The director of twenty-five films, including My Night at Maud's (1969), which was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, and the editor in chief of Cahiers du cinéma from 1957 to 1963, Éric Rohmer set the terms by which people watched, made, and thought about cinema for decades. Such brilliance does not develop in a vacuum, and Rohmer cultivated a fascinating network of friends, colleagues, and industry contacts that kept his outlook sharp and propelled his work forward. Despite his privacy, he cared deeply about politics, religion, culture, and fostering a public appreciation of the medium he loved. This exhaustive biography uses personal archives and interviews to enrich our knowledge of Rohmer's public achievements and lesser known interests and relations. The filmmaker kept in close communication with his contemporaries and competitors: François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette. He held a paradoxical fascination with royalist politics, the fate of the environment, Catholicism, classical music, and the French nightclub scene, and his films were regularly featured at New York and Los Angeles film festivals. Despite an austere approach to life, Rohmer had a voracious appetite for art, culture, and intellectual debate captured vividly in this definitive volume.

A collection of essays by the film-maker and critic Eric Rohmer written between 1948-1979.

The 1969 film Ma Nuit chez Maud catapulted its shy academic film director Eric Rohmer (1920-2010) into the limelight, selling over a million tickets in France and earning a nomination for an Academy Award. Ma Nuit chez Maud remains his most famous film, the highlight of an impressive range of films examining the sexual, romantic, and artistic mores of contemporary France, the temptations of desire, the small joys of everyday life, and sometimes, the vicissitudes of history and politics. Yet Rohmer was almost fifty years old when Maud was released and had already had a career as the editor of Cahiers du Cinéma, a position he lost in a political takeover in 1963. The interviews in this book offer a range of insights into the theoretical, critical, and practical circumstances of Rohmer's remarkably coherent body of films, but also allow Rohmer to act as his own critic, providing us with an array of readings concerning his interest in setting, season, color, and narrative. Alongside the application of a theoretical rigor to his own films, Rohmer's interviews also discuss directors as varied as Godard, Carné, Renoir, and Hitchcock, and the relations of film to painting, architecture, and music. This book reproduces little-known interviews, such as a debate Rohmer undertakes with Women and Film concerning feminism, alongside detailed discussions from Cahiers and Positif, many produced in English here for the first time.

Eric Rohmer was a key figure in French New Wave cinema. Contributors to this volume revisit, complicate, and upend accepted readings and interpretations of perennial Rohmerian topics including the important role of language in his films, the influence of the arts, depictions of gender and class, and the roles played by space and place in his films.

The 1969 film Ma Nuit chez Maud catapulted its shy academic film director Eric Rohmer (1920-2010) into the limelight, selling over a million tickets in France and earning a nomination for an Academy Award. Ma Nuit chez Maud remains his most famous film, the highlight of an impressive range of films examining the sexual, romantic, and artistic mores of contemporary France, the temptations of desire, the small joys of everyday life, and sometimes, the vicissitudes of history and politics. Yet Rohmer was already forty years old when Maud was released and had already had a career as the editor of Cahiers du Cinéma, a position he lost in a political takeover in 1963. The interviews in this book offer a range of insights into the theoretical, critical, and practical circumstances of Rohmer's remarkably coherent body of films, but also allow Rohmer to act as his own critic, providing us with an array of readings concerning his interest in setting, season, color, and narrative. Alongside the application of a theoretical rigor to his own films, Rohmer's interviews also discuss directors as varied as Godard, Carné, Renoir, and Hitchcock, and the relations of film to painting, architecture, and music. This book reproduces little-known interviews, such as a debate Rohmer undertakes with Women and Film concerning feminism, alongside detailed discussions from Cahiers and Positif, many produced in English here for the first time.

Here, for the first time in English, is a comprehensive analysis of Eric Rohmer's work. Rohmer, an enormously influential figure in shaping postwar realist film theory, and later in the development of the French New Wave, has been largely ignored in film studies, while others of the New Wave movements such as Truffaut and Godard have received considerable attention. In Eric Rohmer: Realist and Moralist, Crisp thoroughly examines Rohmer's films, performing structuralist, psychoanalytical, and ideological analyses of each. He further evaluates the connections between these films and Rohmer's realist film theory. Finally, Crisp's impressive study situates Rohmer's work ideologically within the historical context of French cinema after World War II, and gives due recognition to the achievements of this director within the realms of film theory and filmmaking.

Since the 1950s Eric Rohmer has been one of the major presences in French cinema as critic and director. This book is a sophisticated engagement with his work in which Keith Tester argues that Rohmer is not the naIve realist he is often claimed to be. Instead, his films are revealed as a sustained exercise in Catholic theology.

This book examines the theoretical affiliations between the most notable proponent of literary realism, Honoré de Balzac, and two understated but key representatives of the French New Wave, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette. It argues that their film criticism, which gradually led to the establishment of a common aesthetic vision of cinema (the “politique des auteurs”), owes more to Balzac and the nineteenth-century novel than to any intellectual trend of the immediate post-war period. By considering the films of Rohmer and Rivette as an extension of their writings (essays, film reviews, scriptwriting, novels and interviews), this volume analyses the changing and sometimes opposed ways in which they applied Balzacian principles and themes to their cinematic practice. Essentially, it understands the exchange between art forms, past traditions and contemporaneous currents as the overlooked yet common thread that links these three authors, through their own re-appropriations of classical and romantic aesthetics in their explorations of modern French society. In doing so, this study provides further nuance to the “conservative” versus “progressist” rupture that is generally assumed between the two directors, and offers an innovative reading of The Human Comedy in the light of post-war ideas on authorship, film adaptation, classicism and modernism.

Claude Chabrol (1930–2010) was a founding member of the French New Wave, the group of filmmakers that revolutionized French filmmaking in the late 1950s and early 1960s. One of the most prolific directors of his generation, Chabrol averaged more than one film per year from 1958 until his death in 2010. Among his most influential films, Le Beau Serge, Les Cousins, and Les Bonnes Femmes established his central place within the New Wave canon. In contrast to other filmmakers of the New Wave such as Jean-Luc Godard and Eric Rohmer, Chabrol exhibited simultaneously a desire to create films as works of art and an impulse to produce work that would be commercially successful and accessible to a popular audience. The seventeen interviews in this volume, most of which have been translated into English for the first time, offer new insights into Chabrol’s remarkably wide-ranging filmography, providing a sense of his attitudes and ideas about a number of subjects. Chabrol shares anecdotes about his work with such actors as Isabelle Huppert, Gérard Depardieu, and Jean Yanne, and offers fresh perspectives on other directors including Jean-Luc Godard, Fritz Lang, and Alfred Hitchcock. His mistrust of conventional wisdom often leads him to make pronouncements intended as much to shock as to elucidate, and he frequently questions established ideas and normative attitudes toward moral, ethical, and social behaviors. Chabrol’s intelligence is far-reaching, moving freely between philosophy, politics, psychology, literature, and history, and his iconoclastic spirit, combined with his blend of sarcasm and self-deprecating humor, gives his interviews a tone that hovers between a high moral seriousness and a cynical sense of hilarity in the face of the world’s complexities.