Eric Rohmer: Interviews

243 Pages·2013·1.226 MB·English

by  Fiona Handyside

Eric Rohmer: Interviews
Conversations with Filmmakers Series
Gerald Peary, General Editor
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Eric Rohmer
i n t e r v i e w s
Edited by Fiona Handyside
University Press of Mississippi / Jackson
www.upress.state.ms.us
The University Press of Mississippi is a member
of the Association of American University Presses.
Copyright © 2013 by University Press of Mississippi
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2013
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rohmer, Éric, 1920–2010.
Eric Rohmer : interviews / edited by Fiona Handyside.
p. cm. — (Conversations with filmmakers series)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-61703-688-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61703-689-7 (ebook) 1.
Rohmer, Éric, 1920–2010—Interviews. 2. Motion picture producers and directors—
France—Interviews. I. Handyside, Fiona, 1974– II. Title.
PN1998.3.R64A3 2013
791.4302’33092—dc23 2012035308
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
Contents
Introduction vii
Chronology xv
Filmography xix
Eric Rohmer: An Interview 3
Graham Petrie / 1971
Eric Rohmer: Choice and Chance 15
Rui Nogueira / 1971
Moral Tales: Eric Rohmer Reviewed and Interviewed 28
Beverly Walker / 1973
Rohmer’s Perceval 41
Gilbert Adair / 1978
Comedies and Proverbs: An Interview with Eric Rohmer 50
Fabrice Ziolkowski / 1981
Eric Rohmer on Film Scripts and Film Plans 58
Robert Hammond and Jean-Pierre Pagliano / 1982
Interview: Pauline at the Beach 67
Serge Daney and Louella Interim / 1983
Celluloid and Stone 72
Claude Beylie and Alain Carbonnier / 1984
v
vi contents
Interview with Eric Rohmer 82
Gérard Legrand, Hubert Niogret, and François Ramasse / 1986
Interview with Eric Rohmer 101
Gérard Legrand and François Thomas / 1990
Eric Rohmer: Coincidences 111
Olivier Curchod / 1992
The Amateur: An Interview with Eric Rohmer 124
Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse / 1993
Interview with Eric Rohmer 140
Aurélien Ferenzi / 2001
Interview with Eric Rohmer: Does Cinematography Have an
Artistic Function? 146
Priska Morrissey / 2004
Interview with Eric Rohmer: Video Is Becoming Increasingly
Significant 165
Noël Herpe and Cyril Neyrat / 2004
I’m a Filmmaker, Not a Historian 170
Philippe Fauvel and Noël Herpe / 2007
Eric Rohmer: Father of the New Wave 182
Kaleem Aftab / 2008
Interview with Eric Rohmer: The Memory of the Figurative 185
Philippe Fauvel and Noël Herpe / 2010
Major Interviews Given by Eric Rohmer 191
Index 197
Introduction
Despite a reputation for shyness, Eric Rohmer (1920–2010) gave many ex-
cellent, insightful, and engaging interviews over his film career in a wide
variety of publications and also on television. As Gilbert Adair writes in
1978, Rohmer cut rather a solitary figure in the world of French cinema:
when his New Wave contemporaries were riffing on Hollywood genres
in their films, he was planning his Contes moraux/Moral Tales, more in-
debted to the French literary tradition of libertinage than the influences
of American cinema. He avoided becoming involved in the Marxist/
Leninist politics of the later 1960s, holding onto his own vision of the
function of cinema and society, and describing himself as a “theologi-
cal” filmmaker in a landmark interview/interrogation published in 1970
in the Cahiers du cinéma, in which they claim to “disagree with Rohmer
on every point.” The fundamental disagreement concerns the very na-
ture of cinema itself, with Cahiers keen to underscore their view of cin-
ema as a form of ideological production of reality, and Rohmer defending
a position in which cinema is understood as mechanically reproducing
that which is outside of it.This bruising encounter, not reproduced in
this collection but available to read in English in issue 54 of Senses of Cin-
ema, left its mark on both sides and Rohmer never gave another inter-
view to Cahiers for all of the 1970s. Ironically, however, the 1980s, 1990s,
and 2000s saw Rohmer routinely interviewed by both the major French
cinema journals, Cahiers du cinéma and Positif, and several of his inter-
views with these journals are available here for the first time in English.
It was not Rohmer who changed, but the intellectual, political, and cin-
ematic climate around him, seeming to demonstrate his point that art’s
progression is not teleological, but rather circular, and that modernity
can sometimes appear classical and old-fashioned at certain points. He
never seems to consider himself anything other than a modernist, for all
that his films are constructed with dense plots, complex characteriza-
tion, and a desire for transparent realist presentation. Rohmer declares
to Gilbert Adair that non-narrative cinema seems passé and his films
vii
viii introduction
tell stories. At the same time, he emphasizes the structural nature of his
cinema, so that when Carbonnier and Beylie attempt to summarize his
films with an invented proverb, he returns to the geometric, claiming his
films should be read as the conflict between the stable and the unstable,
immobility and change. In his rendering of Perceval Rohmer emphasized
the medieval construction of space, creating a tension between a highly
stylized flat décor and the three dimensions desired by cinematic pho-
tography. This love of form endures, to the extent that in 2007 Rohmer
discusses the mathematical pattern in L’Astrée and attributes his admira-
tion of Murnau, Lang, and Hitchcock to their ability to invent new forms
(and that he also attributes to Picasso and Cézanne in the realm of paint-
ing). These interviews allow Rohmer and his interviewers to explore
the structural tension of his films as they pull between the psychologi-
cal interests of detailed stories and expressive acting and the geometric
abstraction of behavior, gesture, and décor, ranging as they do over his
scriptwriting techniques, his interest in the presentation of space and
time, his use of innovative technologies, his opinion on music, architec-
ture, and painting, and relationships with his collaborators.
What is particularly striking about these interviews, alongside his in-
tellectual coherence and impressive breadth of knowledge, is a twinkly-
eyed charm: Rohmer is able to laugh at the ironies of fate (for example,
that by the time a 1993 interview takes place, Cahiers du cinéma will hap-
pily discuss the influence of Balzac and realism, against structuralism)
and interviewers attest to his vitality and youthful demeanor well into
his eighties, an insight into the reasons why Rohmer would have com-
manded such loyalty from his small group of actors and crew, discussed
particularly in two interviews taken from the landmark 2007 publica-
tionRohmer et les Autres which examined Rohmer’s world through the
lens of influences and intertexts. As befits a man who proclaimed the
virtues of modesty and economy in filmmaking, his interviews are not
about the creation of a personal myth, or an indulgence in the cult of
director as celebrity (Rohmer refuses to discuss his personal life, dismiss-
ing it as banal and irrelevant, and is vague and contradictory about such
details as his date of birth). When Rohmer proclaims himself an auteur,
as he does, it is not a claim based on an assertion of individual “genius,”
but attributed to the body of work he has created, a body of work that
has been carefully elaborated and that defends his thesis that cinema
is a tool that allows one to discover the beauty of the world. He privi-
leges the cinema over art forms, he tells us, because cinema leads us back
to nature itself. His philosophy of cinema is infused with a theological
introduction ix
and ecological view, in which the role of the filmmaker is to record (and
conserve) the ordered beauty of the world, rather than attempting its
transformation (as an architect or a painter may). Given this view of cin-
ema, Rohmer films almost entirely on location, and in several interviews
discusses the complexities of location shooting, from the need to respect
people’s property when they loan it out to you for a shoot, to the need
to be constantly aware of the weather—he describes his films as “slaves
to the weather.” Discussions of the weather, both in terms of its practical
challenges for the filmmaker and its symbolic and narratological pos-
sibilities, occur frequently (on one occasion for example, Rohmer muses
that Carné’s decision to abandon filming due to mist would not have
occurred to him, and he welcomes the way weather forces his films to ac-
commodate themselves to chance). Of course, once it is placed onto cel-
luloid and captured, what was contingent becomes fixed and absolute, a
paradox captured in the title of Rui Nogueira’s Sight and Sound interview
which he called “Choice and Chance.”
This interest in cinema’s ability to preserve the constantly mutating
landscape takes different directions in differing interviews, illustrating
the differing perspectives interviewers open up onto Rohmer and his
filmmaking techniques and philosophy. For example, in the 1986 inter-
view in Positif, this interest in preservation leads to a discussion of the
fragility of film stock, and Rohmer’s interest in film archives. In the 1993
interview with Cahiers du cinéma, the interview concentrates on ques-
tions of ecology and politics, given that it focuses on The Tree, the Mayor
and the Mediatheque, a film in which the environment as a political as
well as aesthetic issue comes to the fore. In a 1985 interview, Rohmer’s
interest in the landscape is linked to his critical engagement with issues
of architecture and urban planning. Rohmer is delighted to be asked the
question, glad that his interest in urban planning is visible in his films.
Rohmer argues that given the thematic similarity he imposes on his
films through placing them into series, variety will come through show-
casing a multitude of locations and seasons, and his films deliberately
examine different milieus.
Certain themes predominate in the interviews: an interest in the rela-
tionship between cinema and the other arts (literature, theatre, and es-
pecially architecture and painting); the use of technology and the desire
to keep abreast of new developments (in terms of color, sound, and digi-
tal recording); an interest in the ontology of the cinema and an indebt-
edness to André Bazin’s view of the cinema (although he considers him
rather hidebound in his fetish for the sequence shot and depth-of-field);