Though Eric Rohmer may not have been in the forefront of the Cahiers group, his work is artistically the most subtle. Before discussing his work, however, we must briefly recapitulate the key issues of the New Wave that developed in France after 1958. We also need to look at Rohmer's Catholic paradigm, as he is the only New Wave director with an articulated Christian approach. With the benefit of these two perspec-tives (New Wave and Roman Catholic) we will be able to evaluate one film from Rohmer's rich and varied productions since 1959: My Night at Maud's (1969). This film belongs to Rohmer's first series of films, "Moral Tales." His next series of films was called the "Comedies and Proverbs."
My thesis here is that Rohmer's films are a cinema of grace. Rohmer hid profound religious beliefs under the surface of his films. The some-what superficial moral structure of My Night at Maud's is partly a device to reveal the true nature of grace. I will also try to show how the moral in this film and Rohmer's other films is a reflection of divine immanence.
Eric Rohmer and the New Wave
Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, and Rivette were roughly the same age. From months of coviewing films at the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris, they developed a friendship based on their common passion to make movies. The films they watched in the 1950s were mostly American. The personal style of directors such as John Ford, Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, and Alfred Hitchcock truly fascinated them. Their own French cinema frustrated them by its dominance of impersonal period films and huge romantic costume dramas made in the fashion of 1930s cinema.
After almost ten years of criticism, discussion, and viewing, the five men decided to make films themselves. Though several other directors are considered part of the New Wave, these five made their first films in 1959, thereby setting the wave in motion. Alain Resnais, Louis Malle, and others would later make films that significantly carried the movement along.
In retrospect, all five pioneers denied there was any "movement" with concerted doctrines that created the New Wave (Hillier, 1986). It seemed that an intellectual consciousness about the way a story is cinematically presented united them. This consciousness brought about a set of coherent features in their films and about a hundred other films made in France between 1959 and 1965. This was the "New Wave."
Differences existed, however, in the works of the five filmmakers. The divergence between the five "pioneers" were brought out in later interviews. For Godard and Rivette, "New Wave" was an expression of opposition, of avant-garde. It was almost necessarily anti-popular in taste. Chabrol, Truffaut, and partly Rohmer were more concerned with the continuation of the popular French cinema. For Eric Rohmer the greatest innovation of the New Wave was "making films cheaply," while Truffaut said the New Wave made it possible "to make a first film with a reason-ably personal theme before you were 35." It was "simply an attempt to rediscover a certain independence which was lost somewhere around 1924" (Hillier). Actually, the most articulated ideas for what were to become the distinguishable marks of the New Wave came from Andre Bazin, who died one year before the cinematic "earthquake" in 1959. The term "New Wave" had not then been invented, so Bazin refers to the politiques des auteurs:
The important predecessors of the Cahiers-group are found mostly in America and Italy. Rohmer stated in an interview that "For the cinema to have a future, its past could not be allowed to die .... Can you imagine a budding musician who was unable to listen to the works of Bach or Beethoven, a young writer who was unable to read the works of the past by going to a library?" (Hillier, p. 3 1). Bazin praised "the photographic realism of deep focus in filmmakers like Wyler and Welles and the realism of episodic, elliptical narrative organization to be found in Italian neorealism" (Hillier, p. 29).
The driving force of the Cahiers-group was the search for the "deep structure" of cinema. In 1959 the method behind the search was dialecti-cal, though purely apolitical. Later, in the 1960s, Godard and Rivette would employ a Marxist dialectic in their works. In the 1950s, the important thing was to reveal the "language" of cinema, in historical terms, and then the "style," the personal dimension of the auteur as a dialectical counterpart. This "dialectical relationship between the history of the art and the artist's personal action" (Monaco, 1976), was creating a synthesis, a new mode of filmmaking. Many critics have defined this synthesis as a "new realism."
In his auteur theory Andre Bazin was concerned about what he defined as "moral realism." This term is closely connected with the auteur ideal, "it insists on personal relationship between filmmaker and film viewer" (Monaco, p. 8). Traditionally, films are "alienated products," consumed by mass audiences. According to Bazin, films should be intimate conversations between makers and viewers. The dialectical sum of the relationship between "language" and "style" was therefore ethically determined: film "is no longer a product to be consumed but a process to become engaged in" (p. 8).
The significant features of the new realism were depth-focus and mis-en-scene. Mis-en-scene was seen as the counterpart of montage, which, along with other "film-tricks," destroyed the possibility of an intimate relationship between filmmaker and film viewer. Depth-focus brought the spectator closer in relation with the image to achieve a more "active mental attitude." Other characteristics of the New Wave were episodic and elliptical narrative, improvisation, freedom of camera movement, and location shooting (Hillier, 1986).
During the 1960s Cahiers du Cinema became radically politicized, and the more conservative Truffaut and Rohmer were antagonized by their colleagues in the journal. Hillier describes the relationship between Cahiers and Rohmer as "openly hostile" by the late 1960s. Rohmer described the tendencies of Cahiers as a kind of "terrorism" to force him (and Truffaut) to embrace ideas of radical modernism and leftism. He contended that one should not "be afraid of not being modern ... you have to know how to go against the trend of the times" (Hillier, p. 30). This attitude would characterize much of Rohmer's personal work.
Eric Rohmer's Catholicity
Rohmer's real name was Jean-Mafie Maurice Scherer. He used "Eric Rohmer² as his pen-name when he started to write for film journals. He was editor of Cahiers du Cinema from 1957 to 1963, though he wrote for it in the early 1950s as well. Rohmer did not share the spontaneous success of Truffaut, Godard, and Chabrol. Only after ten years of limited work, mostly with 16mm shorts, did his position as a feature film director become secure, when My Night at Maud¹s was shown at the Cannes Festival in 1969.
As a political and aesthetic conservative, Rohmer was an outsider in the milieu of French film making during the 1960s. His articulated Christian approach was not exactly popular in a time when the Church and all other social and political authorities were dismissed by the cultural elite. To understand Rohmer's religious intentions and the religious content of his films, we need to understand the Catholic way of perceiving reality.
Ingrid Schafer (1991) makes a very clear distinction between what she calls the Catholic and the Protestant imagination. She talks about a Catholic "both-and" imagination versus a Protestant "either-or" imagina-tion. "Both-and" reflects the incarnation: God became man, and he is truly God and truly Human at the same time. The Protestant paradigm focuses on "divine transcendence" versus the Catholic focus on "divine immanence" ( p. 50-51). Divine transcendence sees the world "fractured by original sin," while divine immanence views the world as originally blessed by a God who is a caring and loving Father.
The Catholic imagination is "analogical" according to Shafer. The world as God's creation shows us how God is. We learn about God by understanding the world. This distinction is based on the Catholic emphasis on the Incarnation and the Sacrament. Divinity and flesh are intermingled; God himself is also truly human and the blood of Christ is physically present in the communion cup. For Thomas Aquinas the whole world was sacramental, "a bearer of grace." In the Catholic perspective the "artists are sacrament makers, revealers of God-in-the-world" (Shafer, p. 52). R.A. Blake claimed (1991) that people tend to come closer to the divine "through the senses-through color and form, through song and story and dance--than through precise verbal formulations of their theologians" (p. 60).
With one or two exceptions Rohmer's films do not deal with any explicit spiritual or religious themes. His attention is rather directed to contemporary man, his values, conflicts, and everyday problems without any reference to religious or non-religious beliefs. Bedouelle (1979) notes that "such attention to what we might call the spiritual dimension of every human situation has become a commonplace in post-Conciliar Catholic thought" (p. 272). For Bedouelle, Rohmer's films, especially the "Moral Tales," represent a rediscovery of Christian reality.
Rohmer, however, obviously had more on his mind than moral education. He held that "Christianity is consubstantial with the cinema," and that "the cinema is the cathedral of the twentieth century" (Bedouelle). The latter statement is interesting with regard to another significant focus of the Catholic imagination. Shafer states that the Catholics emphasize the "the individual relating to God as a member of a community" (Shafer, p. 53). The community of people serving God is realized through the cathedrals. And what is the "cathedral" expressing if not "the liturgical re-enactment of God's comedy of grace," Shafer notes (p. 53). Film as a collective art form does carry traits of the cathedral. However, Rohmer probably had a more transcendent concept in mind when using "cathedral" as a metaphor.
The "Moral Tales"
Six films (the first three were 16mm shorts) comprise the cycle of Rohmer's "Moral Tales." They were made between 1965 and 1972. The structural identity for the plots of these films is a love triangle. A man involved in some relationship with a woman meets another woman to whom he is sexually attracted. After resisting temptation, he returns to his wife, fiancéeÇ, or lover, whichever case the film presents.
Bedouelle (1979) notes that Rohmer's intention with these Tales is not to give moral lectures: "These 'moral' films are not moralizing. For if he talks about fidelity he does so in a subtle, profound, and original way, which, paradoxically, is more convincing in his seemingly libertine films than in the more 'correct' films . . . ." (p. 274). Rohmer stated in an interview (Pym, 1987) that the ethical judgment in the "Moral Tales" is formulated by one of the characters "who, through their commentary, lecture the others on morality."
The "Moral Tales" were originally a collection of short stories that Rohmer wrote before he got involved with cinema. Each short story has a narrator, the protagonist himself. The film versions reflect this subjective point of view, but the narration of the short stories has partly been transformed into dialogue.
A final element to have in mind when reflecting upon Rohmer's six Moral Tales is the meaning of "moral" in French, French literature has a long tradition of moralistes, such as Pasca. But their concern was not so much with ethical evaluation of people's acts as with descriptions of states of mind, feelings, and choices from an internal point of view: "What matters is what they (the characters) think about their behavior, rather than their behavior itself' (Rohmer cited in Monaco, 1976, p. 292). Rohmer's "Moral Tales" falls within that French literary tradition.
My Night at Maud's
Norman King finds the highly favorable reception of My Night at Maud¹s at the Cannes Festival in May 1969 extraordinary: "It was as if May '68 had not existed" (Hayward & Vincendeau, 1990). The film is a continuation of great literary traditions, ethically conservative and aesthetically attuned with classical ideals, seemingly unaffected by the abortive revolution of May '68.
The hero of the film is Jean-Louis, an unmarried engineer in his early thirties and a practicing Catholic who has recently returned to France from years of work abroad. A chance encounter brings him together with an old friend, a Marxist atheist philosophy professor, who introduces him to Maud. Jean-Louis spends the night with Maud, talking, discussing, and finally platonically sleeping by her side. Before that night, however, he had seen a girl in church whom he hoped someday to marry, but with whom he had been unable to make contact. In spite of Maud's invitation -she is beautifully attractive--Jean-Louis is "faithful" to the image of his prospective wife and declines sex with Maud. The next day, in another chance encounter, he meets the girl from the church. Their relationship is sealed. The film ends with talk, reflection, and observation.
In several ways Maud is one of Rohmer's most exceptional films. It is his only film dealing overtly with religion: several times we are brought into the church to partake in the Catholic mass--one scene actually involves a full-dress Sunday sermon. The principal topics in the night-time conversation of Maud and Jean-Louis deal with Christian beliefs and Catholic morals.
The film also makes extensive literary cross-references. Scarcely an argument is presented without reference to Pascal, Rousseau, or Chanturgues, not to mention the Church, Christ, and religious ethics.
Consistent with the structure of the "Moral Tales," the male protago-nist Jean-Louis, is distinguishably self-loving. The film starts out as his story, his account of the events. Critics have been intrigued by the fact that the protagonist is never given a proper name. He is only the "I" of the story. This is why Maud has been considered Rohmer's most personal film. This subjective point of view, however, seems consistent with the structure of the written "Moral Tales" and with the moralite of French tradition. The object is to describe, from an internal point of view, a character's various states of mind in relation to his actions.
Jean-Louis ("I") lives in a world centered around himself. His philosophical concern deals persistently with the problem of choice. In his discussion with Maud, he contrasts the Jansenist view (an aspect of Catholic tradition emphasizing Divine predestination) with his own belief that he controls his own destiny. So Rohmer creates a character, Jean--Louis, who emphasizes the theoretical possibility of choice rather than the act of choosing (Monaco). The sadness at the end of the film, as in all Rohmer's films, is that the protagonist (or at least the spectator), finally realizes the self-deception of the control-idea. Rohmer describes the endings of his films like this:
After being sexually tempted by Maud, Jean-Louis escapes, running away from her apartment without being able to verbalize or solve the situation in any rational form. By choosing sudden escape rather than reflective withdrawal, he throws himself at the mercy of chance encoun-ters and the uncontrollable. And, paradoxically, the first person he meets out in the street is his imagined wife, Francoise. This paradox is what I interpret as the "divine irony of grace." Jean Louis' escape from Maud is his realization of "lostness;" he ' has lost his control and his self-centered place in the universe. Marriage then becomes the sacrament of grace. It is more than a symbol of salvation; as in the Catholic imagination, it is sacramental salvation itself.
As Monaco points out, the subjective point of view is overpowered by what Rohmer described as the "raw events," an inescapable objectivity. Few critics apply a religious interpretation to this shift in point of view. But I am reminded of Soren Kierkegaard's words about the relationship between subjective truth and objectivity. In Either Or, Kierkegaard says that, while only the subjective is truth, there is one single objective truth, that is, Christ's death and resurrection.
It is when we let Rohmer's irony (the incongruence of his characters) be a seed of self-reflection within ourselves that his films take on a transcendent dimension. His characters are reflections of love, they are truly genuine, with a multitude of internal aspects. They are truly human in the sense of their "lostness." Rohmer's intention is not solely to raise a finger against marital infidelity. Even by acting ethically consistent with Christian morality, the characters are lost and in need of grace the moment they lose control over the universe they have created around themselves. As Shafer (1991) clarified concerning the Catholic imagina-tion, there is a unity between God and his creation, an order in love, morals, and society that reflects the nature of God. Both morals and sacraments reflect the divine immanence. Rohmer puts it this way:
On top of the wave and against the stream.
The New Wave is regarded by many as the most important influence in motion-picture history since D.W. Griffith. Eric Rohmer was one of an exclusive group who constituted this remarkable phenomenon in France at the end of the 1950s. He was "on the top of the wave" among a minority of filmmakers who wished to say something essential about life and reality. But Eric Rohmer was also "against the stream." Being himself a major instigator of the New Wave, he turned against what became a "fashion" in world cinema after 1959.
In America Rohmer is disliked by many critics who find his films boring, and in Europe he is attacked by those who oppose the conserva-tive values he emphasized. Many critiques on Rohmer's films display some surprisingly emotional language, both positive and negative. Apparently, Rohmer does not leave spectators indifferent to the things he says through his films.
The controversial reactions to Rohmer's films in the 1960s and 1970s may be shifting, however. His popularity seems to be growing, especially in Europe. Perhaps Rohmer was merely ahead of his time. If such is the case, his statement from an interview with Cahiers du Cinema in 1965 becomes almost prophetic: "Art is no reflection of the time, it's the precursor. You shouldn't go along with popular taste, you should be in advance of it" (Hillier, 1986, p. 93).
Rohmer was a realist filmmaker in the sense that he created "real" moments meant to catch all the senses of the spectator (at least those interested enough to be attentive viewers). This quality of diminishing the distance between the filmed events and the spectator is among Rohmer's most outstanding and exceptional talents. Thus he almost reached his desire to make films in which the camera is invisible.
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Hillier, J. ed. (I 986). Cahiers du Cinema. Massachusetts: HarvardUniversity Press.
King, N. (1990). Eye for irony: Eric Rohmer's Ma nuit chez Maud (1969). In Hayward, S. & Vincendeau, G. (Eds.), French cinema. Texts and contexts (231 -240). New York: Routledge
Marie, M. (I 98 1). The art of the film in France since the "New Wave".Wide Angle 4 (4).
Monaco, J. (1976). The New Wave. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pym, J. (1987). Silly girls. Sight & Sound, 56, (1), 45-49.
Rohmer, E. (1980). Six moral tales. New York: The Viking Press.
Shafer, I. (199 ) The Catholic imagination in popular film & television. Journal of Popular Film & Television. 19 (2), 50-57.
Ziolkowski, F. (1982). Comedies and proverbs: an interview with Eric Rohmer. Wide Angle, 5, (1), 62-67.