Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. The Green Ray is playing on Mubi UK starting today through December 5.
Smitten by a viewing of Eric Rohmer's 1972 film, Love in the Afternoon, French actress and filmmaker Marie Rivière felt compelled to write the director a letter expressing her fondness of the film and offering her professional services. By 1978, she had been given a small role in Perceval, the director's minimalist take on Chrétien de Troyes's 12 century romantic text. Rivière was later given an expanded role in 1981's The Aviator's Wife, the first entry in Rohmer's six-film cycle of Comedies & Proverbs. By 1986, Rivière was called upon to play Delphine in the director's semi-improvised masterpiece, The Green Ray, a film whose form and content innovatively draws upon the actor's personal experiences and fragile emotional state at the time. Such was her connection with Rohmer and his work,...
Smitten by a viewing of Eric Rohmer's 1972 film, Love in the Afternoon, French actress and filmmaker Marie Rivière felt compelled to write the director a letter expressing her fondness of the film and offering her professional services. By 1978, she had been given a small role in Perceval, the director's minimalist take on Chrétien de Troyes's 12 century romantic text. Rivière was later given an expanded role in 1981's The Aviator's Wife, the first entry in Rohmer's six-film cycle of Comedies & Proverbs. By 1986, Rivière was called upon to play Delphine in the director's semi-improvised masterpiece, The Green Ray, a film whose form and content innovatively draws upon the actor's personal experiences and fragile emotional state at the time. Such was her connection with Rohmer and his work,...
- 11/5/2012
- by David Jenkins
- MUBI
In conjunction with La Furia Umana, Notebook is very happy to present Ted Fendt's original English translation of Luc Moullet's "Le masque et la part de Dieu," on the films of Eric Rohmer. Moullet's original French can be found at La Furia Umana.
Cecil summed up the difference between him and his brother, William DeMille, like this: “I show a thousand camels and you show one camel and you psychoanalyze it.” Eric Rohmer is a lot more like William than Cecil, minus Freud.
What is fascinating, foremost, in his work is his obstinacy to not go beyond his only or main subject, often summed up, in a somewhat misleading way, by its title: Béatrice Romand wants a good marriage, or, at least, to help her friend have one (A Tale of Autumn), Brialy wants to caress Claire’s Knee (meaning, to be sure that she is practically consenting), Lucchini,...
Cecil summed up the difference between him and his brother, William DeMille, like this: “I show a thousand camels and you show one camel and you psychoanalyze it.” Eric Rohmer is a lot more like William than Cecil, minus Freud.
What is fascinating, foremost, in his work is his obstinacy to not go beyond his only or main subject, often summed up, in a somewhat misleading way, by its title: Béatrice Romand wants a good marriage, or, at least, to help her friend have one (A Tale of Autumn), Brialy wants to caress Claire’s Knee (meaning, to be sure that she is practically consenting), Lucchini,...
- 1/3/2012
- MUBI
He made poignant, sensual films about first love and chance encounters. But it was the dialogue that made the late Eric Rohmer's movies magical, says Gilbert Adair
Who says that the cinema is not in a state of terminal infantilism? Consider the case of the French filmmaker Eric Rohmer, who died on Monday at the age of 89. It's a sobering thought that My Night With Maud, the work that established his international reputation all of 40 years ago – a cerebral comedy about a pious young Catholic intellectual and a flirtatious, free-thinking bourgeoise, who spend an unconsummated night together mostly discussing Pascalian theology – was a huge popular hit in its day, and not only in France. Nowadays, if My Night With Maud were made at all, it would almost certainly be marginalised, by critics and public alike, as an avant-gardist, even downright experimental, film, with an audience to match.
During those intervening four decades,...
Who says that the cinema is not in a state of terminal infantilism? Consider the case of the French filmmaker Eric Rohmer, who died on Monday at the age of 89. It's a sobering thought that My Night With Maud, the work that established his international reputation all of 40 years ago – a cerebral comedy about a pious young Catholic intellectual and a flirtatious, free-thinking bourgeoise, who spend an unconsummated night together mostly discussing Pascalian theology – was a huge popular hit in its day, and not only in France. Nowadays, if My Night With Maud were made at all, it would almost certainly be marginalised, by critics and public alike, as an avant-gardist, even downright experimental, film, with an audience to match.
During those intervening four decades,...
- 1/14/2010
- The Guardian - Film News
Idiosyncratic French film-maker who was a leading figure in the cinema of the postwar new wave
In Arthur Penn's intelligently unconventional private eye thriller Night Moves (1975), Gene Hackman's hero – who finds the mystery he faces as unfathomable as his personal relationships – is asked by his wife whether he wants to go to an Eric Rohmer movie. "I don't think so," he says. "I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry."
Behind that exchange lies a jab at Hollywood's mistrust of any film-maker, especially a French one, who neglects plot and action in favour of cerebral exploration, metaphysical conceit and moral nuance. The Dream Factory, after all, had proved through trial and error that cinema is cinema, literature is literature, and the twain shall meet only provided the images rule, not the words.
Of the major American film-makers, perhaps only Joseph Mankiewicz allowed his scripts,...
In Arthur Penn's intelligently unconventional private eye thriller Night Moves (1975), Gene Hackman's hero – who finds the mystery he faces as unfathomable as his personal relationships – is asked by his wife whether he wants to go to an Eric Rohmer movie. "I don't think so," he says. "I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry."
Behind that exchange lies a jab at Hollywood's mistrust of any film-maker, especially a French one, who neglects plot and action in favour of cerebral exploration, metaphysical conceit and moral nuance. The Dream Factory, after all, had proved through trial and error that cinema is cinema, literature is literature, and the twain shall meet only provided the images rule, not the words.
Of the major American film-makers, perhaps only Joseph Mankiewicz allowed his scripts,...
- 1/13/2010
- by Ronald Bergan
- The Guardian - Film News
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