It's been almost a month now since the renowned French filmmaker Eric Rohmer died. Rohmer's legacy is more or less uncontested: The consensus opinion is that he was responsible for some of the smartest, subtlest and, above all else, talkiest films ever made.
Many have taken the occasion of Rohmer's death as motivation to revisit his oeuvre, myself included. Each decade of his career featured no fewer than two or three outright masterpieces. 1970's ""Claire's Knee"" remains the most satisfying movie ever made on the subjects of sexual temptation and monogamist willpower. 1981's ""The Aviator's Wife"" is as good, honest and anxious an image of young love as you'll find.
A couple of weeks ago I screened Rohmer's nearly flawless comedy of manners (or lack thereof), ""La collectionneuse,"" for my roommate. I was struck by the extent to which Rohmer's work—particularly his 1960s and 1980s films—communicates directly with young people. Much of this resonance has to do with what some call the ""literary"" qualities of his films: the ways in which the movies unfold more like works of literature than works of cinema.
Indeed, Rohmer's work contains the seeds for the implausibly rational personas residing in the Fitzgerald-esque films of directors like Whit Stillman (it's uncontroversial to suggest that without Rohmer there'd be neither ""Metropolitan"" nor ""The Last Days of Disco""). A prototypically Rohmerian character is a hyper-articulate, hyper-intelligent and hyper-bourgeois armchair philosopher: She's so adept at presenting and pleading her own case that it effectively calls attention to the fact that everything she says was written rather than improvised. Unsurprisingly, Rohmer published a novel in 1946 before becoming a critic for the influential French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s and a director in the 1960s.
But is this literariness good or bad? Does the fact that these films behave so much like novels make them aesthetically impure? Are these films properly cinematic or are they something else?
If you're the sort who easily gets hung up on so-called ""realism,"" you might find Rohmer's heartfelt investigations into self-consciousness and everyday ethics kind of silly or, as Gene Hackman's character in ""Night Moves"" famously argues, boring. Indeed, the matter of whether Rohmer's work is dull (which, for the record, it certainly isn't) points toward another question connected to the entire notion of literary cinema: Do we watch foreign language films or do we read them?
I should clarify what I mean when I say that one ""reads"" a film. When critics and/or scholars refer to a ""reading"" of a film, ""reading"" is usually synonymous with ""interpretation;"" the word ""read"" therefore implies that a film is a text, a wide-open assemblage of signs that can yield any number of legitimate interpretations depending on the viewer's intellectual sensibility.
But I mean ""read"" in a more literal sense: If a movie has subtitles (and Rohmer's films have plenty of subtitles), the viewer inevitably spends a lot of time paying attention to only the bottom section of the screen, for fear of losing track of whatever's going on in the narrative.
The consequences of this literariness are unclear. How much of a film does one miss by paying strict attention to a single part of the frame? The great critic Manny Farber wrote of the film frame as if it were a canvas, a sprawling space abounding with visual intrigue. He was right: The film frame is definitely loaded with things worth seeing, whether they're massively spectacular or discreetly understated. Finding objects to look at and engaging with them is essentially what the viewer does. But in cinema we're presented with things in a state of becoming, of unceasing change. If painting, like photography, offers us images of objects in relatively fixed and therefore easily observed states, cinema shows us objects as they appear both inside and outside the gallery: as processes, as things in flux. Thus, it makes sense that if a viewer's gaze is forced to stick to one part of the frame, there's a great deal of stuff that she'll necessarily miss. Subtitles are magnets attracting our attention away from the rest of the image as it develops dynamically.
Although it's a necessary chore, we might as well acknowledge the effect that reading subtitles has on film-viewing. There's a lot to like about literary cinema, especially that of Eric Rohmer; but is it possible that we must watch these films twice in order to say that we've truly seen them—once for the language and once for the images?
Do you give foreign films that second viewing? Let Dan know at dasullivan@wisc.edu.
