Legacy Matters

Eric Rohmer R.I.P.

New York Times obituary

Eric Rohmer, a Leading Filmmaker of the French New Wave, Dies at 89

Photograph: H Mandelbaum/Rex Features

In a statement Monday, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said of Mr. Rohmer, “Classic and romantic, wise and iconoclastic, light and serious, sentimental and moralistic, he created the ‘Rohmer’ style, which will outlive him.”

Mr. Rohmer’s most famous film in America remains “My Night at Maud’s,” a 1969 black-and-white feature set in the grim industrial city of Clermont-Ferrand. It tells the story of a shy young engineer (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who passes a snowbound evening in the home of his best friend’s lover, an attractive, free-thinking divorcée (Françoise Fabian).

The conversation, filmed by Mr. Rohmer in a series of unobtrusively composed long takes, covers philosophy, religion and morality, and while the flow of words takes on a distinctly seductive subtext at times, the encounter ends without a physical consummation. But the pair form a bond that movingly re-emerges five years later, when they meet again in a brief postscript that closes the film.

London Telegraph obituary

Eric Rohmer, who died yesterday aged 89, became the most durable film-maker of the French New Wave. Although he was overshadowed at first by more apparently innovative figures – Godard, Truffaut and Chabrol – he outlasted them, and in his seventies was still making movies the public wanted to see. By that time, Truffaut had died, while Godard and Chabrol had lost their edge.
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But the conversations that peppered his films were not made up of party small-talk; on the contrary, they were generally conducted on a high philosophical plane, and were more likely to turn on pages from Pascal than on recipes or fashion. Rohmer, like Bresson, was a Roman Catholic film-maker rather than a film-maker who happened to be Roman Catholic.
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Youthful and exuberant though his films were, and fixated on love and personal affinities, none was ever about sex. That whole dimension of life was missing. Rohmer's characters fell in love only with each other's minds. He gave the impression that physical attraction, everywhere apparent in the films of Truffaut and Chabrol, was somehow beneath him.