Eric Rohmer, 1920-2010

I had a revelation a few years ago: I'm the kind of person who, among the French New Wave directors, likes Eric Rohmer the best. I felt I had discovered something about myself, and could happily move on. (And then I had a secondary revelation: I'm the kind of person who defines myself by which French New Wave director I like best. Oh well.)

News came over the Twitter feed that Rohmer died today at the age of 89. How do I justify a post about a film director on a books blog? Well, I have a few excuses. First, Rohmer seems, at first glance at least, among the most literary of film directors. Is that just because people spend most of their time standing around talking? Probably. But there's also something about the moods and events of his stories that have the same emotional impact--melancholy, indirectly consequential--of a classic short story in the Chekhovian vein. My first impulse is to say that you can much more easily imagine translating one of his films into fiction than those of his peers. But that's probably not true at all: Godard may seem a figure of pure cinema, but what would a Godard book look like? Probably somewhere between an Ishmael Reed novel and a Donald Barthelme story. See, that's not so hard.

Second, Rohmer's literariness is no coincidence. His best-known cycle of films, the Six Moral Tales, was based on stories he had sketched out before he became a filmmaker. They don't appear to be in print right now, but you can find used copies, and there's also a small book of the stories included in what is one of my prized possessions, the Criterion Collection boxed set of the Six Moral Tales.

And third, one of the many Rohmer movies I haven't seen is his adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist's The Marquise of O--. One of my favorite directors, adapting one of my favorite writers--how have I passed this up? I'm not sure if I'm holding this pleasure off at a distance, unconsummated, Rohmer style, or just wary of something that, like Todd Haynes making a glam-rock picture, is just too spot-on to be anything but disappointing. --Tom