Eric Rohmer, Historiographer

Abstract

“Believe it or not, Diderot is a more modern scriptwriter than Faulkner is:”1 This provocative remark from Eric Rohmer’s essay “The Classical Age of Film” is more than an attention-grabbing epigram. It points toward his rich, distinctly nonlinear belief in how different means of artistic expression comingle to create cinema and to present the human experience of time, past and present. While the majority of Rohmer’s films have contemporary settings and subjects, it is not true that his interest in how cinema can represent the experience of time is limited to chamber ensemble performances about the mores of the bourgeoisie. The proof of this appears in his last three feature films: L’Anglaise et le Duc (2001), set during the French Revolution; Triple Agent (2004), set in Paris in the 1930s; and Les Amours d’’Astree et de Celadon (2007), set in fifth-century Gaul. While these films have generated much debate about their significance to his body of work,2 my claim is that they are representative rather than exceptional. More than a simple return to the historical themes of his educational television work, En Profil dans le texte (1964-69), or his adaptations of Heinrich von Kleist and Chretien de Troyes in the 1970s, the trilogy reveals Rohmer’s profound and consistent concern with how cinema can produce the experience of time, whether on a scale that is individual and linked to the present or that is social and placed in the past. One fact holds his works together even as they display an immense and frequently playful diversity in their forms.