‘Eric Rohmer is perhaps one of the more under-rated Nouvelle vague film-makers. His formative contribution to the Nouvelle vague in the late 1950s – through his work at Cahiers du cinéma, through his patronage of younger film-makers, and through his creative collaborations with Jean-Luc Godard – is now often overlooked, yet enough to secure his place in history. What fascinates me most about Rohmer, however, is what happened over the fifty years that followed. As the Nouvelle vague petered out in the early 1960s, its different film-makers went in various directions – for example, towards political activism, or popular entertainment, or stylised genre experiments. Rohmer, by contrast, kept following the thematic path that he started out on in his first feature, Le Signe du lion (1958, released in 1962): how individuals inhabit and move through the physical spaces of Paris, and how these spaces shape their meetings with others. In thirteen of the twenty-five feature films that Rohmer made between the early 1960s and mid-2000s, characters journey through Paris on foot, by train, and occasionally by car. As they do so, they make chance connections with strangers; they flirt with them, fall in and out love with them, and most of all talk with them.
Rohmer once said: “I have nothing to say, but often those with nothing to say, say the most.” Rohmer’s characters say nothing at great length, though often with great wit. Perhaps for this reason more than any other, Rohmer is not for everyone. Their interest in Rohmer piqued by my film Rohmer in Paris (2013), two friends of mine decided to watch A Tale of Springtime one evening. They managed to sit through about twenty minutes of talk before turning to each other for alternative entertainment. They are now married, and deeply thankful to Rohmer for bringing them together. It’s a slight affront to Rohmer’s work, of course, but I feel sure he would have approved of this connection. Perhaps he’d even have written this scene into one of his films – the extent to which he drew on the personal lives of his friends and collaborators to write his scripts is well-documented.
The vague boredom with which my friends engaged with Rohmer is not unusual. Throughout the time that I spent researching and making Rohmer in Paris, people would repeatedly ask: ‘Why Rohmer?’. Aren’t his films visually a bit dull, they would ask? Aren’t the stories of young men and women falling in and out of love a bit repetitive? Didn’t you get bored of watching his films again and again? The answers to these questions are, in order, yes, yes, and never.
When faced with the question ‘Why Rohmer?’, I could provide many answers: his rigorous documentation of his environment, his intricate plotting, his ironic tone, his serious philosophical engagement, or his hilariously self-deluding characters. But actually the answer is more Rohmerian: pure chance. Nine years ago, faced with a wet winter in a new city and with no local friends, I started to frequent a nearby library. Their DVD collection was small, but for some reason, it included almost the entire canon of Eric Rohmer’s films. I took one out and watched it. And then another, and another. And another. I was hooked, in the same way we’re all now hooked on the latest Netflix series.
After a while, though, I became fascinated by the spatial fidelity that Rohmer displayed towards the city. One of the great things about cinema is its ability to compress time and space and shuffle it around. Rohmer stubbornly refused to do that. If his script had a character walking in a circle around a block, then he would typically film his actor walking that exact route in real time. A particularly startling example of this ‘topographic continuity’ occurs during an extended sequence in The Aviator’s Wife (1981). François is visiting his girlfriend Anna early one morning. As he turns into her road, he sees her leaving her apartment block with an ex-boyfriend. By chance, he later crosses paths with the ex-boyfriend and sees him meet another woman. In the subsequent sequence, played out almost in real-time, François follows them across Paris: first onto a bus, then on foot through Buttes-Chaumont, a park in the inner north-western suburbs, and finally down a street into an anonymous building. Rohmer said in an interview that he shot François’ pursuit ad hoc in the park and on the streets; when it started raining towards the end of the scenes in Buttes-Chaumont, Rohmer looked for a nearby café in which to shoot the next scene. He found one, got permission to film in it, and started filming there and then. So, as Rohmer recounts, ‘the film was shot at the same time as it was being played.’ Over the course of forty minutes, The Aviator’s Wife traces an almost continuous journey from the Gare de l’Est to Buttes Chaumont.
Fascinated by this self-imposed discipline, and perhaps a little seduced by Rohmer’s intimate relationship with Paris, I began a research project on the spatial “truthfulness” of his films – I presented seminars, and gave conference talks, and drafted a book chapter on the subject. At the same time, for a long while I’d been interested in the idea of using film to interrogate film. So I also started work on a short video essay on Rohmer’s Paris, made up of clips from his films. Within a few months, I’d made a 15-minute piece called Mapping Rohmer but it felt too short to do justice to the complexity of Rohmer’s relationship with the city, so I just kept on editing. And re-editing. And re-editing. My act of looking gradually turned into fascination and then obsession. So I began to refer to the project, at least to myself, as ‘Rohmer Obsession Project’. Three years later, I finished ‘Rohmer in Paris’, though perhaps ‘abandoned’ is more accurate.
Since then, I’ve occasionally returned to talking and lecturing about Rohmer, and still never get bored. However, a few weeks before I was asked to contribute to this year’s Summer School, I finally promised myself that I would stop talking and writing about Rohmer – after four years of making Rohmer in Paris and another four of screening it publicly – it was time for Rohmer and me to part ways. Time to move on. Yet here I am again, once again crossing paths with Rohmer. Once again…
Wait! That’s a line from my film! How did I get here again? Will I ever escape Rohmer’s Paris? Or perhaps, more to the point, do I want to? My answer, again: never!’
From ‘Crossing Paths with Eric Rohmer’, Filmkrant 2018 (introductory essay for ‘Éric Rohmer, Games of Love and Chance', Zomer Film College, Cinematek, Antwerp, 2018).
A more detailed discussion of the project is available below, in the form of a conversation between Erika Balsom and myself at the 2015 Essay Film Festival in London.
‘Mapping Rohmer’ and ‘Rohmer in Paris’ can both be streamed and downloaded under a Creative Commons 0 (public domain) license.
‘“All I have to offer is myself”: the film-maker as narrator’ (in Julia Vassilieva and Deane Williams (eds.), Beyond the Essay Film: Subjectivity, Textuality and Technology. University of Amsterdam Press, 2020) discusses the narrative voice of ‘Rohmer in Paris’.