Abstract
Rohmer’s career from 1959 to the early 1970s had three facets: film criticism, fiction film, and short nonfiction films, incorporating documentaries made for Les Films du Losange1 and 28 for television. Until recently the latter were the least known part of his oeuvre. It has taken until 2012 for their importance to be marked by the release of a four-DVD set produced by the National Center for Pedagogical Documentation, the centerpiece of which is 12 films mostly made in 1964 and 1965 and treating primarily literary topics.2 I will be looking at one of them, Les Caractères de La Bruyère,3 from 1965. Virtually nothing has been written about this film, in part because it has been difficult to see until the CNDP release and in part because La Bruyère is a little-known author in the English-speaking world, though in France he is one of the greatest of the French classiques. 4 It stands as a small gem of pedagogic filmmaking, its original context, but no less as a prism through which we can assess Rohmer’s development and vision in the period immediately preceding his first successful feature, La Collectionneuse, filmed in 1966 and released in 1967, which in its style and production really inaugurates his remarkable career as a filmmaker, soon followed by the international success of Ma Nuit chez Maud in 1969.
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Notes
Eric Rohmer, Le Laboratoire d’Eric Rohmer, un cinéaste à la Télévision Scolaire (Chasseneuil-du-Poitou: CNDP, 2012), four DVDs and booklet written by Philippe Fauvet, including an essay, “Uhomme, les images et le cinéma.” The figure of 28 films is taken from this collection.
For an account, see Antoine de Baecque, Les Cahiers du cinéma: Histoire d’une revue, vol 2. (Paris: Cahiers de Cinéma, 1991), 76–86.
Georges Gaudu, “Eric Rohmer télépédagogue et cinéaste essayiste,” in Eric Rohmer, Un hommage du Centre Culturel Français de Turin (Turin: Fabbri, 1989), 65. This article, written by the head of the section, gives important details on Rohmer’s collaboration as well as insightful assessments of the films.
“I did some educational films on different subjects … and what I found very interesting was that I learned a great deal and I was free to do what I wanted. I was on my own. I wrote the scripts as well as filming them. It was a very interesting experience.” Graham Petrie, “Eric Rohmer: An Interview,” Film Quarterly 24–4 (1971): 39.
Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères, ed. Robert Garapon (Paris: Bordas, 1990)
Jean de La Bruyère, Characters, trans. Jean Stewart (Baltimore: Penguin, 1970).
For a compendious description of the French moraliste tradition, see Louis van Delft, Le moraliste classique (Geneva: Droz, 1982).
Jean Narboni, “Interview with Eric Rohmer: The Critical Years,” in Eric Rohrner, The Taste for Beauty, trans. Carol Volk, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), 9.
Quoted in Guy Bedouelle, “Eric Rohmer : The Cinema’s Spiritual Destiny,” Communio 6:2 (1979), 280.
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© 2014 Leah Anderst
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Cohen, M. (2014). Eric Rohmer’s Talking Heads: Listening to the Classical Text in La Bruyère . In: Anderst, L. (eds) The Films of Eric Rohmer. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011008_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011008_17
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