25 - The Taste for Beauty: Eric Rohmer's Writings on Film

Summary

My films, you say, are literary: the things I say could be said in a novel. Yes, but what do I say? My characters' discourse is not necessarily my film's discourse. What I ‘say,’ I do not say with words. I do not say it with images either, all due respect to the partisans of pure cinema, which would ‘speak’ with images like a deaf-mute with his hands. After all, I do not say, I show. I show people who move and speak. That is all I know how to do; but that is my true subject.

Eric Rohmer

In recent years, the advent of what is called “theory” in academic film study has led the field to turn away from the study of authorship in film, both from critical studies of individual authorships and from reflection on the implications of the fact of authorship in film, on the conditions that make authorship in this singular medium possible. Historically, this turning away occurred at the precise moment rigorous practices of film criticism, responsible to the films and to the critic's experience, were being instituted in the university, and film study was claiming – and beginning to earn – its rightful place in the university's intellectual life.

When the field turned away from “author criticism,” it turned away from other modes of criticism as well.