Offscreen Notes
Eric Rohmer RIP: April 4, 1920-January 11, 2010
One of the original film critics turned filmmakers who helped establish the French Nouvelle Vague, Eric Rohmer, has passed away at the age of 89. Rohmer was well established as the editor of Les Cahiers du Cinéma from 1956 to 1963 and, perhaps more than his colleagues, was influenced by the more spiritual/metaphysical leanings of its founding father, André Cinéma. Rohmer’s films were markedly different from the films of other New Waver directors, such as the more rigorously political/theoretical/polemical works of Jean-Luc Godard, or the more self-reflexive/intertextual/populist works of François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, or the more formalist/intellectual films of Alain Resnais, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Marguerite Duras. Although Rohmer was active until his death (his last film coming in 2007), he will be best remembered for his philosophical series of six ‘Moral Tales’ films, which began in 1969 with Ma Nuit Chez Maude and ended in 1998 with Conte d’automne.
