Eric Rohmer and the Legacy of Cinematic Realism

Abstract

Film theory can generally be divided into two broad types: theories devised by filmmakers, which came directly out of their practice, and theories devised by critics, which come out of their patterns of film viewing. The filmmaker-theorists tend to privilege and champion specific types of filmmaking, whether techniques—Eisenstein’s montage or Epstein’s photogenie—or attitudes towards visual representation—Brakhage’s metaphors of vision or Vertov’s communist decoding of reality. Theory by critics, on the other hand, tends to be more synoptic and to argue less for a specific form of filmmaking than to engage in a dialogue with film’s relation to broader cultural constructions, such as film’s relation to realism in Bazin, to consciousness in Munsterberg, or to language for the early Metz. The writings of Eric Rohmer claim a nearly unique place in this typology Although his writings began before he had produced his most well-known feature films, he has emphasized that he was making films in 16mm even before he was writing and that filmmaking informs his theory from the beginning. However, his writing is not primarily a manifesto for a particular type of filmmaking and certainly not a plea for a specific technique. Rather, his writing can be primarily approached as a dialogue with—and in some ways a continuation of—the theoretical work of André Bazin, focused mainly on Bazin’s major theme of cinema’s mission as a realistic art form.