anywhere 6.” And two years later he wrote about Full Moon in Paris that Rohmer “practices a sort of perverse Brechtism,” and that “the modern auteur is jealous of his spectator. His art, in the final analysis, consists in taking us back to the bedroom door. This may be called ‘alienation 7.’” In reality, Rohmer was probably the only classical French filmmaker to film modernity so accurately and so fully. As a good classical artist, Rohmer thought that life is difficult but simple, and he systematically filmed modern characters who think that life is easy but complicated. So it was in a perverse way that Rohmer would spend the 1980s depicting, in his “Comedies and Proverbs,” young people going astray in phoney problems, and lying to themselves, when their quests are usually objectless and lost from the outset. Where Rohmer is not just a classical artist resides in the fact that, by being the only artist to film the modern world from such a lofty angle, he literally invents, live, characters, gestures, décors, and novel situations which are, by definition, modern. Rohmer’s enemy is not, as people have here and there claimed, modernity, but imprecision. 8 He is a bit like Hawks, his favorite filmmaker, who, at the end of one of the most classic Hollywood films there is, announced in Man’s Favorite Sport? Godard’s abstract ballets of the 1980s, and the soap opera in Red Line 7000, simply filming an irrevocably altered world with his own means.
As a cerebral, intellectual filmmaker, Rohmer has been at times rebuked for his excessive mastery and the slightly petty aspect of his cinema. This is to miss the fact that precision in Rohmer’s movies is always a means and not an end. In one of the crowning moments of his work, the scene of the lakeside walk at Cergy-Pontoise in My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, the feeling of love that grips the film’s two leading characters is all the more moving because, knowing them both inside out, we can understand how their love at first sight shifts in just a few seconds from the unexpected to the inevitable. The sexual impulse that attracts the two lovers is endlessly touching, because we know what narrative and existential challenges it transcends. Similarly, it is because the prewar world of spies is precisely described in Triple Agent that the blur surrounding the narrative’s outcome makes us dizzy. Lastly, the writing of A Tale of Winter is so complex and sophisticated that we shall never really know if Charlotte Véry’s spiritual quest is admirable or ridiculous, or if her character is heroic or stupidly cruel. It is through actual belief in the complexity of the human soul and film’s ability to scrupulously describe it that Éric Rohmer’s œuvre represents a model of contemporary novelistic writing, rather than an antidote to the recent dead ends of auteur cinema.
Text translated from French by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods.
1 Accessible online: http://sites.radiofrance.fr/chaines/franceculture/nouveau_prog/connaissance/
alacarte_fiche.php?scr_id=150000038&diff_id=250000185. The FÉMIS, formerly the IDHEC,
is the Advanced National School of Image and Sound—the École nationale supérieure pour les métiers
de l’image et du son.
2 Serge Daney, L’Exercice a été profitable, Monsieur (Paris: P.O.L., 1993), 229.
3Accessible online: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xbx87w_dialogue-entre-cineastes-serge-bozo_shortfilms
4 Jean-Claude Biette, Cinémanuel (Paris: P.O.L., 2001), 112.
5 Éric Rohmer, De Mozart en Beethoven (Arles: Actes Sud, 1996), 15.
6 Serge Daney, La Maison cinéma et le monde - 2. Les années Libé 1981-1985 (Paris: P.O.L., 2002), 117.
7 Serge Daney, Ciné journal (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1986), 253.
8 Éric Rohmer was often reproached for being a “reactionary”: this is to forget a trifle quickly that Rohmer defended, in particular, Isidore Isou’s Traité de bave et d’éternité [Venom and Eternity], when it appeared.
Image: Éric Rohmer and Arielle Dombasle, in En répétant Perceval (dir. Jean Douchet,) 1978.
