I even tried not to think
Eric Rohmer, the French critic and filmmaker who was one of the founding figures of the French New Wave and the director of more than 50 films, including the Oscar-nominated “My Night at Maud’s,” died on Monday in Paris. He was 89.
{ NY Times | Continue reading }
“The Moral Tales” and the cycles that followed — the six “Comedies and Proverbs” in the 1980s and the “Tales of the Four Seasons” in the 1990s — are the essential Rohmer. Other filmmakers manufacture sequels or burrow repeatedly into genres. His cycles are unusual in the way that they arrange self-contained narratives around themes, ideas and suggestive anecdotes. They don’t make arguments so much as offer slightly different views of similar problems. What happens when we fall in or out of love? How do accidental occurrences impinge on our plans and ambitions? What happens next?
These are not necessarily timeless questions, at least not in the way that fundamental problems of philosophy are. But they are always part of life, and framing them — in language and in pictures, the constituent elements of Mr. Rohmer’s movies (he rarely used music) — is what art does. Classicism is an approach that takes up these problems as they occur, without worrying too much about their contemporary relevance or their permanence.
video { Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse, 1967 | See also: Ma nuit chez Maud , 1969 }
