The Period Films: Tragedies and Miracles

Abstract

The vast majority of Rohmer’s films take place in the everyday present. They happen ‘now’. Of course, there are practical reasons for this. Using amateur actors, letting them wear their own clothes (or carefully made selections from their own wardrobes) and filming in the street is a remarkably cheap way of working. For example, Rohmer estimated that The Green Ray cost less than £100,000 to produce (Lennon 1992). Fortuitously — or not — the economic implications of this method were entirely compatible with the New Wave concern to work outside of the studio system, and according to the principle of the director as auteur rather than mass producer for a consumer industry. Indeed, Rohmer has implied that it is precisely the liberation of film-makers from the studio system that is the core of the appeal of French cinema. He has said that in France ‘Everyone works in his own way. That’s what makes French cinema interesting. There is no common line. There are very distinct individualities’ (Rohmer in Hammond and Pagliano 1982: 224). In a conversation about The Aviator’s Wife, Rohmer turned cheapness of production into a definite virtue. He made a deliberate good out of the possibility of making movies without a large amount of money: ‘That’s important given the situation of the industry at this time. It is good to know how to make films with little money.