Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer or Jean Marie Maurice Schérer, known as Éric Rohmer (French: [eʁik ʁomɛʁ], 21 March 1920 – 11 January 2010), was a French film director, film critic, journalist, novelist, screenwriter and teacher.Rohmer was the last of the post-World War II, French New Wave directors to become established. He edited the influential film journal, Cahiers du cinéma, from 1957 to 1963, while most of his colleagues – among them Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut – were making the transition from film critics to filmmakers and gaining international attention.Rohmer gained international acclaim around 1969 when his film My Night at Maud's was nominated at the Academy Awards. He won the San Sebastián International Film Festival with Claire's Knee in 1971 and the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for The Green Ray in 1986. Rohmer went on to receive the Venice Film Festival's Career Golden Lion in 2001. After Rohmer's death in 2010, his obituary in The Daily Telegraph described him as "the most durable film-maker of the French New Wave", outlasting his peers and "still making movies the public wanted to see" late in his career.
His films frequently refer to ideas and themes in plays and novels, such as references to Jules Verne (in The Green Ray), William Shakespeare (in A Winter's Tale) and Pascal's Wager (in Ma nuit chez Maud).
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Prefers to use non-professional actors in his films.
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The settings of his movies are often on pleasant beaches and popular resorts, notably in La Collectionneuse (1967), Pauline at the Beach (1983), The Green Ray (1986) and A Summer's Tale (1996).
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Populates his movies with people in their twenties.
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Avoids extradiegetic music.
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Concentrates on intelligent, articulate protagonists who frequently fail to own up to their desires.
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Quote
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The art of cinema takes us back to the world, if it is true that the other arts have distanced us from it. It has forced us, throughout the course of its history, and forces us still, to take the world into consideration.
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It is certain that as a work of art, a film corresponds to your description: film is a reconstruction, an interpretation of the world. But out of all the arts, the cinema - and this is its paradoxical character - is the one in which the reality of the thing filmed has the most importance, in which the "interpretation" aspect seems sometimes to entirely disappear. In other words, it's the miracle of the first Lumière films. The impression that these films give us is to make us see the world with different eyes and to admire, as Pascal said, things whose originals we don't admire.
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...a film never allows us to admire a translation of the world, but to admire, through this translation, the world itself. The cinema is an instrument of discovery, even in fictional films. Because it is poetry, it is revelatory and, from the fact that it is revelatory, it is poetry.
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[on Ma nuit chez Maud] What retains your interest in this film is the fact that my characters have a discourse to give, while in the majority of films, this is absent. Note that in general, I have always had misgivings about discursive films. But you are often attracted by things which seem the most unattractive and the most perilous to you. My idea was precisely to integrate a discourse into the film and to avoid the film being at the service of the discourse, at the service of the thesis. But throughout history, starting with the Greeks, discourse has been very important in the theatre. The Greek theatre was composed of maxims, of moral reflection, which didn't prevent it from being real theatre.
[on his work] You can say that my work is closer to the novel - to a certain classic style of novel which the cinema is now taking over - than to other forms of entertainment, like the theater.
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We have to show what lies beyond behavior, while knowing we can't show anything but behavior.
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What I would most like to do is to make movies with a completely invisible camera.
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Fact
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His ten favorite films are True Heart Susie (1919), The General (1926), Sunrise (1927), La Règle du jeu (1939), Ivan the Terrible (1944), Journey to Italy (1954), Red River (1948), Vertigo (1958), Pickpocket (1959) and La Pyramide humaine (1961).
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Francois Truffaut in a 1973 interview: "Rohmer is the best French director now. He became famous very late compared to the rest of us, but for 15 years he's been behind us all the time. He's influenced us from behind for a long time.".
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His obituary in The Daily Telegraph described him as "the most durable film-maker of the French New Wave".
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Interviewed in "World Directors in Dialogue" by Bert Cardullo (Scarecrow Press, 2011).
$250,000
