Legendary French New Wave filmmaker, Eric Rohmer, has died aged 89, his production company has announced. He was one of the key figures in the postwar film movement, not just as a director, but as the editor of Cahiers Du Cinema, where many of the New Wave theories and ideas about auteurism were first espoused.
It was while in that role that he helped his younger colleagues, such as Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, get established.
Rohemer was born on April 4, 1920 as Maurice Scherer, taking his professional name from director Erich Von Stroheim and author Sa Rohmen, who wrote the Fu Manchu series.
While he first started making movies in 1959, he began gaining attention in the early 60s with his Six Moral Tales series (each of which told the same basic stories but with different characters and situations), with the third of the films, 1969’s My Night At Maud’s, securing him as international reputation as a major arthouse filmmaker.
While his movies never became big successes at the box office, they were incredibly well regarded by the arthouse community (particularly his Tales of Four Seasons quartet, which he directed during the 1990s), making him a hugely influential figure in modern film.
His movies are known for being largely devoid of action, with young, middle-class characters engaging in long, wandering conversations, often about men and women. With a background as a professor of literature, Rohmer’s films tend to be heavily influenced by books and philosophical ideas (his brother is a professional philosopher), even if much of the dialogue intially seems mundane.
Rohmer made 24 films, with his last one being 2007’s Romance of Astrea and Celadon. Although at that time he said he was thinking of retiring, he never officially stepped away from making movies.
Eric Rohmer (born Maurice Scherer): April 4th, 1920-January 11th, 2010 – RIP