Eric Rohmer: A Biography

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The Mysteries of “le grand Momo”

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hat do we know about Éric Rohmer?

Certain films are highly esteemed by film aficionados: My Night at Maud’s, Claire’s Knee, The Marquise of O, Full Moon in Paris, A Tale of Summer, The Lady and the Duke . . . A broader audience knows that Rohmer liked to film very young women—the so-called Rohmériennes— sometimes presenting them as symbols of the period, simultaneously charming, revelatory, and annoying. He also introduced a few actors who went on to have successful careers: Fabrice Luchini, Pascal Greggory, and others. Abroad, Rohmer seemed to embody a very French way of filmmaking.

But is it known, for example, that taken all together his twenty-five fulllength films attracted more than eight million spectators in France, and several million more around the world? Éric Rohmer was not a pure product of SaintGermain-des-Prés chic who made a limited number of films that were snobbish in a very Parisian way. In his work, sophisticated plots and delicacy of feeling went hand in hand with a classical ideal: their expression of emotions, their narratives, and their direction made his films capable of moving a broad audience while at the same time recording and expressing a certain atmosphere of the time in a critical or ironic mode.

Do people also know that another man, Maurice Schérer, was hidden behind the pseudonym Éric Rohmer, which he adopted when he was more than thirty years old? That was the source of the nickname—“le grand Momo”— that some of his oldest friends were to continue to use until the end of his life. He liked secrecy. More than that, it was probably the true passion of his

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life: knowing how to conceal himself, creating doubts, remaining far from the spotlight. A pronounced penchant for playing with masks led him to invent doubles for himself; he took on alternate identities that allowed him to sow confusion regarding his private life, to protect his anonymity, and even sometimes to remain clandestine.

At the age of twenty-five, just after the war, he published a novel with Gallimard under the pseudonym Gilbert Cordier. Shortly after the war, he wrote articles on film and directed his first short films under another pseudonym, Éric Rohmer. A little later, in the mid-1960s, when Éric Rohmer was looking for work, he sent out a couple of CVs: in one of them, he was born in Nancy on April 4, 1920, while in another he was the son of “Louis Rohmer, professor,” who after “studying at the lycée of Nancy and at the faculty of letters in Lyon,” had pursued a career as a “professor of history and geography at a lycée.”1 Most of these statements are false. This predilection for manipulation allowed him to cover his tracks. Rohmer maintained ambiguity with undisguised pleasure, and for a long time it was hard to assemble reliable facts concerning his private life. In 1986, entrusting to Gilles Jacob and Claude de Givray a few letters he had written to François Truffaut, he admitted to Givray: “In the event that you would like to publish passages in which reference is made, not to my articles on films but to me personally [ . . . ] I would ask that you seek my approval. Because, you know, I guard my secrets jealously, even the old ones.”2 However, the secrecy he maintained did not conceal scandals, anti-conformist habits, or provocative commitments, and still less a complicated family romance or a closeted second emotional life. “My life has always been very ordinary. I have thoughts that everybody has,”3 he wrote in one of the countless school notebooks he filled until the day he died with ideas, quotations, impressions, and memories of his reading. This secrecy seemed to him necessary, even if he liked to play with his masks: he was determined to protect his mother by hiding from her—until her death in 1970, after twenty years of make-believe—the fact that her son, who she thought was a professor of classics in a lycée, was one of the most admired French filmmakers. “That would have killed her,”4 he assured a close friend.

Maurice Schérer, a former professor of French, led an orderly life as a good son, good husband, and good father, a life into which Éric Rohmer never penetrated, preferring a more Bohemian and less respectable one spent in the company of starlets and dandies, the dream life seen on movie screens. However, on closer inspection, Éric Rohmer’s life was not that of a brilliant seducer, either. When he

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was asked the secret that allowed him to associate with all these ravishing creatures, he replied slyly: “Absolute chastity.” If he liked listening to actresses, it was first of all in order to propose stories or scenarios to them and to subtly fit them into the geometry of his productions. Éric Rohmer’s critical writing is sometimes overlooked; he was one of the great critics and theoreticians of his time and the editor in chief of the Cahiers du cinéma. In 1955 he wrote a manifesto in five parts entitled “Celluloid and Marble,” in which he stressed the importance and the influence of cinema: “Today one art possesses all the strength of this classicism and the splendid health that the other arts have lost forever.” He thus legitimizes this major art and conceives the critic’s role as residing in a “taste for beauty.” Rohmer also enjoyed journalistic jousting and the polemics that surrounded films: he published a number of articles in Arts, the cultural weekly that was the Nouvelle Vague’s iconoclastic, contrarian, and influential organ. In them we find a Rohmer who is fond of Westerns, defends Hollywood, and loves his actresses. A Rohmer who reacts to the films of his time, taking an opposing view, seeking to convince and to surprise a broad readership. He has to be restored to his place in critical thinking about the seventh art, and it must be emphasized that he is a genuine écrivain de cinéma.

If he liked to remain in the background, that is because he distrusted his own impulses and feared all kinds of excess. There is nothing more opposed to his character than the public display of an extremist or radical position. That did not prevent him from believing in values and affirming principles. Moreover, he enjoyed the discussion of ideas, the arts, and politics. He never hesitated to say that he was a conservative, seeing in the past a source of inspiration for the present and even for the future, and he long claimed to have a sensibility that was as royalist as it was Catholic. He was nevertheless not dogmatic: curiosity about the other, tolerance, and even a love for civilized contradiction and controversy define his cast of mind. This man of tradition and conversation was particularly sensitive to the arguments of militant ecologists and adopted them more and more overtly. He did not regard this as in any way incoherent on his part.

In June 2010, five months after his death, Éric Rohmer’s family deposited his archives, as he had requested, at the IMEC (Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine). Of his ninety years of life, there remain almost one hundred and forty document boxes containing more than twenty thousand items. It is thanks to this impressive corpus that we have been able to retrace not only each

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of Maurice Schérer’s parallel lives—his simultaneous careers as a teacher, critic, movie-lover, writer, and filmmaker—but also his main apprenticeships, readings, references, correspondence, and revealing centers of interest.

At the heart of the artist’s multiple activities documented by the Rohmer collection lies his work as a writer and as a filmmaker. Beginning in the early 1940s, we find manuscripts of narratives, short stories, and brief scenarios that testify to an intense activity as a writer and reappear in large measure in his later film scripts. Many films in Rohmer’s great cycles (the Moral Tales and Comedies and Proverbs) drew on literary writings dating from fifteen, twenty, and sometimes thirty years before. The genealogy of Rohmer’s films is thereby illuminated and renewed in depth.

The construction of the full-length films is also documented by this collection, which provides us with an opportunity to reconstitute Rohmer’s work from beginning to end, from the conception, writing, filming, and direction of the actors to the reception of each of his works. As we follow this development, we will find that he undertook and filmed an initial full-length film as early as 1952, Les Petites Filles modèles, based on a story by the Countess of Ségur, which must henceforth be considered the very first Nouvelle Vague film.

In addition to making use of this treasure-house of documents, we also talked with members of the broad circle of friends or collaborators, technicians, artists, or intellectuals who worked with Éric Rohmer. More than a hundred people were consulted in the course of interviews carried out specially for our biographical investigation. These contributions, complementing those of the archives and our readings, testify to the extraordinary eclecticism of Rohmer’s career, which includes stories, novels, plays, and literary criticism, as well as essays on cinema, literature, and music. Rohmer was not only a great film director but also a photographer, an illustrator, a designer of costumes and stage settings, and a composer of songs and music for his films. Thus we shall see the emergence of the portrait of a genuine one-man band who, though concerned about his complete independence, took his inspiration from the encounters elicited by his films and by the literary, pictorial, musical, and theatrical works that never ceased to feed his cinematographic projects.

In other words, we will discover Éric Rohmer as a secret man, as a complex personality, and as a well-rounded artist.