ESSAYS

Romantic and intellectual games by Éric Rohmer

On the occasion of the retrospective in Film Programmes

Written on the occasion of the film cycle selected for Film Programmes, the essay tackles four films by French New Wave director Eric Rohmer – two from his early Moral Tales cycle (or Six Moral Tales; Contes moraux), Ma nuit chez Maud (1969) and La genou de Claire (1970), and two from the Comedies and Proverbs series (Comédies et proverbes), Les nuits de la pleine lune (1984) and Pauline à la plage (1983) – with a thesis that, by way of a non-filmic approach of a sort, Rohmer builds an extreme film suspense combining ethic, emotional and philosophical issues, in line with Pascal, Kierkegaard and French literary tradition (Marmontel, Alfred de Musset, De Troyes etc.).

Marijan Krivak