26 - Tale of Winter: Philosophical Thought in the Films of Eric Rohmer

Summary

In his long career as a filmmaker, Eric Rohmer has made over thirty films that consistently evidence an interest in philosophy, as exemplified by his 1991 masterpiece Tale of Winter. My modest goal in this essay is to collect a few thoughts about Tale of Winter, all of them exploratory, that relate directly or indirectly to the topic “Philosophical Thought in the Films of Eric Rohmer.”

There was a time when I confessed my taste for Rohmer films only with embarrassment. This was not only because so many of my friends found them boring. (Dwight McDonald once said that viewing a film by Antonioni was like watching paint dry. Some would say this of a Rohmer film, too.) There was also a sense that Rohmer films were ideologically suspect. Rohmer's characters talk a lot, and much of what they say irritated people, or, at least, my friends. Even critics who have cared enough to write about Rohmer's films have found themselves adopting a patronizing tone. And yet it now seems to me a fair wager that history will judge Rohmer, along with Jean-Luc Godard, to be the greatest of the “New Wave” directors.

Before he began making films, Rohmer, a founding editor of Cahiers du cinéma, was a formidable film critic and theorist, very close in his views to those of Andrè Bazin. Rohmer's writings, like Bazin's, continually return to the fact or intuition that film's basis in photography makes it a medium in which reality plays a special role.