The Green Ray By Eric Rohmer: An Attempt To Find The Real Story

This paper intends to go below the surface of Eric Rohmer’s 1986 masterpiece, to discover what is really being said in the film. It is but a brief look at the film’s naturalistic approach that carries elements of philosophy while also giving it a psychological touch. It is not too difficult a task as clues to what the film is really about are scattered throughout the screenplay. Eric Rohmer alludes to cinema being an art, eschewing the visual fireworks of commercial cinema and instead explores a character’s imagination and obsession

Répétition Planétaire

This chapter starts by considering the general relation between postmodernism and religion. It suggests that, as postmodernism becomes increasingly susceptible to historicization, so it is possible to understand more clearly the projection of religion as a hybrid cultural entity combining sacred and secular motifs. It then goes on to examine treatments of temporality in the work of two French artists, composer Olivier Messiaen and film-maker Eric Rohmer, who both bridged the modernist and postmodernist eras. It discusses how Messiaen’s music was shaped by World War II and surrealism, as well as by religion. This chapter’s final section focuses upon the films of Rohmer, with whom Messiaen was acquainted. There is a discussion of Rohmer’s particular interests in postmodern architecture, environmentalism, and globalization, along with an indication of how these themes manifest themselves in his films, particularly in his last great film cycle ‘Tales of the Four Seasons’.

La suspensión del sentido: Cahiers du cinéma y la Nouvelle Vague en el comienzo de los años sesenta / The Suspended Meaning: Cahiers du cinéma and the French New Wave in the Early Sixties

¿Cómo reacciona Cahiers du cinéma frente al surgimiento de la Nouvelle vague? ¿Qué estrategias implementa la revista ante el riesgo de que la politique des auteurs se convierta en una politique de l’amitié? Mientras otras publicaciones, como Positif o Présence du cinéma, se dedican a atacar a los nuevos cineastas, Éric Rohmer (que ha quedado a cargo de la jefatura de redacción luego de que sus antiguos colegas han decidido lanzarse como directores de cine) profundiza su predilección por el clasicismo y evita referirse a los films modernos. Su resistencia a comprometerse con la contemporaneidad genera fricciones en el interior de Cahiers y, finalmente, Rohmer será desplazado por Jacques Rivette. Comienza un nuevo ciclo en la revista: el nuevo jefe de redacción entiende que el cine moderno reclama una crítica moderna y que ya no hay que producir sentido a partir de los films sino que, en cambio, se trata de suspenderlo. Desde la perspectiva de una crítica histórica, el presente artículo intenta reconstruir las etapas de ese conflictivo momento de transición. Se trata de mostrar cómo emerge de allí una cierta noción de cine moderno y una nueva manera de concebir el estatuto de la imagen.

Mozart-Perspektiven

Mozart's String Quintet in D major, KV 593, in the reception of a French filmmaker (Éric Rohmer) and a Russian private scholar of the 19th century (Alexander Oulibicheff); Mozart's piano concertos as model questioning of intertextuality; Friedrich Gulda's idiosyncratic Mozart interpretations—Mozart's instrumental music proves to be an incessantly fascinating challenge for everyone interested in his compositions. Modern Mozart research must bring together all the areas it encapsulates: its philological source material as well as modern reception and interpretation research, which also includes a look at the formal aspects of Mozart's music.

Perceptual Interface and Painterly Cinema

The fifth chapter of Style in Narrative in part parallels the second chapter, but with a shift from literature to cinema. Specifically, it takes genre as its scope, though it considers genre in visual representation, rather than story structure. Moreover, in this case, it focuses on an unusual genre, one that is not widely identified as a genre—painterly films, which is to say, films that draw their visual models from non-cinematic forms of visual art. The chapter presents an account of the kinds and functions of painterly film, ranging from mere allusion through imitation of a period or movement, to the cultivation of broader sensitivities characteristic of painting beyond a specific period. This chapter considers works by Luis Buñuel, Éric Rohmer, Deepa Mehta, and M. F. Husain. It focuses particularly on Robert Rodriguez’s remediation of graphic fiction, in part to prepare the way for the treatment of graphic fiction later in the book.

A Woman of Paris: Geraldine Chaplin across French cinema

Charlie Chaplin was a major figure in postwar film criticism, particularly in France, where critical luminaries such as André Bazin, Éric Rohmer, François Truffaut, and Jacques Rivette all wrote on his work. Early in her career, Geraldine Chaplin inherited her father’s Parisian legacy, in both discourse on her public life in France (where she lived and worked early in her career) and also across a number of French films in which she played a central role. This chapter examines Geraldine’s work in France for filmmakers such as Jacques Rivette, Alain Resnais, and Michel Deville in the context of French film culture’s fascination with her father, showing how Geraldine herself intervened in and redirected this critical legacy through her own performances.

Orden, verdad, belleza: la poética del Mac-Mahon

A comienzos de los años sesenta, el grupo de cinéfilos del Mac-Mahon se acercó a Cahiers du cinéma: durante un corto período de tiempo fueron cobijados por Éric Rohmer y su influencia en la revista creció rápidamente. Los macmahonianos propugnaron una puesta en escena transparente, un culto de ciertos actores viriles, un elogio de la violencia y, en general, un tono de escritura categórico, intolerante, dogmático, fuertemente confrontativo. Sus posturas extremistas generaron malestar entre algunos de los redactores de Cahiers du cinéma y el grupo acabó mudándose a la revista Présence du cinéma que, desde entonces, se convirtió en la tribuna de la doctrina macmahoniana. Este artículo estudia las implicancias de esta poética absolutista a la que Daney calificó como un “bazinismo de derecha” y que intentó recuperar los postulados aristotélicos en un momento en que el cine moderno pretendía poner en práctica las ideas de Brecht.

How Motion Shapes Thought in Cinema

This article provides an embodied study of the film style of the French filmmaker Éric Rohmer. Drawing on insights from cognitive linguistics, I first show how dynamic patterns of containment shape human thinking about relationships, a concept central to Rohmer’s cinema. Second, I consider the question of how film might elicit this spatial thinking through the use of such cinematic devices as mobile framing and fixed-frame movement. Third, using Rohmer’s Comedies and Proverbs series as a case study, I demonstrate how the filmmaker applies these devices—and with them the spatial thinking they initiate—systemically to shape the relationships of his films visually. Lastly, I use the results of this analysis to provide discussion and suggestions for future research.