Eric Rohmer In Memoriam

19 - 31 October 2010

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In January 2010, Eric Rohmer's death at the age of 89 is a reminder of the incredible energy, tenacity and longevity of France's great nouvelle vague generation.

Rohmer came from the New Wave tradition of critic-turned-director; he was a former editor of Cahiers du Cinéma, and became the distinctively romantic philosopher of the New Wave and the great master of what was sometimes called "intimist" cinema: delicate, un-showy movie-making about not especially startling people, people often in their 20s, whose lives are dramatized at a kind of walking, talking pace. He avoided dramatic close-up, and tended to avoid music. He became Editor-in-Chief of Cahiers du Cinéma in 1957, a position he left in 1963 to start up Les Films du Losange with Barbet Shroeder, the film company that was to produce the majority of his films. In 1962, he embarked on a cycle of films entitled Moral Tales whose storyline he summed up as, "While the narrator is looking for one woman, he meets another who holds his attention until he finds the first woman again". In the 1980s, Comedies and proverbs make up the second major cycle: each film, in its own way, illustrates a saying taken from popular wisdom. In the 1990s, the filmmaker continued his exploration of the games and fortunes of love with Tales of the Four Seasons.

"Basically, I don't say, I show. I show people who move and speak. That's all I know how to do, but my real message is there", says Eric Rohmer. And this is what this selection of films tries to show.