Éric Rohmer set the terms by which people watched, made, and thought about cinema for decades. This definitive biography vividly captures Rohmer's life and achievements. Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe detail Rohmer's close communication with his contemporaries and competitors as well as his voracious appetite for art, culture, and debate.
The director of twenty-five films, including My Night at Maud's (1969), which was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, and the editor in chief of Cahiers du cinéma from 1957 to 1963, Éric Rohmer set the terms by which people watched, made, and thought about cinema for decades. Such brilliance does not develop in a vacuum, and Rohmer cultivated a fascinating network of friends, colleagues, and industry contacts that kept his outlook sharp and propelled his work forward. Despite his privacy, he cared deeply about politics, religion, culture, and fostering a public appreciation of the medium he loved.
This exhaustive biography uses personal archives and interviews to enrich our knowledge of Rohmer's public achievements and lesser known interests and relations. The filmmaker kept in close communication with his contemporaries and competitors: François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette. He held a paradoxical fascination with royalist politics, the fate of the environment, Catholicism, classical music, and the French nightclub scene, and his films were regularly featured at New York and Los Angeles film festivals. Despite an austere approach to life, Rohmer had a voracious appetite for art, culture, and intellectual debate captured vividly in this definitive volume.
De Baecque and Herpe open the door to Rohmer's world by treating the reader as an interlocutor to whom they are excitedly relaying delightful nuggets from the life of "le grand Momo": that time he and an actress ate cookies and listened to Tahitian music in pious silence (p. 343); the other time when the American comedian Chris Rock remade his film Chloe in the Afternoon (p. 257). In other words, reading Éric Rohmer: A Biography feels like having a long conversation--a nourishing and satisfying one.
