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The Aviator's Wife (1981) More at IMDbPro »La femme de l'aviateur (original title)

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3 items from 2010

15 January 2010 9:31 PM, PST | MUBI | See recent MUBI news »

Maurice Schérer, born in either Tulle or Nancy, a former schoolteacher, a gaunt face with an odd lip. A notoriously private man who was in his late 40s before he found any sort of success, and then under a pseudonym. The obituaries say Eric Rohmer has died; that's not really true. Schérer was a real man whom very few people knew well, and yes, he really did die on Monday, aged 89. "Rohmer," who made his first short film in 1950, when Schérer was almost 30, and formally retired from filmmaking 57 years later, can best be described as the product of Schérer's intellect. An Ellery Queen, or maybe an Émile Ajar. Schérer's body is barely cold, and yet it's already necessary, in a certain respect, to defend his Rohmer. The obituaries have a tinge of faint condescension. It's almost as though some other man, who made "sophisticated" and "talky" "low-key" films "about young »

14 January 2010 6:42 AM, PST | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »

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, »

13 January 2010 2:24 AM, PST | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News 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, »

- Ronald Bergan

3 items from 2010