Two women fall prey to surreptitiously placed bear traps, their screams echoing — to no avail — through the rural Quebec woods. A six-year-old tyke in a beetle costume rants hysterically about the plight of France until his clownish father tranquilizes him. A dead dog is hung from a riverside tree, and a village's worth of goats are slashed or shot to death.
Such ominous (and ominously funny) moments percolate throughout the Museum of the Moving Image's third annual First Look festival, which features 13 international features and three shorts (including the late Eric Rohmer's The Bakery Girl of Monceau). Most of the films are receiving their U.S. premiere; most brim with extravagantly bleak imagery, offering up equal doses of desperation and strife &md...
Such ominous (and ominously funny) moments percolate throughout the Museum of the Moving Image's third annual First Look festival, which features 13 international features and three shorts (including the late Eric Rohmer's The Bakery Girl of Monceau). Most of the films are receiving their U.S. premiere; most brim with extravagantly bleak imagery, offering up equal doses of desperation and strife &md...
- 1/8/2014
- Village Voice
Here are some highlights from the Eric Rohmer Retrospective at Lincoln Center which is moving into its finally days. * * * * * The Bakery Girl of Monceau & Suzanne’s Career make of a pair of films that are simply heartbreaking. Circa 1963, Rohmer displays why women don’t trust men as best as has been done on film. Not to be dismissed because they are short films, along with the other Moral Tales, these are some of his best works. They’re great examples of how Rohmer captured on celluloid an entire generation of “flaneurs,” made famous by the previous generation’s writing of Verlaine, Rimbaud and company, but rarely represented in film as it’s a quite literary concept. Rohmer is literary though, and these works, especially considering their use of voiceover, are as literary as he and film gets. These are the best examples of his work to show how he is...
- 8/31/2010
- IONCINEMA.com
The oldest member of 1960s France’s Nouvelle Vague, the late Eric Rohmer receives the retrospective treatment starting today, through September 3rd, at New York’s Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center with “The Sign of Rohmer.” Rohmer had a style all his own that was not really picked up on until many years later, and indirectly at that, arguably in the 1990s and now quite prevalently in today’s indie cinema. He started with an idea, and then created a film as an essay about that idea. This is the essence of film as art. Pictures like "The Kids Are All Right" and "Cyrus," likely unconsciously, are more mainstream and significantly less-intellectualized versions of Rohmer constructs. They each start with an idea, or conflict, and then we watch characters discuss that idea—with plot only functioning as a means to bring us different sides of the arguments. Highlights are...
- 8/18/2010
- IONCINEMA.com
To celebrate its 20th Anniversary, it appears as though the Tiff Cinematheque is set to pull out all the stops.
According to Criterion, the Tiff, formerly known as the Cinematheque Ontario, will be bringing out a rather superb and cartoonishly awesome summer schedule, that will include films ranging from Kurosawa pieces, to films from Pier Paolo Pasolini. Other films include a month long series dedicated to James Mason, Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, a tribute to Robin Wood, and most interesting, a retrospective on the works of one Catherine Breillat.
Personally, while the Kurosawa, Pasolini, and Rohmer collections sound amazing, the Breillat series is ultimately the collective that I am most interested in. Ranging from films like the brilliant Fat Girl, to the superb and underrated Anatomy of Hell, these are some of the most interesting and under seen pieces of cinema of recent memory, and are more than...
According to Criterion, the Tiff, formerly known as the Cinematheque Ontario, will be bringing out a rather superb and cartoonishly awesome summer schedule, that will include films ranging from Kurosawa pieces, to films from Pier Paolo Pasolini. Other films include a month long series dedicated to James Mason, Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, a tribute to Robin Wood, and most interesting, a retrospective on the works of one Catherine Breillat.
Personally, while the Kurosawa, Pasolini, and Rohmer collections sound amazing, the Breillat series is ultimately the collective that I am most interested in. Ranging from films like the brilliant Fat Girl, to the superb and underrated Anatomy of Hell, these are some of the most interesting and under seen pieces of cinema of recent memory, and are more than...
- 5/26/2010
- by Joshua Brunsting
- CriterionCast
The two disc set from Artificial Eye called "The Early Works of Eric Rohmer" features two of his Six Moral Tales, the shorts La boulangère de Monceau and La carriere de Suzanne. (In addition it contains Rohmer’s shorts Nadia á Paris and Charlotte et son steak, and his documentary on the Lumière brothers.) The Moral Tales, and much of the other miscellany, are handled quite well in the renowned domestic Criterion box set, so the picture I’d like to concentrate on from this set is Rohmer’s first feature (and his last for almost a decade) Le signe du lion, or The Sign of Leo. Rohmer’s known for his Four Seasons, his Comedies and Proverbs, and of course his Moral Tales. Le signe du lion, its title notwithstanding, would appear to be Rohmer’s sole Shaggy Dog Tale.
- 2/2/2010
- MUBI
Idiosyncratic French film-maker who was a leading figure in the cinema of the postwar new wave
In Arthur Penn's intelligently unconventional private eye thriller Night Moves (1975), Gene Hackman's hero – who finds the mystery he faces as unfathomable as his personal relationships – is asked by his wife whether he wants to go to an Eric Rohmer movie. "I don't think so," he says. "I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry."
Behind that exchange lies a jab at Hollywood's mistrust of any film-maker, especially a French one, who neglects plot and action in favour of cerebral exploration, metaphysical conceit and moral nuance. The Dream Factory, after all, had proved through trial and error that cinema is cinema, literature is literature, and the twain shall meet only provided the images rule, not the words.
Of the major American film-makers, perhaps only Joseph Mankiewicz allowed his scripts,...
In Arthur Penn's intelligently unconventional private eye thriller Night Moves (1975), Gene Hackman's hero – who finds the mystery he faces as unfathomable as his personal relationships – is asked by his wife whether he wants to go to an Eric Rohmer movie. "I don't think so," he says. "I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry."
Behind that exchange lies a jab at Hollywood's mistrust of any film-maker, especially a French one, who neglects plot and action in favour of cerebral exploration, metaphysical conceit and moral nuance. The Dream Factory, after all, had proved through trial and error that cinema is cinema, literature is literature, and the twain shall meet only provided the images rule, not the words.
Of the major American film-makers, perhaps only Joseph Mankiewicz allowed his scripts,...
- 1/13/2010
- by Ronald Bergan
- The Guardian - Film News
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