Eric Rohmer: C/D

lol

tonight at bar trivia we will all speak like Tale of Winter characters

Although even the street people in France used fancy words like "désolée" instead of "sorry."

we all know that nrq can't relate Rohmer to "his culture"

(The guest on The Muppet Show this week is Steve Martin)

aw, RIP

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NeRXbf7sEg

I really do intend to watch one of his movies, if not tonight, then sometime in my life. Gotta start sometime, right?

I remember Tarantino saying in the mid 90s he wanted to do a pseudo-Rohmer film, let's hope to God that never happens

which rohmer does the august ilx film dude recommend for young impressionable nouvelle vague come-lately here?

Yeah, he should leave that stuff for Rick Linklater, Motbius.

I'm not putting you down for that, Eric.

Les nuits de la pleine lune
Was just checking on Fabrice Luchini to see if anybody was left standing from that one.

My favorites:

My Night at Maud's
Chloe in the Afternoon
Pauline at the Beach
Summer
A Winter's Tale
An Autumn's Tale
The Lady and the Duke

we all know that nrq can't relate Rohmer to "his culture"

― Rage, Resentment, Spleen (Dr Morbius), Monday, January 11, 2010 5:55 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

no, i can, northern european bourgeoisie is close enough. 'ma nuit chez maud' is the one to go for imo.

I'm afraid if anybody gives any suggestions to the impressionable Louis, it will be like when the Federation starship left the Roaring Chicago book on the planet with Vic Tayback.

Yeah, he should leave that stuff for Rick Linklater

grrrrrr! yes, his best films are like the Before movies if they had a non-punchable man in them.

Lots of insufferable characters in Rohmer films.

yes, but no slick grungemeisters.

"What I say, I do not say with words. I do not say it with images, either, with all due respect to partisans of pure cinema, who would speak with images as a deaf-mute does with his hands. After all, I do not say, I show. I show people who move and speak. That is all I know how to do, but that is my true subject. The rest, I agree, is literature."

http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2010/01/eric-rohmer-19202010.html

Lots of insufferable characters in Rohmer films.

― Hell is other people. In an ILE film forum. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, January 11, 2010 1:27 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yes, but no slick grungemeisters.

― Rage, Resentment, Spleen (Dr Morbius), Monday, January 11, 2010 1:29 PM (11 minutes ago) BookmarkpAlso, they don't always go unpunished.

Don't know if I told you this before but before the first Before was made, there was some talk in Austin that the lead was going to be David Thewlis.

Not to play into the hands of the history mayne, but thinking about it, his kind of clean "non-cinematic" visual style reminds me of that of his, um, co-religionist Luis Buñuel.

Lots of insufferable characters in Rohmer films.

I meant to say: But they're mostly girls, just like IRL

[/Homer Simpson]

which rohmer does the august ilx film dude recommend for young impressionable nouvelle vague come-lately here?

rayon vert (green ray) (summer)

or my night at maud's

(ma nuit chez maud)

Pauline at the Beach
A Tale of Springtime
An Autumn Tale

Claire's Knee's the only canonical one I find overrated; prefer Chloe in the Afternoon

Have a soft spot for Chloe in the Afternoon because we saw that in intro French. Love that part about how he has a different book to read on the bus or on the train or on the park bench or whatever the breakdown was.

btw I would remind you that Chris Rock has already done a Rohmer remake.

from Nestor Almendros' OOP memoir, on working with E.R.:

http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/the-perfect-moment-20100112

Argh, I got rid of that book during a move.

I had a friend who is a DP who complained about the information provided therein, but now I see from those excerpts that maybe it was more about a cinematographer talking about the great directors with whom he worked rather than giving away trade secrets.

My little tribute to him.

Well done.

Astrea and Celadon is fun proto-Shakespeare, tho the luscious Andy Gillet looks a bit too much like Ashton Kutcher when in drag. It could've been called Astrea's Breast. Great last scene.

http://www.observer.com/files/full/sarrisROMANCE-OF-ASTREA-CEL.jpg

^^^ That movie was so erotic, and tonally weird, too, what with it being a contemporary movie based on a fourteenth century text of a story set in the fourth century (or something along those lines).

Rohmer was so old so I think he had a good run and don't feel sad or anything, but I watched, like, eight or nine or ten of his movies in 2009, and read two of his stories. He was a real clever ironist, and I liked how his formalism would always lay bare his plotting and the philosophical ideas he folded in without making it all seem easy or empty. Although Pauline Kael disagreed; she thought he made well-crafted fluff, I think.

which stories did you read? I bough the Moral Tales book but quickly realized I'd rather just watch the films.

Yes on the tonal weirdness of Astrea & Celadon - I put it down to the utter strangeness of doing a dead Renaissance genre (one that is to me both fascinating & basically unreadable) completely straight (I mean there are plenty of ironies there, but he's not mocking the conventions of the genre afaict). It's a lovely back and forth reflection - a neglected ancestor of the novel coming to life in the hands of a director who's novel-y in his film-making.

And yes on the erotic aspect. I have not been so engaged by a breast in a film for a long time.

I was engaged by Andy Gillet's cleft and philtrum.

I think I read My Night at Maud's and Love in the Afternoon. Both were excellent. Though I haven't seen My Night at Maud's because of how poorly the subtitles are programmed (and by Criterion, too).

Yeah, he films very straight. His ironies are definitely in his scripts, not in his film-making, and Astrea & Celadon, which I liked a lot, was probably his most formally rigid of the movies of his I've seen.

I don't know what a philtrum is. Oh, I see.

Why Astrea & Celadon was probably erotic for me: it was the sisterly closeness, and the taboo-ness of the relationship. The one is supposed to be a girl and even looks like a girl, and girls, you know, aren't supposed to be with girls, at least not in the Dark Ages? And I don't quite remember, but it seems like there was some incest angle, too. The falseness, the fact that it's perfectly acceptable for the two to be together if only Astrea and all the others were really to know that Celadon was Celadon, the elongated time it takes for them to couple, all of that makes it all even more erotic - it's this delayed gratification thing, I guess, but it also has some of the taboo-type eroticism of Mother's Three Daughters or some hackneyed incest manga.

Who's seen Aviator's Wife? I thought that was a little masterpiece.

Though I haven't seen My Night at Maud's because of how poorly the subtitles are programmed (and by Criterion, too).

The subtitles on this looked fine to me.

I didn't notice much of a difference between the Maud's subtitles and others I've seen - I guess I don't understand how they were "poorly programmed"

Because you don't have a $25 dvd player, Ms. Class Signifiers (semi-colon, hyphen, closing parenthesis). If you did, you'd be able to tell when the dvd production people are half-assing it or not. About 2/3s of the subtitles stay up for only about 1 or 2 frames.

so sorry - I have a $35 dvd player.

Why would you assume I have some fancy DVD player anyway?

Coby or gtfo.

LOL! - I have a Coby story, but I'm gtfo-ing.

What Rohmer was quick to grasp, and what accounts for his singularity, is the constitutive ambiguity of the "point of view" in film—the impossibility, when filming, of occupying an attributable place, a fate both fortunate and cruel. Or, as Bonitzer would say, the filmmaker's singular fate of being both transparent and masked. A cinema of frivolity? Rather a cinema of cruelty, but in the stark summer light: "On neither the sun, nor death, can a man look fixedly," wrote another great French moralist, La Rochefoucauld. Triple Agent closes with a terse, legal, "she is dead," which casts the coldest possible gaze upon a love story. Wrongly dismissed from the New Wave by some as a "classicist," triple-agent Rohmer coined a unique variation on the most famous of modernist cinematic tropes. In his films, Harriet Andersson's or Jean-Paul Belmondo's stark stare into the lens is cruelly reversed onto the protagonists and onto the narrative itself.

http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/a-cinema-of-cruelty-20100115

that sounds p clever but ehhh no. "the filmmaker's singular fate of being both transparent and masked" is a vraiment example of le having it both ways.

perhaps im being stupid, but what does the first sentence mean? in detail, i mean, with reference to an actual moment in a rohmer film. (indeed, an early rohmer film, because he was "quick to grasp" the "constitutive ambiguity" meme.) it sounds a lot like "presence in absence", which is a kind of annoying concept, partly for its ubiquity in film studies.

I just post.

as I already posted somewhere, a friend of mine once said that at the end of all of Rohmer's films you realize that the main action has happened off camera or rather that the main story was not the one being filmed. Could taht be the "constitutive ambiguity of the "point of view" in film"?

I am watching Summer again tonight, which is an exception to that pattern -- the climax is a real climax, and the plot is pretty straightforward.

history mayne - Transparent and masked because the transparency is in the filmmaking and the masking is in the storytelling, maybe. The masking is in the ironies - the characters not saying what they mean, &c.

baaderonixx - The main story is happening off-screen? So in "The Girl at the Monceau Bakery," the story of the girl the hero chases is our real story? Or the story of the girl at the bakery? To me it seems like the story presented is our story. Does your friend say that because of narrative sleights-of-hand or because of inferences you have to make into what resides in the characters? Or something I'm not considering.

Anyway, you friend's idea is interesting.

nah i *think* what it means -- coz it's the filmmaker's fate -- is that (this is certainly what film theorists use "presence-in-absence" to mean) well, we know where the camera is placed. but in the reverse shot we don't ever see it. hence the look into the lens being deeply significant. i could be wrong but i've read stuff along those lines. i don't think she convincingly relates it to rohmer though.

and i mean, in the rohmer films i've seen, the significant action is what we see. not in that french revolution one (quite liked that iirc).

I'll try to find time to read the article this weekend and think about it. I don't think it relates, either, if that's what she's saying.

xxp. I don't remember how the Boulangère de Manceau ends anymore, but for ex. Suzanne's Career or Full Moon in Paris ends with the realization that while the main featured character was discussing what to do, making us believe he/she was the one in control of the story being told, the real action (in both meanings of the word) and the decision-making was being done by the absent character (ie. Suzanne, or Pascale Ogier's boyfriend)