Éric Rohmer: A Biography III

I am finding that, although the French New Wave was a movement, it was not coherent compared to, say, Impressionism. The Impressionists exhibited together during the Belle Époque, and their paintings are now exhibited in museums all over the world, whereas the French New Wave occurred briefly during a less-affluent period. It was built from an existing medium and merely added slightly different styles, whereas Impressionism represented a permanent replacement of formalism in painting and a transition to modernism. Moreover, film is a more transient form of art than painting and doesn't lend itself to exhibitions in museums or purchases by art aficionados. Since the early 20th century, film has been an industry, and "art films" such as those made by Éric Rohmer constitute only a tiny segment.

As I read, I am slowly forming a more complete picture of Rohmer. In 1974 he said in an interview:

I have in reality three activities: (1) the cinema; (2) teaching cinema, which is a kind of theoretical reflection; (3) a more open pedagogy, teaching through cinema. I did that for educational television, and now I am doing it on the service of research. I am very happy with this triple vocation, because I don't want to confine myself in a personal universe that is pure fiction. I seek to retain, in every possible way, contact with the world.

This doesn't explain his choices of subject matter, which I think can be understood with a look at the available biographical information. There is evidence that he would have preferred a university position and felt that, to some extent, he was a failure for not obtaining one. That is what his mother would have preferred, and he let her believe that he was still a schoolteacher right up to her death in 1970. He also gave his sons no encouragement to enter the film industry. On some level, he always seemed to think of it as a disreputable field.  

As the authors of this book suggest, Rohmer's second full-length film (1969), My Night at Maud's, was in fact highly autobiographical. He was a conservative Catholic who wanted a Catholic wife. In the film, this is slightly intellectualized by a discussion between the characters regarding Pascal's Wager, but it is one example of his hidebound religious and social views. In his first full-length film (1967), La Collectionneuse, the protagonist, Adrien, engages in a lot of self-deception regarding the sexually promiscuous Haydée until he finally gives up on her at the end. In his fourth full-length film (1972), Love in the Afternoon, Frédéric avoids pressure to begin an affair with Chloé and decides to remain faithful to his wife. In his third full-length film (1970), Claire's Knee, Jérôme gets to know the young Laura but isn't attracted to her. When he meets Claire, also quite young, he is attracted to her. Since he is about to leave and get married, he elects to sublimate his attraction by focusing only on her knee to resolve the tension. It is probably fair to say that there is a little of Rohmer in each of these four male characters.

As far as Rohmer's film career is concerned, his popularity gradually increased among critics after Claire's Knee and My Night at Maud's. In 1976 he shared the Jury's Special Prize in Cannes for The Marquise of O, awarded by Tennessee Williams, but was not present that day. Taxi Driver won the Palme d'Or. In 1986, he won the Golden Lion in Venice for The Green Ray. Even so, he never had high box office sales by industry standards.

One topic that isn't mentioned at all in this book is Rohmer's influence on Woody Allen. Allen was an early admirer of Rohmer and to some extent copied his style. He liked the emphasis on conversation and the interactions between men and women. However, it isn't necessarily easy to see Rohmerian characters in short, talkative, neurotic Jewish New York men and their Waspy girlfriends. 

I should finish this book within a couple of weeks and will make some additional comments on the Rohmer films that I've seen and what I like and dislike about them.

Theme Song of the Day

John Prine (from Bruised Orange)

Éric Rohmer: A Biography II

At the time of his marriage, Rohmer was editor-in-chief of Cahiers du cinéma, one of the leading film magazines in Paris, and this provided most of his income. His own experimentation with filming was done on the side with what became his production company, Les Films du Losange, co-founded with Barbet Schroeder in 1962. His preferred cinematographer became Nestor Almendros. Everything changed in 1963 when, due to financial losses at Cahiers du cinéma he was fired and replaced by Jacques Rivette. He does not seem to have been prepared for that and briefly considered returning to school teaching. However, by then he had two sons, and his wife didn't work, and he preferred to keep the family in Paris. As far as I've read, in November, 1963, he began to make short episodes for educational television. 

If you have been reading this blog much, you may have noticed that I make an effort to keep the dates straight in order to get a good picture of the sequence of events. In some biographies that information may be listed at the end of the book and makes this a little easier. However, when you are looking at a "movement" – particularly in the arts – the sequence of events can be quite murky, and this book does little to remedy that. Rohmer produced short films in 1962 and 1963, but his full-length films didn't begin to release until 1967. In the context of the French New Wave, Louis Malle and Claude Chabrol had released full-length films in 1958, François Truffaut and Alain Resnais in 1959 and Jean-Luc Godard in 1960. So, technically, Rohmer's films fall at the tail end of the French New Wave. He was primarily a journalist during the first few years. This isn't necessarily crucial knowledge, but in order to understand how the aesthetic aspects of a movement evolve, it would be useful to at least have detailed descriptions of the motifs and styles of the directors over time and the extent to which they influenced each other. I am not finding this book very helpful in that respect.

Ironically, I first learned of the importance of dates while studying Impressionism in Paris in 1995. The instructor, Jean Lancri, University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, always states the birth and death years whenever he mentioned an artist. This may be a little tedious, but it is a good way to avoid mistakes, such as considering people to be contemporaries when that was not possible.

Other than this criticism, the book is quite readable, and I am hoping that greater detail will be provided when I get to Rohmer's major films.

Éric Rohmer: A Biography I

This book, by Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe, is my current reading project. I like most of the Rohmer films that I've seen and wanted to understand him better. What I've found is that all human activities, including the arts, exist in ecosystems. It isn't always easy to recognize this, particularly when you live in a dominant ecosystem whose participants presume that it is the best of its type in the world. When it comes to the arts, Americans tend to think, or are trained to think, that box office sales, value at auction, copies sold, crowd size, number of followers, etc., are indications of success. However, that is just a current sociological phenomenon here and is unlikely to hold up over time. What I find is that various motifs and styles surface and disappear all over the world all of the time, and to understand them properly requires a lot of work. In the arts as in the biological world, the ecosystems are ultimately what determine the success of individuals. Often, when evaluating a work of art, it is best to start with the ecosystem. I think of classical music as an example. First there was Bach in Germany, then a musical cult developed in Vienna and was led successively by Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. I think that if Vienna hadn't developed as it did as a musical center, you may never have heard of Beethoven. In the case of Éric Rohmer, I find that his particular ecosystem is not entirely familiar to me, as I have not paid much attention to the French New Wave. However, it does appear to be a distinct artistic and cultural movement, and I will attempt to discuss Rohmer in that context.

Éric Rohmer was born Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer in Tulle, in south central France, on March 21, 1920. His grandfather had moved to Tulle from Alsace-Lorraine, where he had worked as a gunsmith, following its annexation by Germany in 1870.  He married a Tulle woman, and they had one son, who was Rohmer's father. His father worked as a notary's clerk, and the family belonged to the middle class and were conservative Catholics. Rohmer had a brother, René, who was two years younger. They were close, and René grew up to be gay. They were both good students and enjoyed the arts. Rohmer had little exposure to film but staged theatrical productions at home while he was growing up. He studied in Paris for entry to the École normale supérieure in Paris and passed the written exam but failed the oral exam in 1939. He tried again in 1940 but failed. At that point he was drafted into the French army for physical work. He was discharged from military duty on January 31, 1941 and wasn't sure what to do next. He eventually decided to move to Paris, where his brother, René, was studying for the École normale supérieure. When the Germans retreated from France in 1944, there were severe reprisals against Nazi collaborators, and this seems to have traumatized Rohmer. Simone de Beauvoir describes this period in The Mandarins. She was twelve years older than Rohmer, but they had similar postwar experiences.

Rohmer never succeeded at gaining entry to the École normale supérieure. Instead, he earned a license-ès-lettres and was only qualified to teach Latin and Greek in a secondary school. René, on the other hand, entered the École normale supérieure at the age of twenty-one, which led to a brilliant career in philosophical research. René entered the same "mandarin" class as Sartre and de Beauvoir, but was not a close friend of them. This all had a psychological effect on Rohmer but didn't damage his relationship with René. However, within the Schérer family, René was considered the brains. In the greater scheme of things, it's probably just as well, because Rohmer's career was more interesting. One of the factors that interfered with his academic success was probably his shyness, because in those days aggressive students like Sartre and de Beauvoir were the model. I'm probably a little prejudiced on this because I've never had any desire to study French philosophy. In any case, René went on to have a successful career, despite once being charged with "inciting minors to debauchery." For that matter, Sartre and de Beauvoir were always a little depraved.

The relevant details in this book are a little slim, but Rohmer did work as a teacher for a few years and had a job near Paris. In the early 1950's, the film craze that led to the French New Wave gained momentum. All of a sudden there were countless film clubs and film journals. Rohmer wrote articles and was exposed to the new directors, such as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol. I'm not sure exactly why Rohmer chose to use a pseudonym, but it may be that he didn't want to upset his mother, who was extremely conservative and had a low opinion of films. The actual films didn't appear until the late 1950's. Most of them were markedly low-budget. Rohmer seems to have been completely inept when attempting to make his first film, and I enjoyed this anecdote from Claude Chabrol:

Intending to make a film of Les Petites Fille modèles, he thought it would be a good idea to seek his actress in the parc Monceau. Imagine the scene: this tall, skinny, dark-haired silhouette wearing a cape, slithering silently down the garden paths with a package of candy in his hand. When he liked a little girl, he beckoned to her, saying: "Come here, little girl, I'm going to tell you a lovely story." After using this ploy for three or four hours, naturally he got himself arrested by the park guard. In his absolute innocence and entirely cinematic passion, he didn't understand why the cops hauled him off to the police station.

Some of the inspiration for the French New Wave came from Alfred Hitchcock. Rohmer enjoyed It Happened One Night, by Frank Capra. There was also an interest in Paris of American authors such as William Faulkner and John Dos Passos. Rohmer enjoyed the works of Balzac.

Rohmer's shyness may have impeded his romantic life. This was resolved as follows:

One Saturday evening in December 1956, at a dance at École des Mines, this very shy man had the nerve to approach a young brunette who was herself very reserved, and whom he had "spotted" (one might think we are already in My Night at Maud's). In doing so, Rohmer, who had never been very bold with girls, suddenly made good on a wager he had made with his friend Jean Parvulesco: "This evening," he had told him, "I will meet my wife." Her first name was Thérèse. She came from a good family in the north, having been born in Cambrai. She had been carefully brought up, was a practicing Catholic, and was twenty-seven years old. They began seeing each other. On July 13, 1957, Maurice Schérer married Thérèse Barbet at the church in Paramé, near Saint-Malo, where the young woman's family owned a vacation home. Rohmer, established in his profession, married, and aged thirty-seven, looked for an apartment for himself and his wife: his bachelor life was definitely over and he left, after fifteen years of Bohemian renting, his furnished room in the little Hôtel de Lutèce on rue Victor-Cousin.

A Cautionary Note on Democracy

As I've been saying, I think that The Contrarian has been doing an excellent job reporting on the abuses of the Trump administration, and I appreciate their initiation of legal actions against it. However, because my primary view of anything that has to do with human behavior has been affected by my knowledge of evolutionary biology, I occasionally have to question their faith in democracy, while I recognize that they are lawyers and that this is their particular area of expertise. The question that comes up for me is: how important is democracy in the greater scheme of things?

In my understanding of world history, democracy has not been all that important. Some of my ideas were affected when I read Upheaval, by Jared Diamond. While Diamond is certainly not omniscient, I think that he made a strong case that the general success of the U.S. was largely the result of geography. The advantages included more high-quality soil than anywhere else due to glaciation, physical isolation from other world powers, a highly navigable river system, and a huge influx of people who wanted to make money. In fact, the American Revolution was primarily about financial independence, and George Washington was sworn in as president at the intersection of Broad Street and Wall Street in New York City in 1789: Wall Street was literally the capital of the country then. I think that, to some extent, the success of the country has more to do with free enterprise than anything else. Broadly speaking, the country became extremely wealthy by removing economic constraints for most of its history; additionally, no monarchs or religious leaders had influence over the political system. These factors alone probably had more significance than democracy per se. It seems to me that the primary structure of American society has always been capitalistic, and equality and democracy were almost afterthoughts that arose when wealth imbalances and racism became conspicuous during the nineteenth century. As late as 1857, the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court stated that slaves were not citizens and therefore had no federal or legal protections.

Comparatively, there has been far less unity of purpose and stability in Europe than the U.S. since the seventeenth century. Wars between the U.K., Germany and France have been common, and now Russia is acting up. Furthermore, unlike today, the Roman Catholic Church was often politically engaged and interfered with governments. These were rarely American problems. Additionally, it is more difficult to control immigration in Europe than it is in the U.S., and, whereas the U.S. often benefits from immigrants who take unwanted jobs, in Europe, the waves of immigrants may actually contribute to political instability. 

The obvious problem with democracy for me, which I've brought up repeatedly, is that people don't necessarily vote rationally. No matter how many articles you write, rallies you hold, petitions you sign, etc., there are still going to be lots of irrational voters out there. I think that in many cases, to convince irrational voters to vote rationally in their own best interest, you may have to rely on different arguments that are also irrational. 

To put this in the context of how I make voting decisions, let me describe my actual process of thinking about Donald Trump as a politician. By 2015, I already knew that he was pretty stupid and had an enormous ego. I didn't like Hillary Clinton much in 2016, but, with Trump running, voting for her was a no-brainer. I tried to give Trump the benefit of the doubt when he won, but it immediately became apparent that he was completely incompetent, and, rather than learning from his mistakes, he tended to double down on them. Over the years it has become increasingly apparent that he only has one model – the same one that he has been using for decades. This is not a complete list, but covers what I think are the basic ideas:

1. Recruit only people who have a major handicap and are willing to declare full allegiance to you.

2. Groom your hires for corrupt activities.

3. If hires don't deliver, fire them.

4. When negotiating, always exaggerate whatever assets you have.

5. Favor negotiation with those who are unable to match your legal resources in the event of a conflict.

6. If you enter a political position, keep opponents under constant attack.

7. Leverage your political position to extract the maximum possible financial benefits for yourself.

8. Never waste time thinking about benefiting your constituency and delegate those tasks to subordinates.

9. Arrange situations in a manner such that your subordinates will be blamed for failures rather than you.

I think that Trump has always been highly predictable, but that the evidence wasn't quite as clear during his first term. That was largely because he resorted to experienced people in that term and found that they were not only an encumbrance but a threat to him. That is why he has assembled an outlaw gang for his second term. The sheer volume of lies being generated by his administration now is astounding in historical terms.

From the above, you can see that I don't think legalistically. I prefer to analyze the personalities of politicians in order to predict their behavior. Since Trump's behavior indicates that he usually only attempts to benefit himself, that is sufficient to reject him as a candidate or an incumbent. For this reason I have suggested several times that a solution to the current plague of corrupt and incompetent politicians might be something as simple as vote-assisting software. That would be easier than engaging in years of lawsuits, impeaching Supreme Court justices, amending the Constitution, etc. In this vein, since Trump is such an incompetent president – he may be costing taxpayers trillions of dollars – why not just replace him with an app? A few Nvidia chips could probably do the job!

Diary

This is peak cabin fever season for me at the moment. It has been cold and snowy, and the main disadvantage to me is that I don't get enough exercise. I manage to stay entertained by reading or by watching films. I still make an effort not to follow Trump closely, because he is predictable and boring. Fortunately, he is so stupid and self-centered that he is accelerating his own political demise, and, rather than obsessing about him, I am content to watch his death spiral from a distance. Conventional news media are still doing shoddy reporting, but I find The Contrarian quite reliable, and there is now a massive movement to get rid of Trump or at least to reduce his influence, and I think it is already succeeding. The problem is that this all occurs in slow motion. Although I find it very hard to get excited about politics, it could be an interesting year.

The films I've watched recently have been Chinatown, The Wizard of Oz, Claire's Knee, My Night at Maud's, Love in the Afternoon and A Summer's Tale. Chinatown, I think is one of the best noir films, with great acting – and a fantastic musical score. I saw The Wizard of Oz in a theater with family members. From a historical standpoint, I think that The Wizard of Oz may be the most important American film ever made, because it effectively captures the American mindset at the end of the Great Depression; the basic pattern of innocent, simple people trying to survive in a world full of hucksters still exists here. And I just love Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West. Also, the production quality for the time (1939) is amazing.

The reason why I'm re-watching the Éric Rohmer films is that I plan to read a biography of him soon. He is not exactly a household name here, but he is one of my favorite directors. Technically, he was part of the French New Wave, but stylistically he had little in common with the others. I think that most viewers find him boring, because there is a lot of dialogue and not much action. His films shot outdoors in color are generally easier to watch. What I like is seeing male-female interactions in which there are complex undertones to the dialogue. That is something that I have rarely experienced not just in films, but in my own interactions with females. Rohmer represents an earlier period, as he was born in 1920, and, though some of his films are autobiographical, social interactions between men and women may also have deteriorated in France by now. But France has a long history that included many sophisticated women, and the same can't be said of the U.S. Although there was and still is sexism in both countries, French history includes many talented women, such as Madame de Staël – with no equivalents here. More generally, France and other European countries have long had intellectual classes that function independently from universities. Although Tony Judt thought that French intellectuals declined in quality after World War II, he lamented the fact that there was no intellectual class in the U.S. Rather, we merely have PhDs who teach at colleges and universities. Czeslaw Milosz felt the same and didn't identify with his "colleagues" at Berkeley. The reasons for this are complex, but derive mainly from the fact that this is primarily a money-driven country that awards little status to any activity that doesn't somehow produce income. As my father-in-law, the rich lawyer, used to say, he didn't want to waste time meditating on pinecones. This attitude permeates American society and severely reduces the number of interesting conversations that one is likely to have in one's lifetime, and, as I've said, in recent years the internet and political correctness have only made things worse. Even Ralph Waldo Emerson would probably find the U.S. boring now; life was so boring in Boston in 1832 that he had to sail to Europe to find someone interesting to talk to.

Emerson: The Mind on Fire VI

In 1855, Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass and sent a copy to Emerson. Emerson read it immediately and liked it. He wrote back to Whitman approvingly. Without permission, Whitman had the letter printed in the New York Tribune.  Thereafter, Whitman became the poetic model for Emerson, and Whitman built his reputation on that. If I were Emerson, I would have disliked Whitman's shameless opportunism, but Emerson was also opportunistic, and in Whitman he had found a poet who seemed to fit his literary ideals. Since this is my last post on the biography, I'll say that I don't find Emerson, Thoreau or Whitman to be particularly good poets. By this time, Emerson was having a hard time living up to his "great man" ideal.

During Emerson's later life, there were growing abolitionism and women's rights movements, and he participated in them. To his credit, he publicly opposed materialism. In a commencement address at Williams College in 1854, he said "It is the vulgarity of this country—it came to us with commerce, out of England—to believe that naked wealth, unrelieved by any use or design, is merit." When Darwin's Origin of Species became available in 1860, he read it with interest. In Richardson's description, it doesn't sound as if Emerson or Thoreau had a good understanding of speciation, though they were sympathetic toward the general concept of evolution. Thoreau died from tuberculosis in 1862.

By the 1870's, Emerson was quite famous and was still accepting engagements. In 1871 he took a trip out west, during which he met Brigham Young in Salt Lake City and John Muir at Yosemite. In 1872 there was a fire at his house, but the damage was repaired. Following the fire, he took a trip to England, France, Italy and Egypt with his daughter, Ellen. They returned in May, 1873. His memory gradually deteriorated, with Alzheimer's symptoms, and he died from pneumonia on April 27, 1882, at the age of 78. Lidian lived to the age of 90, dying in 1892.

At this stage, I have a fairly mixed view of Emerson. On the positive side, there are his humanistic qualities: he valued equality and disliked material excess. He emphasized the importance of natural environments, but so did many others at the time. For me, his most important impact was on Emily Dickinson. Many of her poems directly embody some of Emerson's ideas. Though they never met, she read his works and attended one of his lectures. I think that what distinguishes Dickinson from the proclaimed transcendentalists is that she had exactly the right feelings and exactly the right words. To me, she is a far more skilled writer than Emerson. In Emerson's case, you can imagine him saying to himself "By God, I'm having a spiritual experience!" I don't agree with his endorsement of Whitman.

I think that there is more to criticize about Emerson in his postures as an intellectual. He was sort of a Romantic social climber, but his timing was all off. When he first arrived in England in 1833, Keats, Shelley, Byron and Goethe were already dead, and Coleridge and Wordsworth were old. The best ally he could come up with was Thomas Carlyle, who was not a particularly good fit for him. More significant, I think, was his compulsively wide reading in conjunction with his dilettantish summation of it. Also, I think that he set the bar for himself quite low by relying primarily on public lectures, often to uneducated audiences. Though I do make allowance for the fact that the fields of psychology, anthropology, sociology and archaeology barely existed in those days, he liked to quote people who lived all over the world in different cultures over thousands of years as if he just ran into them in Concord. I doubt that he fully understood the cultural contexts of what he read. This would have made it difficult for him to apply those models to nineteenth century Massachusetts. My greatest irritation with Emerson has to do with his adoption of the "great man" theory, which he probably applied to himself. To be sure, that has long been a theory among men and is still present in global and national politics. However, the idea had been suspect for quite some time, such as when Beethoven changed the name of his Third Symphony from Bonaparte to Sinfonia Eroica (Heroic Symphony) in 1804.

Summing up, I would say that Emerson was a nice guy who had an interesting life. It would have been fun to visit Emerson and Thoreau in Concord. But I think that an appropriate way to memorialize him would be with an excellent portrait – by Norman Rockwell.