Though biographies are meant to illuminate and reveal their subjects, it’s no insult to the superb new biography of the filmmaker Éric Rohmer by Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe to say that the book (which appeared in French in 2014 and is appearing in English this week, from Columbia University Press, in a translation by Steven Rendall and Lisa Neal) keeps its subject somewhat elusive. Rohmer himself, throughout his career and even throughout his life, remained elusive by design, starting with his name. He was born Maurice Schérer, in the small French town of Tulle, in 1920. He published his novel “Élisabeth,” in 1945, under the name Gilbert Cordier. While earning his living as a high-school teacher of Greek and Latin, he began to write film criticism, then ran a film club, founded and edited a film journal, and began to make films under the name Éric Rohmer. His motives were personal—his mother was led to believe that Maurice was a teacher, and she died in 1970 unaware that he did anything else.
Rohmer married in 1957; he made his first feature, “The Sign of Leo,” in 1959, but his directorial career didn’t take off until the release of his second feature, “La Collectionneuse,” in 1967. When it did, Rohmer became the proprietor of a small but thriving business, and his working life was vigorous—he made twenty-two features between 1966 and 2006. Yet his wife, Thérèse Schérer, and their sons, Laurent and Denis Schérer, didn’t meet his closest work associates until January 1, 2010—at his deathbed. The sheer rigor of his compartmentalized life sounds like the setup for a Feydeau farce—or, rather, it sounds like the setup for one of Rohmer’s films, minus the romantic complications, of the sort that wouldn’t be hard to imagine, and imagining them was the very essence of his art.
Such celebrated films as “My Night at Maud’s,” “Claire’s Knee,” “Summer,” and “A Tale of Springtime” have made Rohmer (as his biographers note) the inventor of a genre unto himself. Namely, the Éric Rohmer film, in which people talk to each other with dialectical precision, intellectual flair, and a stylish offhandedness, on location in striking settings (usually a comfortably tamed nature and architecturally distinctive urban locales), about their emotions and their ideas in pursuit of love and sex, not always with the same person—and do so filmed in images that are both fluid and taut, relaxed and precise. The action meanders but seems held together with a relentlessly unifying purity of cinematic style and idealistic intentions.
But, long before the release of his first feature, Rohmer had brought about a revolution in the name of others—because Rohmer, as critic, editor, and friend, through his writings, activities, and personal influence, was the father of the French New Wave. It’s a story that de Baecque and Herpe tell meticulously. Maurice Schérer wasn’t a precocious movie lover. In his youth, he had little interest in movies at all, but he was a gifted student and was good at philosophy, literature, drawing, music, and theatre. He planned an academic career and passed written exams but (because of overwhelming shyness) failed oral ones, relegating him to minor teaching posts. Yet he had already started sketching “Élisabeth” at age nineteen; he sat out the Second World War in the provinces and then in Paris, pursuing his studies without involvement in the Resistance and without collaboration.
Then, in 1945, in Paris, he introduced himself to the flamboyant journalist and film critic, and soon-to-be filmmaker, Alexandre Astruc (who died last month), who befriended Schérer and introduced him to his milieu (which included Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir). Shortly thereafter, Schérer took a sudden interest in the movies, frequenting some of the film clubs that were proliferating at the time, as well as the crucial and primordial center of cinephilia, the Cinémathèque, founded and run by Henri Langlois. Movies caused something like spontaneous combustion in Schérer’s active but frustrated mind. Within months, de Baecque and Herpe note, he began to write highly theoretical articles about film, and Astruc helped to get them published. The first of them, “Cinema, the Art of Space,” appeared in 1948; Jean-Luc Godard later called it “the first article of what was for us the takeover of modern cinema.” Through his activities at the most prestigious film club, Objectif 49, and another, the Ciné-Club of the Latin Quarter, which one of his students founded and he ran, Schérer got to know the precocious adolescents Godard, Jacques Rivette, François Truffaut, and Claude Chabrol. He had them write for his short-lived startup journal La Gazette du Cinéma, and then, when Cahiers du Cinéma was founded, in 1951, he became an editor and brought his young friends and acolytes in to advance there the radical lines of thought and the distinctive taste they shared.
The taste was for such Hollywood filmmakers as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, and such European ones as Jean Renoir and Roberto Rossellini. The idea involved the blend of documentary and fictional elements, both taken at their most radical extremes—drastic and conspicuous theatricality and stylization alongside scrupulous attention to real locations and space itself, with an emphasis on actors’ presence (even alongside nonprofessional actors), gestures, vocal inflections, and personal idiosyncrasies that connected the characters to them rather than submerging the actor in the role. The underlying principle was that directors are artists whose unifying vision reveals their own distinctive and personal worldview by making it appear as a thing emerging on its own in the world around them. The premise arose from Schérer’s own experience.
Rohmer, as de Baecque and Herpe explain, came to the movies more or less by default, after having tried and exhausted the other arts. Rather, he found the other arts exhausted—he loved the moderns (and retained a pronounced taste for the avant-garde) but felt that the cinema, in its relative youth, offered a renewed classicism, a new golden age in which ideas and experience, the personal and the theoretical, were in a unique equilibrium. Rohmer’s biographers present him as a mentor who introduced Godard to Beethoven’s string quartets (an event that Rohmer himself commemorated in “The Sign of Leo”), who introduced Rivette to Balzac, and who, in the process, helped them to develop the grand sense of their own future cinematic project. Shoring up and enriching these young cinephiles’ autodidactic intellectualism, he launched them on the path not merely to make movies their own way, not merely to renew the French cinema with the spirit of youth, but to make movies with the self-conscious ambition of turning it into (or revealing it to be) the supreme art of their time, the very fulfillment of a cultural heritage that it would, through their own efforts, take over and revolutionize.
Rohmer’s young acolytes, who made their first features while in their twenties, caught the spirit of youth, of a rising generation, on the wing. Rohmer himself played a longer and stranger game. He made his first feature at thirty-nine; its subject was a talented but unrecognized musician nearing forty, living alone and nearly penniless in a garret, for whom things quickly go from bad to worse. But, when the New Wave’s young directors quickly made their mark—and made it in the name of the spirit of youth—Rohmer himself, already married and a father, sought the spirit of youth as well, vicariously.
In the mid-sixties, he began to make films, on extraordinarily low budgets, based on short stories and novellas that he had written in the nineteen-forties—when he was still in his twenties—but that he set in the present day, featuring young people of the present day playing characters modelled very closely on their own personalities, experiences, ideas. The characters he was, above all, interested in developing in a quasi-documentary fashion were those of young women. From the mid-sixties through the very end of his life, Rohmer surrounded himself with young women, actresses or non-actresses, teen-agers and young adults, whom he met for tea, joined on walks, at movies, in museums, and in conversations—which he’d often record. They played music together, they wrote each other letters, their emotional bonds often grew very close; most of the actresses in his movies, throughout his career, began as acquaintances, friends, intimates. He derived his characters and plots from their real lives, based his dialogue on what they told him, filmed in their apartments, took them to scout other locations, imbued himself with their very existence even as he became something of a mentor to them as well.
He told an interviewer, “It isn’t that I like girls so much as that I feel the girl that resides in every man. I feel it in me.” When he made “A Summer’s Tale,” in 1995—based on memories from his own youth—he felt ill at ease with its male protagonist, telling an interviewer, “Who can say, I don’t know, have I feminized myself to that point?” Rohmer divulged to another interviewer the bedrock principle that enabled him to work so closely with the women whose presence, whose inner and outer life, had become so much the stuff of his own life and art: “To someone who asked him: ‘But how do you manage to have tea every day with these magnificent girls?,’ he replied: ‘My secret is absolute chastity.’ ”
Though Rohmer’s actresses (and often his actors, too) were put in the position of fusing their personal lives with their onscreen identities, Rohmer himself—even when his films had strongly autobiographical elements—practiced a complete division of his home life and his work life. He maintained both an unshakable fidelity to his wife and an equally unshakable fidelity to the demands of his work; this practice didn’t just provide him with the particulars of his films—it reflected their very essence.
Rohmer’s entire career is centered on one simple idea. Almost all his films have the same underlying structure, the temptation and rejection of a false love while waiting for a true one. It’s the story of his life. His life is the story of one true love—a marriage—and the snares of desire that both put it in danger and fuel the imagination. But, in order to tell the story that he wanted to tell, he had to live it repeatedly.
That’s also why Rohmer’s films are deceptive in their smooth surfaces and refined intellectualism—and why his lesser imitators (such as Richard Linklater, in the “Before” trilogy) fall far short of his achievements. Rohmer’s films are the embodiment of terrifyingly strong passions and of equally terrifying, and slightly stronger, repression. Rohmer’s surfaces aren’t placid but taut; they’re smooth because of their almost unbearably high tension, and their tautness is like that of a membrane that could, with a prick, be definitively burst, giving way to an unpredictably chaotic eruption of pent-up passion.
Rohmer’s cinematic methods were similarly extreme and similarly contradictory. He wrote his scripts carefully and spent months or more scouting locations and planning décor. The director and producer Barbet Schroeder reports that, for a scene in “Claire’s Knee” involving a rose, “a year earlier, Rohmer had planted the rose at the spot where it was supposed to bloom, calculating the date when it would open, which was written down in the work plan.” He filmed with a fanatical attentiveness to geographical and architectural accuracy, yet did so mainly with very small crews working with a documentary-style, improvisational spontaneity. The sound recordist Georges Prat, discussing the filming of “The Aviator’s Wife,” describes Rohmer allowing his shoot to fall prey to happenstances of weather (a sudden rainstorm) and commerce (a café closing): “A real risk had been taken! But he loved to play with chance.” Rohmer’s biographers add, “It went so far that it becomes almost impossible to distinguish between what comes from art and what emerges in nature . . . as if all his hard work vanished to the advantage of a film that was writing itself.”
For all their deflection and irony, Rohmer’s films are intensely personal fusions of firsthand observation and vast cultural sophistication. In order to make films on his one subject, Rohmer put himself and his art sorely to the test, repeatedly and constantly. He made films on the basis of his actual life experience, and organized his life around his constant and obsessive efforts to generate the specific experiences that his art needed. He made his life the laboratory for his art, made his art the logical outcome of the life that he led. That’s why, for all his films’ instantly recognizable substance and style, they’re inimitable.
The tension between authority and freedom, between self-restraint and liberation, between conflicting desires in seeming contradiction, between chance and necessity is the subject of Rohmer’s life and of his art. His films dramatize confrontations with those dichotomies and with others—documentary and fiction, nature and artifice, classicism and modernism, art history and immediate experience, performance and presence—and they embody a resolution, by means of the transcendent, redemptive, conciliatory power of romantic love, which fuses the accidental events of life, and of art, into destiny.
His art and his life reflect an ideological bent that de Baecque and Herpe note. Rohmer was a practicing Catholic; he was a longtime subscriber to a neo-royalist publication and was a longtime friend of several far-right thinkers. In 1965, he asserted, “I don’t know if I am on the Right, but in any case, one thing is certain: I’m not on the Left.” He voted only once—in 1974, for an environmentalist candidate. His anti-modernism mainly took the form of an aestheticized sensuality, an opposition to bureaucratic practice and official culture—and he made one of the great political films on that subject, “The Tree, the Mayor, and the Mediathèque,” from 1993. But he also practiced his own form of private resistance to what he saw as aesthetic despoilments in public life, as when, in his last years, suffering from scoliosis and walking with great difficulty, he “refused to take a taxi, preferring to take two buses with a transfer at Montparnasse. . . . Traveling to the office in the morning and returning in the evening took two hours.”
In his last three films, Rohmer left the current day behind and looked to the past to make his ideas about society and politics more explicit. “The Lady and the Duke,” from 2001, set during the French Revolution (which he evokes through a blend of traditional scenography and digital technology), calls attention to the nihilistic fury of the Terror by tribunal and guillotine; “Triple Agent,” from 2004, set in the nineteen-thirties, reveals the far and murderous reach of Soviet power in the age of Stalin; and his final feature, “The Romance of Astrea and Celadon,” from 2007, based on a novel by the seventeenth-century writer Honoré d’Urfé, depicts the premodern past as anything but idyllic, and develops all of modern culture, including art and religion, on the basis of one true love. There, Rohmer unites his art of love and his love of art, concluding his life’s work as he started it, with a grand vision of a world-historical vista of creation, one far too great for him to fill by himself, and into which he launched other, younger people even further, on the basis of his own experience, even at the risk of his own doctrinal presumptions. His faith in them, and in the cinema, was still greater. That, too, is a singular love.
