Éric Rohmer: biographie par Antoine de Baecque, Noël Herpe

Abstract

cultures, there is tremendous cross-cultural learning that can be generated from reading Monsieur Georges as one cannot help but draw comparisons to the American slave trade. Even the most reticent of young readers will be engrossed by this entertaining bande dessinée and will benefit from the crucial lessons on race and tolerance that it instills. Canisius College (NY) Eileen M. Angelini Film edited by Michèle Bissière Baecque, Antoine de, et Noël Herpe. Éric Rohmer: biographie. Paris: Stock, 2014. ISBN 978-2-2340-7561-0. Pp. 604. 29 a. This biography of the director of the Contes moraux, Comédies et proverbes, and Contes des quatre saisons cycles is based on unpublished archival documents and some eighty original interviews. Baecque and Herpe enjoyed unfettered access to Rohmer’s artistic collaborators as well as to the small family circle that Maurice Schérer (1920– 2010) kept separate from his directorial activities, all signed under pseudonym. Unlike the unruly, peripatetic Truffaut, Rohmer was a faithful family man who led an austere life, free from brushes with the law, amorous escapades, or calculated public appearances . Though his several platonic friendships with women and his paradoxical fascination with royalist politics, environmentalism, classical music, and the Parisian nightclub scene are duly noted here, emphasis is placed throughout on the ins and outs of filmmaking. An innovative system of project development, casting, rehearsal, and lightweight shooting allowed Rohmer to bypass the industry under the aegis of Films du Losange, the company he and Barbet Schroeder founded in 1962. Rarely do Baecque and Herpe venture psychological motives for the director’s sometimes quixotic behavior during shooting, or his longtime refusal to be photographed or filmed; they aim rather to create an objective record, quoting from established, firsthand sources (negative reviews of Rohmer’s films are routinely referenced) and limiting anecdote. Scholars of right-wing thought will take interest in passages on Schérer/ Rohmer’s ties with the self-styled phalangists and royalists Jean Parvulesco and Philippe d’Hugues, and the novelist-screenwriter Paul Gégauff who infused many Nouvelle Vague screenplays with overt misogyny.The authors take seriously the political conservatism of Rohmer, who was a bystander during May 68, while acknowledging those causes he later espoused such as anti-smoking, the anti-nuclear lobby, and historical preservation. Critical assessments of scores of works and unfinished projects (e.g.,“Fabien et Fabienne”and“Les Aventures de Zouzou”) devised across six decades are greatly enriched by the 137 boxes of archival documents Rohmer donated to the 248 FRENCH REVIEW 88.4 Reviews 249 Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine (IMEC). On this level, the book breaks significant new ground: we see, for example, how short stories drafted in one decade resurface in screenplays composed twenty or thirty years later, or how Rohmer conceived his role as a pedagogue in his Sorbonne University courses on mise-en-scène. Material is grouped thematically when appropriate: chapter 5, for example, broaches work done for French educational television in the 1960s, while chapter 7 looks at the German intermezzo of the 1970s when Rohmer wrote a doctoral thesis on Murnau, shot La marquise d’O..., and staged Catherine von Heilbronn. Elsewhere the coherence is provided by the cycles that afforded Rohmer international stardom, with excellent pages on the Contes moraux’s reception.Writing with acumen and stylistic consistency, Baecque and Herpe achieve in this scrupulously researched volume the paradoxical feat of writing the definitive biography of a pseudonymous subject, a director whose low-budget modus operandi remains one of the miracles of modern film production. Johns Hopkins University Derek Schilling Bénézet, Delphine. The Cinema of Agnès Varda: Resistance and Eclecticism. New York: Wallflower, 2014. ISBN 978-0-231-16975-2. Pp. 160. $25. From the beginning pages, the book establishes itself against existing research on Varda’s shorts, features, and artistic projects, and sets out to“redress gaps and absences in the scholarship, to revisit neglected portions of Varda’s production [...] to re-situate these within their cultural and political context,” and “to analyze Varda’s eclectic yet consistent conception of cinema”(4–5).It is composed of an introduction,five chapters...