Eric Rohmer (1920 - )
Related: French cinema - erotic movies
Biography
Eric Rohmer (born Jean-Marie Maurice Scherer, April 4, 1920, Nancy, France) is a French film director. He is regarded as a key figure in the post-war New Wave cinema and is a former editor of influential French film journal Cahiers du Cinema.
Scherer fashioned his pseudonym from the names of two famous artists: director Erich von Stroheim and writer Sax Rohmer, author of the Fu Manchu series.
Rohmer was the last of the French New Wave directors to become established, working as the editor of the Cahiers du Cinema periodical from 1957 to 1963, while most of his Cahiers colleagues (among them Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut) were making their name in international cinema. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Rohmer [Dec 2005]
Le Genou De Claire/Claire's Knee (1970) - Eric Rohmer
Le Genou De Claire/Claire's Knee (1970) - Eric Rohmer
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Le Genou De Claire/Claire's Knee (1970) - Eric Rohmer [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
This film, like the rest of Rohmer's work, is insidious first because it insists on a level of civilized dialogue and intellectual subtlety practically unknown in the cinema and, more importantly, because beneath its conventional, presumed "plot", significantly minimal, there evolves a secret, second reality which constitutes a deeper meaning of the work. The film is not a mere story of summer-lit amorous entanglements, but, as in Laclos' Dangerous Acquaintances, the manipulation and corruption of innocents, who are still capable of feeling, by sated, world- weary cynics toying with their emotions in the guise of benevolence. The subversion of the work thus resides in its carefuly constructed ambiguity, so typical of great literature and life. --Amos Vogel via Film As a Subversive Art (1974) - Amos Vogel [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
See also: French cinema - erotic movies - 1970
Marquise of O (1976) - Eric Rohmer
Marquise of O (1976) - Eric Rohmer [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Amazon.com
After Eric Rohmer completed his "Six Moral Tales," and before launching into the "Comedies and Proverbs," he tackled two projects very different from anything else in his career. In the first of these, The Marquise of O, based on the novel by Heinrich von Kleist, Rohmer leaves the young intellectuals of Paris for Italy during the Napoleonic wars. During the Russian invasion, the beautiful young marquise (Edith Clever) is saved from certain assault by a handsome and dashing count (Bruno Ganz). She spends the night guarded by her chivalrous savior, who returns months later to rather insistently court her. Only when he leaves does she discover that she is, unaccountably, pregnant. Rohmer's style is both more lush (shot in rich colors by Néstor Almendros) and less intimate than his previous romantic comedies, directed in painterly compositions at a removed distance. Unlike the self-obsessed young adults of his modern films, the count and the marquise act out of moral duty and social responsibility, and their actions reverberate through family and community. Yet this is still a Rohmer film, filled with carefully tooled dialogue (spoken in German) and informed by irony. The story of innocence and corruption, and the shades that lie within even the best of men, ends on a note of delicate forgiveness and understanding. Rohmer followed this with an even more unexpected stylistic experiment, the beautiful and beguiling Perceval. --Sean Axmaker
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