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From Schérer to Rohmer
1945–1957
The publication of Élisabeth by Gallimard in April 1946 was a failure. Very few sales, no reviews; the novel went unnoticed. Maurice Schérer had used the pseudonym Gilbert Cordier, perhaps a wink at his landlady at the Hôtel de Lutèce, whose name was also Cordier, though this may be a mere accident.
The failure was painful, another nonrecognition, but the young man recovered by taking a dislike to this first novel. “After having written Élisabeth I detested that novel, I wanted to distance myself from it because it seemed to me sterile. […] I therefore changed, I felt myself closer to nineteenth-century authors; for example, to Herman Melville, whom I was reading at that time.”1 The notes he wrote at that period on sheets of paper or in school notebooks reveal the hesitations of this young man who was trying to find himself and seemed to be out of sync with his contemporaries.
A Literary Postwar Period
Many of his contemporaries were in fact taking part in carrying out the tasks, often political and cultural, facing a country that had just been liberated and was trying to recover from the misfortunes of the war. There is none of that in Maurice Schérer's writing: no trace of current events, for instance, in the newspaper cuttings he was beginning to collect. In periodicals like Combat, Samedi Soir, and France Dimanche, he focused chiefly on human interest stories, reports on society life, articles on art and music, and a few columns or editorials by André Malraux, Camus, or Sartre; or again, whole pages from L’Équipe on foot races and Marcel Hansenne, who had established himself as one of the “great 800-meter runners”2 in the competition for the first postwar Olympic medal, awarded in 1948 in London. Maurice Schérer was inclined toward “disengagement.”3 The young man remained well-groomed, as can be seen in two pictures from the period, a photograph in which he looks directly at the camera, wearing a velvet vest and a carefully knotted tie, affecting a great reserve,4 and a drawing with delicate lines in which he almost disappears behind a profound melancholy.5
At twenty-five, the longtime student had to think about his future. He took classes at the Sorbonne to prepare for another attempt at the agrégation in classics but once again failed the oral examination in July 1947. He henceforth had the status of “bi-admissible,” which was granted to those who had twice passed the written examination for the agrégation. In September 1946 he found a position as a substitute teacher at the Collège Sainte-Barbe. For his first assignment, he shouldered a relatively heavy load: two groups of students in classical Greek and Latin language and literature, seconde and première, in this prestigious private lycée (Sainte-Barbe was founded in the sixteenth century and is the oldest secondary school in Paris), a red-and-white brick building on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, very close to his lodgings, where teachers had pupils who later became well-known, such as Christian Marquand, Pierre Lhomme, and Claude Lelouch. It was during his five years there that Rohmer’s pedagogical vocation was born, supplemented by jobs as an academic coach at the Montaigne and Lakanal lycées.
Teaching was always a clear value for him, and his only goal was to provide his pupils with a solid foundation in the classics. He also professed an unconditional devotion to Latin and Greek. In a speech given at the award ceremony at Sainte-Barbe at the end of the 1948 school year, he declared himself proud to belong to “the battalion of Latinists” and promoted the dead language to the rank of an instrument of general culture, against the extreme specialization of modern society:
It is a cultural tool, to be sure, but a tool of a refined form of culture reserved for the few. With it, we do not live entirely in our own time…and is that a bad thing? Mastering Latin is less a privilege than a mission, to pass it on from generation to generation. Along with the mathematical problem, it remains the best criterion of intelligence available to us. It is a gymnastics of the mind just as essential as physical exercise to the body. Latin allows us to keep the messiness of life out of our schools.6
The Latin language, like the young professor doing it homage, has good manners. In the conclusion of this speech, a very Rohmerian idea already appears in Schérer the schoolteacher: “Let us free ancient authors from commentaries, from the welter of sophisms and clichés. Let us get to know them as they were; let us seek to discover in what way they were modern and resemble us.”7 Addressing his students, the professor advocates a rediscovery of tradition in the present. In other words, tradition is the true modernity: “The sense of balance, of harmony, suggests that we respect tradition in its contemporary aspects.”8
In February 1945 Maurice Schérer made an important acquaintance, the first in a series that was to reorient his intellectual vocation. At the Café Flore he boldly sat down at the table of a man who was younger than he but already famous, Alexandre Astruc.9 Astruc had made a name for himself as a journalist and was one of the most promising authors at the time. In 1942 and 1943 he had published articles about the cinema that appeared in Confluence and Poésie 42; then in the spring of 1944, at the age of 21, he joined the staff of Franc-tireur, Georges Altman’s daily. Finally, he wrote for Combat, Albert Camus’s paper, that “horrible paper that I read every morning,” as General de Gaulle put it. Astruc acquired a reputation both political and literary through his reviews and articles (notably on the prosecution of collaborationists, and in particular Robert Brasillach’s trial for collaboration with the Nazis, which began on January 19, 1945), the critical pieces he contributed to LÉcran français, and his novel published by Gallimard, Les Vacances (1945). What fascinated Schérer was not only the younger man’s insolent literary facility but also his independence of mind, which allowed him to claim to be a “right-wing writer” at a time when everyone was supposed to be left wing, and an ability to gather around him an intellectual and artistic group within which he moved with incomparable ease. In return Astruc discerned in Schérer a mixture of erudition and analytic depth that impressed him. Long, almost daily, conversations transformed this acquaintance into a friendship. They discussed Balzac, Poe, literature in general, and politics—far more than they discussed films and filmmaking.
Astruc brought Schérer into the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, an astonishing encounter between the shy young man with a classical culture, more inclined to be a passive spectator than a party animal, and a world lived in an essentially extroverted and exuberant way. At the Café de Flore and the Club Saint-Germain, Astruc introduced Maurice Schérer to his friends—the red-haired poet Anne-Marie Cazalis, his companion and muse, and Juliette Gréco, who was not yet a singer or actress but was already a muse in plaid pants. Schérer reconnected with Pierre Boutang, whose subtle mind, shaped by Aristotle, Plato, Heidegger, Faulkner, and the rhetoric of Charles Maurras, he henceforth regularly mined. He also met there other authors published by Gallimard, Raymond Queneau and Jean-Paul Sartre (who considered Astruc brilliant and published him in Le Temps modernes), who were prepared to look with favor on everyone the younger man recommended to them. Schérer was undeniably influenced by Sartre at this time. He read Sartre’s articles on Dos Passos, Faulkner, recent American literature, and on Husserl and phenomenology, which were reprinted in Situations I in 1947, and also LImaginaire, a phenomenological psychology of the imagination (1940), as well as the famous 1945 lecture “Existentialisme est un humanisme.” As Schérer later willingly admitted, he saw the world “through Sartre’s eyes,”10 with that phenomenological attention to objects, to bodies, and to natural and social existence. “If you wish to follow my aesthetic and ideological itinerary, it begins with Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, which put its stamp on me at the outset,” he told Jean Narboni in a 1983 interview. “I never talk about Sartre but he was nonetheless my point of departure.”11 Sartre’s LImaginaire is crucial in Rohmer’s intellectual development—as it was in that of André Bazin12—because it connects art with ontology. Art shows, it neither writes nor describes ex nihilo: therein lies its truth value, which alone can lead toward the imaginary.
The microcosm of Saint-Germain-des-Prés was a first-class laboratory for Maurice Schérer because there the theory and practice of a whole little world was elaborated in common. In the future filmmaker’s archives, we find several traces of this interest, for example, a two-page spread cut out of Samedi Soir in 1947, “Here is how the troglodytes of Saint-Germain-des-Prés live,”13 a report from the cellars, tribes, and sanctums of Saint-Germain-des-Prés written in the style of an ethnographic expedition. In 1952 Rohmer even made it the subject of one of his first film projects, entitled Poucette et la légende de Saint-Germain-des-Prés. This illustrates his precocious acuity in occupying the position of a witness to his time, mediating between documentary and analysis. The film is conceived in the form of a twelve-minute report whose outside scenes were to be strictly documentary and filmed from real life. Only the inside sequences were to be acted. Poucette is a “young woman in Saint-Germain”: she has written a novel, De vraies jeunes filles (Real girls), and spends every evening making drawings in cafés and cellars while at the same time keeping a record of her nights. In a sidewalk café she meets a young American who is conducting an investigation for his sociology thesis (“The Saint-Germain-des-Prés phenomenon and its effects on French youth”). She tells him about the peculiarities of the area, going to see places (La Pergola, Le Pouilly, Le Mabillon, Le Royal, La Polka, Le Village), prominent figures (Adamov, Giacometti, Pépita, Cazalis), rituals (a cellar, a band, couples dancing be-bop), and then taking him to her place for a final interview. The filmmaker presents his project as an investigation. Rohmer’s art, situated between a love story (“The 1948 girl is the most pleasing form of woman”14), documentary verism (the flirting ritual in cafés), and voyeuristic fiction, is located at an equal distance from three poles: the document, empathy, and criticism.
An Extraordinary Figure
Thanks to a former regimental comrade from Mulhouse met by chance at a firemen’s ball at the place Maubert on July 14, 1947, Maurice Schérer made another acquaintance that proved decisive: Paul Gégauff.15 Gégauff was born in 1922 in Blotzheim near Mulhouse into a rather well-off Protestant family. He was hardly a brilliant student; his education was essentially autodidactic, focusing on the piano, which he played perfectly. When Alsace was annexed to the Reich as a German province on August 6, 1940, the young man was forced to perform his military service in a Nazi paramilitary group. At the same time he published his first work, a libertine tale entitled Burlesque and published by the J. Barbe publishing house, which had withdrawn from Mulhouse to Lyon. With his mother he left Alsace and took refuge on the Côte d’Azur, where he spent most of the war before moving to Paris immediately after the Liberation. There Gégauff, a handsome young man, blond, delicate, with deep blue eyes, sponged off old ladies whom he took out and entertained, frequented high society in Montparnasse and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, squandered the family inheritance, and established his reputation in a few scandals. He later talked about a great costume ball at the Rose Rouge cabaret held in 1946. “Most people came as parish priests or nuns; I came in an SS officer’s uniform. It was the Scandal Ball and indeed I made a scandal! But wasn’t that the point?”16 In Gégauff’s case, this provocation went as far as anti-Semitic excesses that had been displayed as early as 1940 in his tale Burlesque. That is the misfortune, the damnation, and the desperate grandeur of Paul Gégauff: he could create only against, out of a deep antipathy toward intellectuals, conformism, and other people in general.
Gégauff never tired of mocking the postwar world, ridiculing every kind of commitment, demolishing its literary glories and its left-wing sensibilities, resolutely garbing himself in the dubious guise of the anti-conformist. His affected inflexibility, his unfashionable elegance—the military haircut, the oversize shirt collars—constituted the finery of this young man living in scandalous garments. What was fascinating about him was a manner situated between a supreme casualness and an ostentatious affectation, a distinction simultaneously natural and artificial, an exaggerated, brilliant, cutting voice, with intonations bordering on hypocrisy, or haughty, arrogant murmurs. This confirms the impression of a person oscillating between perpetual self-representation and a dandy-like indolence that comes close to the art of living. “What attracted us to him,” Rohmer was later to say, “was a calm, nonchalant side associated with a certain insolence, whereas we were rather uptight. If we had a provocative side, it was the provocation of the timid. In him it was a title of nobility.”17 The last prestigious quality attributed to Paul Gégauff was being loved by women. He was a party animal who inhabited Parisian nights between Montparnasse, Saint-Germain, and the Champs-Elysées. In front of everyone, he seduced girls, took them, deceived them, left them, and returned to them. This “extraordinary figure,”18 as fascinating as he was repugnant, was to serve as a model for certain masculine characters in Rohmer’s work, and also in that of Claude Chabrol, Roger Vadim, and Jean-Luc Godard.
Schérer and Gégauff took an immediate liking to each other. They had things in common: their Alsatian origins, similar literary tastes (Dostoyevsky), the same love for music. Schérer discovered Monteverdi thanks to Gégauff, whereas the latter heard Beethoven’s quartets and sonatas for the first time in Schérer’s room in the rue Victor-Cousin. Gégauff created the nickname that was to accompany Maurice Schérer for the rest of his life, even after he had become Éric Rohmer: “le grand Momo.” Rohmer testifies to this: “He is the only person who really influenced me, and I think the influence was mutual. He’s like a brother to me and I don’t need to see him to understand him; I know him so well. While we were growing up, at the time when people exchange ideas, construct systems, and found new aesthetics, we discussed everything that can be discussed between the ages of 25 and 35. Nothing escaped us and that marked us for life.”19 Gégauff lived in a furnished apartment on rue de la Convention, and then with a friend in the 15th arrondissement, but the two friends often slept alongside one another, Schérer on the bed, Gégauff at his feet on a mat that was rolled up in the corner during the day. The room in the Hôtel de Lutèce became a laboratory for creation as well as for discussions that were essentially literary. Schérer and Gégauff were a couple in this writing workshop.
Gégauff wrote: he published four novels with Éditions de Minuit between 1951 and 1958: Les Mauvais Plaisants, Le Toit des autres, Rébus, and Une partie de plaisir. His editor, Jérôme Lindon, liked them even though they were not terribly successful. Gégauff also wrote a play, Mon colonel, that was staged by Jacques Mauclair at the Théâtre de la Huchette in 1956. Not to mention countless tales, fables, short stories, and two more novels preserved in Rohmer’s archives. At the same time, Maurice Schérer was also writing short stories and left behind at least three attempts at novels. It would seem that Schérer’s reading of Gégauff’s texts and the discussions that followed triggered a burst of writing, because between January 1948 and December 1949 he put down on paper five short stories of about forty pages each, an unfinished novel of two hundred typed pages, and a plan for another novel—all of it inspired by Gégauff. The novel was entitled, La Tempête.20 Placed under the sign of Shakespeare and the character of Prospero and set on an island off the coast of Brittany, the plot follows complex, intersecting love affairs in the large decrepit house of an old family that has lost all its money, and whose heiress is being courted by several wealthy suitors. Nature, and particularly the sea surrounding both the places and the characters, becomes more and more important. The final storm, unleashing furious waves, reveals the more or less energetic characters. In the introduction to this novel, Maurice Schérer offers a profession of faith that confronts the creator with his responsibilities: “Depict only what is noble, beautiful, elevating, consoling. The pleasure of writing must be immense […] In short, my personal philosophy has been only that of good intentions: reconciling the rejection of passions and the impossibility of life without passion. I seek the aesthetic rehabilitation of good intentions. There is no good without the possibility of evil, but good is nonetheless in nature. I am sensitive only to a certain beauty of things or to the innocence of a good intention.”21
In addition there are five short stories dated 1949. The first, untitled, is largely inspired by Goethe’s Faust, a myth that regains its relevance in these apocalyptic times. The second story, entitled “Le Revolver,” prefigures in the form of a literary narrative the scenario of “Suzanne’s Career,” which was written nearly fifteen years earlier. A somewhat unattractive girl, Paule, whom two boys are trying to pick up and take advantage of, considering themselves superior to her, ends up avenging herself socially by marrying well. The third story, “L’Homme de trente ans,” is about Gervais, an engineer who is caught between two dissimilar women: Aline, an old acquaintance he knows only too well, and Françoise, a young girl of sixteen, sly and provocative, his landlady’s daughter. This ends tragically when Gérard, Françoise’s jealous boyfriend, strikes the man a fatal blow with a bronze bookend. In “Chantal, ou l’épreuve,” a story dated November 17, 1949, the story is narrated by a foppish, right-wing diplomat. In an elegant, precious, detached tone it narrates the vengeance taken by a young woman on manifestations of masculine pride: this is already the subject of La Collectionneuse.22
The last story is entitled “Le Genou de Claire.” Dated December 5, 1949, it returns to an obsessional fetish that had already appeared in Élisabeth. From the outset it is very close to the film adaptation of it that Rohmer made more than twenty years later. This is shown by these lines in which the crucial and the anodyne intersect:
One evening when I was sitting on the bench at the tennis court, our couple sat down near me. Jacques had just played a brilliant game which had left him breathless. He’d leaned back against the wire fence, and his weary hand was resting gently on Claire’s knee. Short skirts were fashionable at that time, and as she sat down, this one had revealed a narrow triangle of flesh that the boy’s fingers partly hid from me. The sun’s rays, which were low at that hour, were touching the inside of her knee and tinting pink the skin which was here paler and softer, slightly shaded by a delicate dimple. What exactly was happening to me? It was as if I had found the joint through which this hard flesh suddenly became permeable to my desire. I knew what I was looking for: a caress, but known to me alone, which would reveal to me the secret of Claire’s body more profoundly than the most ardent promises she might have made me. […] A right arises from the very violence of desire. Nothing in the world could forbid me to grant myself what was due only to me.23
Adding to these a text written a few years earlier, in 1944, “Rue Monge,” Schérer completed a collection of a half-dozen stories that he submitted to Gallimard, which had published Élisabeth. Six months later, in June 1950, Gaston Gallimard, referring to a negative reader’s report, rejected this collection. He told Rohmer: “It’s not at all modern! You’ve lost the new, young aspect your first novel had.” The door to literature suddenly slammed shut. There remains nonetheless a title, the one the author gave his collection, Moral Tales (Contes moraux). And also the literary matrix of a certain number of future films.
The Commitment to Film
As we have seen, films played no important role in Maurice Schérer’s childhood or even his youth. The large-scale invasion of Parisian movie theaters by Hollywood cinema dates from the summer of 1946, following the commercial agreements signed by Léon Blum and James F. Byrnes, which put an end to the prohibition on showing American films in France that had been in place since 1939. Schérer was already twenty-six years old: he was not a child of the mania for Hollywood cinema, as were filmmakers ten years younger: François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Godard, Chabrol, and the New Wave generation as a whole. When he got to know film, he was an adult, already intellectually shaped and artistically committed. Cinema came late; for Maurice Schérer it was the “last” of the arts before it became the “first.” Moreover, in his case, the initial, tangible signs of this passion for film—programs and cinema club membership cards, newspaper clippings, notes on films—go back to 1947 and the beginning of 1948. At this time he underwent an initial conversion to cinema through an accelerated apprenticeship in the art of film watching: becoming a movie lover and making up for lost time.
The oldest indication of this love of films is an annotated program for the university cinema club from February 1947. This club, created in the summer of 1944 by Jean-Paul Gudin at the SNCF Hall near the place de la République, seems to have been Rohmer’s point of reference. The shows were often organized by Jean Boullet, a well-known figure around Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Boris Vian’s illustrator, a free-thinker and homosexual who loved the bizarre and the forbidden; he was also a film critic fond of the fantastic and horror. But Gudin died young at the age of 24 in 1948, Boullet moved to other venues, and the club, whose members included, in addition to Rohmer, film buffs like Jacques Rozier, Michel Wyn, and Georges Kaplan, rapidly went downhill. Schérer then began to frequent the Néo-club Cinéart run by the very active Armand J. Cauliez, who soon became the director of the film club at the Musée de l’Homme. In September 1948, the young movie lover also went to see the films shown at the Amis de Charlot and the Scéno-Club, and then those shown on Thursday evenings at La Tribune de l’écran in the hall at 31, avenue Pierre-Ier-de-Serbie, whose main organizer was Roger Régent. He could not know that, two decades later, the offices of his production company would be set up almost across the street.
Thus Schérer took a modest part in this rich and flourishing world of film lovers.24 The Paris movie theaters were often packed, especially with young people who gathered there after the principal film club meetings, which were generally held twice a week. With some four hundred theaters, ranging from immense movie palaces to small neighborhood cinemas, postwar Paris was the ideal site for this passion for cinema, and the film clubs experienced their golden age, constituting a dense network throughout the capital. In early 1949, Armand J. Cauliez, the main herald of the movement, published a newsletter called Ciné-Club, authorized by the Fédération française des ciné-clubs, which had been created in late 1945, was presided over by Jean Painlevé, and was firmly left-wing. Cauliez was the “secretary responsible for questions of culture and propaganda.” Another tutelary figure for film lovers was Jean Cocteau. He was their prince, their master of ceremonies. For example, he presided over Objectif 49, the most prestigious of the clubs at that time, or “the film club of tomorrow,” launched on the occasion of the premiere of “Les Parents terribles” at the Studio des Champs-Élysées on December 1, 1948. The club included representatives of the “new criticism”: André Bazin, Alexandre Astruc, Pierre Kast, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Claude Mauriac, and Nino Frank, who enjoyed the sponsorship of filmmakers like Robert Bresson, René Clément, Jean Grémillon, and Roger Leenhardt. Objectif 49, a rather closed but very influential club organized by Bazin, who was along with Astruc the main postwar critic, attracted Maurice Schérer, who attended its meetings.
On December 21, 1948 Bazin published the credo of this elite film club in LÉcran français, a kind of manifesto for a new criticism that defended a new cinema exemplified by the work of Welles, Renoir, Rossellini, Bresson, William Wyler, Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges, and Huston: “This avant-garde needs to be revealed, understood, and supported. That is the goal of Objectif 49, which will present recent films three or four times a month, most of which have not been previously shown and have been chosen in this spirit. The films will be followed by an in-depth commentary, including numerous technical analyses of individual frames. These commentaries will be offered by critics, technicians, actors, painters and writers.”25
Objectif 49’s office was at 146, avenue des Champs-Élysées, but the film showings took place on Sundays at 9:30 A.M. at the Broadway, at number 36 on the same avenue, on Monday evenings at the Studio des Champs-Élysées, or on Saturdays at 5:30 P.M. at La Pagode.
But the main place to learn about cinema was Henri Langlois’s Cinémathèque française.26 Founded in 1936, it was established on the rue Toyon, near the place de l’Étoile, in December 1944, and then moved to the Maison des Arts et Métiers, avenue d’Iéna. In October 1948 a new theater set up in a private building at number 7, avenue de Messine in the eighth arrondissement. It was there that Maurice Schérer became acquainted with Langlois, his films, and many other young movie-lovers. The theater, where films were henceforth projected every day, could hold from sixty to a hundred spectators. The same people always sat in the front row. First they examined silent movies: Griffith, Feuillade, DeMille, Murnau, burlesques, Danish and Swedish films, then Renoir, Ford, Dwan, Walsh, Hawks, and King, as well as the first film stars. This generation of movie-lovers was the last that could acquire a full acquaintance with film culture in a few years of bulimic consumption: there were only fifty years of cinema to learn about; the pantheon of classics was well established; and Langlois, the “dragon,” owned most of the treasures of an art that had not yet spread throughout the world. Chris Marker, who hung out there and was then writing a column in Esprit, paid homage to the Cinémathèque in an article published in June 1949:
Although the price of admission is modest, it isn’t easy to get into this darkroom which resembles the mortuary chamber in the Great Pyramid where the precious mummies of Douglas Fairbanks and Lillian Gish await you shrouded in their celluloid wrappings. Unreliable schedules, forgetful ticket takers, crowding in hallways, lost tickets, seats sold twice, all this orchestrated with brio by Henri Langlois, the irreplaceable manager, puts the spectator in a genuinely religious state, torn between an awareness of his indignity and the extravagant hope of finally seeing the film, it crushes, churns, flattens and purifies him so that he finally clings to the screen as if it alone could save him, and compared to what he has just endured, it seems a paradise.27
Langlois was aware of his role: to exhibit shadows, to discover old films and pass them on to the next generation. He would often say he felt like the father of the New Wave, laying claim to a way of seeing both as a spectator and as a creator, as if Maurice Schérer and his younger colleagues learned to make films by watching old films. “It was regular attendance at our films that gradually shaped the audience’s critical perspective,” wrote Langlois in 1949. “Last year, the spectators were essentially young people from 17 to 22. At first, they knew only films made in the previous four or five years. They had trouble adapting. But they were automatically educated by watching films and now some of them have told me they can no longer go to the cinema as they used to. Some films became so unbearable to them that they could no longer watch them.”28 Although Schérer was a little older than these young people “from 17 to 22,” he shared in this apprenticeship through films: he too developed taste, judgment, and culture in contact with the works of the past that Langlois showed, and that was how he became a critic, and even a filmmaker, as was acutely noted by a journalist from Combat. “The Cinémathèque joins the past to the future.”29 Schérer preserved records of the things that first excited him, the mimeographed schedules for the films shown at Langlois’s theater. Over a period of ten months, between October 1949 and July 1950, he missed few of the films that were shown. In the program for October 1950 he even underlined with concern the following warning: “The number of seats in the hall at the avenue Messine being limited, two kinds of passes will be sold, one for the Saturday showing and the other for the Sunday showing.”30 Rohmer probably tried to get both.
Newspapers and cinema magazines were the other vector of this renascent cinephilia. Alexandre Astruc is a good guide to this, because he wrote on cinema in virtually every postwar periodical, from Combat to Poésie 45, from Opéra to Les Temps modernes, from LÉcran français to La Nef, and also in La Revue du cinéma, a monthly edited by Jean George Auriol and published by Gallimard between October 1946 and the end of 1949 in nineteen issues that contained landmark texts. At the height of the Cold War, there were enormous cleavages within a deeply divided cinematographic criticism. Starting in the summer of 1948, communists took control of LÉcran français, the most widely read and most lively specialized weekly, which was for a time open to contradictory trends. The polemics blew up in a cinematographic press and milieu that seemed to be on edge: about Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, which was attacked by Jean-Paul Sartre and the communists when it came out in Paris in 1946 and was defended by Bazin, Astruc, and Leenhardt; about Hitchcock, scorned by so-called “serious” criticism and the intellectual left, but supported as early as 1947 by the youngest Hollywood lovers, Jean-Charles Tacchella and Roger Thérond, in a few iconoclastic manifestos in LÉcran français. In the political context of the late 1940s American cinema divided people: for many people, liking Hollywood movies was tantamount to a right-wing, antinational provocation, a deviant taste that the Left could hardly understand.
An old guard, for which an artwork was first of all a great subject and a clear message, objected to the new criticism’s predilection for form, the sophistication of its analyses, and its emphasis on an author’s style and even on the way the film was directed. In this sense an article published by Alexandre Astruc on March 30, 1948, “Naissance d’une nouvelle avant-garde: la caméra-stylo” (The birth of a new avant-garde: the camera-pen), had the force of a manifesto. Striking an offensive tone, the critic insists that the author of a film, through his own style, has a writer’s freedom to create and impose his personal universe. “After having been a fairground attraction, an entertainment analogous to boulevard theater, or a way of preserving images of the period, the cinema is becoming a language. A language, that is, a form in which and through which an artist can express his thought, no matter how abstract it might be, or his obsessions, exactly as is the case today for the essay or the novel. That is why I call this new age of cinema that of the camera-pen.”31 Maurice Schérer witnessed these critical jousts; he was still trying to find his place within the cinephile movement and the critical landscape, but he nonetheless understood what was at stake in these disputes.
The First Critical Texts
Schérer soon began to take part in these debates. Only a few weeks after having bought his first pass to the university film club, he thought he was ready to publish his first texts on cinema. Once again it was Alexandre Astruc who served as his mentor. Following the publication of “Naissance d’une nouvelle avant-garde: la caméra-stylo,” Schérer told Astruc he wanted to write for LÉcran français. But Astruc knew that his periodical was ceasing to be pluralistic, and sent Schérer’s proposal to La Revue du cinéma, where he had many friends, notably Jean George Auriol, the editor in chief, Doniol-Valcroze, and Bazin. Moreover, through a neighbor, Schérer knew Henri Rossi, one of Langlois’s associates at the Cinémathèque and a friend of Auriol, who was also able to recommend him. Éric Rohmer later had a perfect recollection of this crucial context of his debut as a critic: “I went to see Auriol,32 who was by nature tolerant and open. The first article I wrote concerned the problem of color in films. I thought the future of film was in color, just as it had been in talkies in 1929. I also maintained that there was something specific about the use of color in film, that it had nothing to do with painting.”33 Auriol rejected the article on the grounds that he had recently published another on the same subject. Schérer then began an article on Eisenstein, who had just died. In it he emphasized, contrary to what was usually thought, that the great artist is not the author of Potemkin but rather of Ivan the Terrible, that in his work the important thing is not montage but the organization of space. Auriol again rejected the article, obituaries not being of interest to him. “I was not discouraged,” Rohmer goes on, “and ultimately I wrote ‘Le cinema, art de l’espace’ [Cinema as a spatial art]. Auriol told me that it was a kind of synthesis of the two preceding articles and limited himself almost exclusively to remarks on the style of my article, because he was very much a purist. He said nothing at all about the substance of the article, and it was published.”34
“Le cinéma, art de l’espace,”35 Rohmer’s first article, shows an astonishing maturity. In an author’s first text we rarely find an already completely constituted system that establishes itself from the outset through its reflective power and the clarity of its style. This article, which has great theoretical ambitions, focuses on the “concern for spatial expression” peculiar to cinema, an art that “has to organize the semantic code it uses in relation to a conception of time and space.” This latter being, according to Schérer, “the general form of sensibility that is the most essential to this art of seeing.” In contrast to graphic, purely visual expression, cinema makes use of means that are specific to it and creates meaning when it moves about objects or bodies within the space of the frame and a flat surface, in accord with an organization inspired by nature.36
The article had a profound influence, especially on the generation of the future New Wave, those young people “from 17 to 22” mentioned by Langlois. Jean Douchet, for example, was to emphasize the importance of this text: “For me it was a revelation. This essay showed that the specificity of cinema resided in the way space was treated and the way bodies moved within it.”37 Jean-Luc Godard, who was ten years younger than Schérer, wrote in a similar vein: “He wrote the first article of what was for us the takeover of modern cinema. It was the first text that was of major importance for us because it proposed a definition of cinema as an art of direction, an art of movement in space.”38
Maurice Schérer continued to submit articles to La Revue du cinéma. In March 1948 it published his review of Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, which most critics had treated with disdain and condescension as if, since his departure for the United States, the director of The 39 Steps no longer had “anything to say.” For Schérer this was, on the contrary, the first stage of a long journey alongside the “master of suspense” (an already-established expression that he preferred from the outset to “the virtuoso of the camera”),39 a journey that led nine years later to the publication of a book of film analyses coauthored with Claude Chabrol. Schérer put his finger on the originality of Notorious, in whose direction seeing becomes a kind of fetishism and a drive toward an extreme stylization based on magnification: “Notorious is a film of close-ups. Its best moments are the ones in which the actors’ faces occupy the whole surface of the screen: for example, the extraordinary kissing scene, which deserves a special place in an anthology of cinematographic love or eroticism.”40
The young critic had hardly begun to work for La Revue du cinéma, where he felt comfortable, before he found himself adrift: the periodical ceased to appear in the fall of 1949, having been sacrificed by Gaston Gallimard along with several others that he published. Shortly afterward, in a tragic postscript, Jean George Auriol died in an accident on April 2, 1950, run down by a car on the road to Chartres.
Alexandre Astruc once again came to the rescue of his friend and submitted to Les Temps modernes an article that Schérer had just written for La Revue du cinéma. Les Temps modernes was a monthly, founded by Sartre and edited by Merleau-Ponty, to which Schérer contributed several pieces over the next year. The article Pour un cinéma parlant, a manifesto directed against a nostalgia for silent films then widespread among critics, was published in October 1948. Schérer wanted speech to be “integrated into film,” and thought it would be “desirable” that the author of the dialogue and the director of the film be one and the same person (what would soon be called an “auteur”). According to him, words are an integral part of a cinematographic work. This article outlines a Rohmerian creed: it tells us what the filmmaker will do with words, manipulations of meaning, finally making this astonishing confession: “There are not enough lies in cinema, except perhaps in comedies by René Clair, Ernst Lubitsch, and Frank Capra.” Deliberately situating himself in this tradition, Maurice Schérer vows to engage in an ambiguous relationship with truth.
This was followed in January, March, and June 1949 by three reviews, suggesting that Schérer would be a regular contributor to Les Temps modernes. But in June 1949 he also published three articles in other periodicals.41 On the fifteenth of that month he wrote the Objectif 49 column in Combat under the title “L’Âge classique du cinema,” in which he proposed a thesis dear to him: by filming the modern, cinema naturally rejoins the archetypes of classical beauty. “Let those who are uneasy be reassured,” he wrote. “In the cinema, classicism is not a step backward but a step forward.”42 This formula permanently marked Jacques Rivette, an eighteen-year-old movie-lover who had just come to Paris and who heard Schérer speak at the next meeting of the Objectif 49 film club. In the cultural weekly, Opéra, edited by the conservative and well-behaved Roger Nimier, Schérer published two articles one after the other. The first, Réflexions sur la couleur,43 was a defense of the color film: it was probably the very first article Schérer wrote, the one he had planned for Auriol’s La Revue du cinéma a year earlier. Next came “Preston Sturges, ou la mort du comique,”44 a short essay on one of the most highly regarded filmmakers of the time who gave laughter a melancholy depth.
In October 1949 Maurice Schérer reviewed for Les Temps modernes the first Festival du Film Maudit which had been organized by Objectif 49. In his review he defended the films Jean Renoir had been making in the United States, Swamp Water, The Southerner, Diary of a Chambermaid. He also discovered Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione and was enchanted by a new version of Jean Vigo’s LAtalante. He concluded with a portrait of this new generation of spectators that, according to him, had distinguished itself in Biarritz by demanding a new kind of cinema, with which he certainly identified. “In the youngest generation I see much less concern to proclaim its break with classical or ‘bourgeois’ tradition. Because it is considered proper to swear only by history, let us say that at certain moments in the evolution of the arts the values of conservation may deserve to be lent priority over those of revolution or progress.”45 This latter statement, which is openly conservative, was singled out a few days later by Jean Kanapa in an editorial in Lettres françaises, the communist weekly that competed with Les Temps modernes. Kanapa scolds Schérer but sees in his article above all a “proof” of the reactionary drift of Sartre and his magazine. This was considered fair play in these times of very great intellectual tension. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the editor of Les Temps modernes, reacted immediately to this opening of polemics, putting out the fire before it endangered the line taken by his magazine. As Rohmer was to write a few years later: “The editors of Les Temps modernes recognized the shot across the bow—and got rid of me.”46 This ended Maurice Schérer’s participation in the most prestigious intellectual review of the time. Abandoned by the now defunct Revue du cinéma, sent away from Les Temps modernes, where was he henceforth going to express his love for the seventh art?
The Latin Quarter Film Club
In December 1948, Schérer found work as a film-club organizer. The opportunity came through the Collège Sainte-Barbe, which offered a classical education and, in the framework of a film club that had long existed at the school, a few courses on cinema. One of his students in film, Frédéric C. Froeschel, who had just turned eighteen and was bold, curious, and nonconformist, got his hands on copies of films that were about to be thrown away. With the help of his father, who backed him, he founded the Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin (CCQL), of which he was the first president. The club’s statutes47 were registered on December 9, 1948; the headquarters was at number 19, rue Cujas; and the club’s goal was to be the “students’ independent club.” Maurice Schérer was one of the founding members: Froeschel asked him to organize the meetings, which took place every Thursday at 8:30 P.M. in the hall of the Sociétés Savantes at number 8, rue Danton, and every Friday at 5:45 P.M. at the Cluny Palace, a lovely old-fashioned theater with 385 seats, boxes, and a balcony, that was managed by the Troadecs, father and daughter, and that had long had the reputation of showing more Westerns than any other theater in Paris.
This free student film club had a varied and unusual program that attracted a wide audience; before long there were three thousand members. It was open to any kind of film; Frédéric Froeschel had uncovered English, German, and Russian films; war documentaries; and also many classic American movies from the 1930s that could now be seen again. The programs Schérer preserved and annotated provide interesting clues to the content of these stimulating shows. Thursday evenings on the rue Danton tended toward musicals, with fantastic or surreal aspects, and included a number of unusual films (for example, those made by Stalinists or Nazis), whereas the Friday showings alternated between silent films and American classics. “You could see an enormous number of films in this club,” Éric Rohmer recalled. “Its interest was that it was purely for cinephiles and showed as many things as possible, without discrimination. We showed all kinds of stuff, we had no pre-established ideology or hierarchy. We ran counter to conventional tastes; we surprised people, it was original.”48
Rather severe-looking, though quite schoolboyish, combining erudition and humor with method, Maurice Schérer impressed his audience. He already had the prestige of someone who wrote for cinema magazines and hung out with respected cinephiles but was nonetheless close to students and young film lovers. Claude de Givray recalls a formal debate presided over by a Schérer who seemed “very professorial,”49 giving the floor to a young, unruly audience and taking it back to provide analyses “of a certain breadth” or decisive opinions (“a regular demolition of High Noon as ‘false intellectualism’ ”). Philippe d’Hugues, another cinephile, has preserved the notes he took as a young man: “Schérer was not the most brilliant one there, but he worked very hard to prepare for these sessions. He often stammered, spoke very fast, seemed ill at ease, remained reticent and shy after the sessions, but every discussion of a film taught us a great deal. That is why his sessions attracted us.”50
Schérer was very involved in the organization of this film club, of which he became the president in March 1950. He had to prepare the showings, contact guests, and set up varied and appealing programs with the films that Froeschel offered him. Froeschel did not make it easy on him, as is shown by this little note from the autumn of 1949: “Momo my dear, when you get this message, write on the paper that you’ll find in the envelope addressed to [Claude] Mauriac, asking him to come tomorrow evening because [Jean-Pierre] Melville really wants to see him in the discussion. For once I’m counting on you. And don’t forget to take the message to the post office immediately. Urgent. Fondly, Froeschel.”51 Schérer did not get much in return for his efforts: no financial compensation, or very little, and above all problems with police headquarters and the courts.
On January 27, 1950, Schérer and Froeschel received a court summons on the charge that they had shown Robert A. Stemmle’s Ballade Berlinoise without authorization and the German company that held the right had filed a complaint. “The advertising they have done and are planning to do to announce the showing of the film causes the plaintiffs serious prejudice,”52 argued the lawyer for the company. The two young men were ordered to return the copy of the film, to halt all promotion of it, and above all to pay damages with interest in the amount of 10,000 francs, a substantial sum that had to be paid by Frédéric Froeschel’s father. Fortunately his garage on the lower end of the boulevard Saint-Michel was thriving. In June 1950, they had to pay further costs and fines for having pasted advertising posters on electoral signs on the rue Victor-Cousin. Schérer was having a run of bad luck; he was fined again and then summoned to police headquarters because some paperwork he had submitted for the club had been judged faulty.
But the Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin was first of all a place where one could meet people and exchange ideas, and that was of inestimable value and worth all the fines. Schérer drew to the club a large number of students and young movie-lovers. He was seen as a mentor, open to discussion, to listening to their expectations and tastes. The CCQL rapidly became the crucible of the New Wave, where the spirit of the future group of “young Turks” was born and developed. One of its habitués was Jacques Rivette, a shy boy from Rouen who soon became the best, the cleverest, the most erudite, the most clear-sighted. He arrived there from his hometown in 1948, along with his friend Francis Bouchet, and immediately began attending the sessions at the Studio Parnasse and the CCQL. “He was slight, dark-haired and had very lively dark eyes in an emaciated visage of a waxy pallor,” Jean Gruault remembers. “Add to that a forced, nervous smile stuck onto this tragic face, the desperate smile of someone who has to make constant efforts to win acceptance by a society that he seemed to regard as irremediably hostile.”53 When Rivette spoke, he was brusque, cutting, irrefutable, and unstoppable, and seemed to set a permanent standard of taste. His hand fell like the blade of a guillotine: that was the truth. Then there was Jean-Luc Godard, a son at odds with his family—he was a Monod—who had come from Switzerland and the shores of Lake Geneva to study at the Sorbonne (a little ethnology, a little film studies); he was a dandy who spent much of his time in dark theaters. Claude Chabrol, who also came from a good bourgeois family, deserted the study of law to go slumming at the cinema; François Truffaut, the youngest of the group, had become André Bazin’s private secretary at the age of 17, which gave him a certain prestige and counterbalanced his roguish, self-educated, low-class side. But there were also many other young cinephiles, such as Suzanne Schiffman, Jean Domarchi, Pierre Bailly, André Labarthe, Étienne Chaumeton, Georges Kaplan, Francis Bouchet, Jean Gruault, Jean Douchet, Claude de Givray…
Some of them recorded their memories of this unusual area of young Turk sociability. Claude Chabrol’s comments are piquant: “Despite its location on one of the most noble streets in Paris, the enterprise was not irreproachable in the way it handled its finances. Its accounting was rather evasive. The organizers did not hesitate to dip into the cash drawer. At its sessions, I met Éric Rohmer. Tall, skinny, brown-haired, this literature teacher looked like Nosferatu the vampire.”54 Paul Gégauff, who followed his friend Schérer to the film club, was thrust into the presidency on January 16, 1950: that was where he began to see films. But he was never to write film criticism. That did not prevent him from having a largely fantastical idea of the place that arose from an imagination that smelled of sulfur: “The CCQL was a criminal organization of which I was the president, a president who regularly dipped into the cash drawer. The money was used mainly to get laid. The truth must out: Froeschel thought only of money and screwing, and so did I, while le grand Momo, it goes without saying, was also interested in going after the daughters of concierges that he brought to the film club…No one thought of anything but screwing and stealing, it was horrible.”55 In February 1950, after an American war film had been shown, in a virtuoso act of pure provocation and schoolboy humor, Gégauff suddenly appeared in the spotlight dressed as a Nazi officer and, looking at a stunned audience with a malicious eye, cried out in an Alsatian accent: “Vee vill come back!”56
In late July 1949, a large part of this cinephile group went with Maurice Schérer to the Festival du Film Maudit in Biarritz, a prestigious event set up by Objectif 49. Schérer helped organize the sessions and agreed to introduce a certain number of films: The Flame of New Orleans, René Clair’s first American feature film, Robert Bresson’s The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne, and Jean Grémillon’s Summer Light. In his notebooks Philippe d’Hugues wrote for the date August 4, 1949: “I discovered Maurice Schérer, a little stammering in the morning discussion on Bresson, brilliant and at ease in his presentation of Clair […] On the list of twenty-four people I saw at the festival, I ranked him sixth in order of importance, behind Cocteau, Grémillon, Bazin, Bourgeois and Auriol, and before Astruc, Mauriac father and son, Graham Greene and René Clément. His was the only name on this list I did not know, and that shows the strong impression he made on me.”57 On leaving for Biarritz from the Gare d’Austerlitz on the evening of July 29, Schérer met Jean Douchet, another young cinephile who was then twenty years old: “I’d read his article in La Revue du cinéma,” Douchet wrote, “which had impressed me, I had seen him run a few sessions of the CCQL…At that time I was as shy as he was. But there, as I got into the train for Biarritz, I saw him. I went up to him. We talked all night in the corridor. We discussed Shadow of a Doubt and Notorious, Rossellini, John Ford, Keaton, Renoir, and Murnau. We agreed about everything. For the first time, I was talking to an organizer who was not, first of all, a communist or a Catholic, but whose first principle was the love and knowledge of cinema. How should we watch a film? What do we see in it? All at once with him, you became aware that there was an art which was no longer politically conservative, which avoided the big questions, and which had a form.”58 Along with other aficionados of cinema such as Douchet, Rivette, Truffaut, Chabrol, Philippe d’Hugues, and Charles Bitsch, Schérer stayed in the Biarritz high school dormitory, feeling that he was closer to this group of young cinephiles than to the stars of Objectif 49 who were staying at the Hôtel du Palais and who frequented the formal balls at La Nuit maudite on Lake Négresse. However, Maurice Schérer appears in the festival’s official photo that Cocteau organized on the main beach: in the last row on the right, Schérer is the big beanpole hiding under his cap.59
The Gazette du cinéma
In October 1949 Maurice Schérer published a review of the Festival du Film Maudit in Biarritz in a small film magazine for which he provided most of the articles, Le Bulletin du ciné-club du Quartier Latin. This monthly, which had been published since April 1949 as a supplement to the neighborhood newspaper, LHebdo-Latin, was run by Frédéric Froeschel, who signed its editorials. This bulletin presented the film club’s programs: in it Schérer published a few reviews—which he signed “M.S., CCQL discussion leader”—of special sessions. In March 1950, he had an article on René Clair’s participation in the session on his 1933 film Quatorze juillet, cosigned by François Truffaut (it was Truffaut’s first published article), and another on Jean Renoir’s presence for the showing of an unedited version of Rules of the Game (also written with Truffaut). Jacques Rivette was another author who made frequent contributions, notably an important article, “Nous ne sommes plus innocents,” published in March 1950. This is a veritable New Wave manifesto in which the twenty-year-old Rivette asks the rising generation to embrace a reflective and melancholy cinema that has to be realized in the simplest way possible: “We are dying of rhetorical asphyxia and intoxication: we have to go back to a cinema of simple writing. To put on film the manifestations, the way of life and being, the behavior of the cosmos; to film in a cold, documentary way, where the camera is reduced to the role of a witness, of an eye. And Cocteau has rightly introduced the notion of indiscretion. We have to become voyeurs.”60
In May 1950 Maurice Schérer went further, creating La Gazette du cinéma. He chose a journalistic title that was very old regime—an allusion to the Gazette that Théophraste Renaudot founded in 1631, the first French periodical—and was well-suited to its traditionalist spirit. But La Gazette du cinéma was not in any way anecdotal; on the contrary, it was overflowing with ambition. Commercially registered by “Maurice Schérer, publication director” on May 27 and June 5, 1950, the monthly’s statutes and motivations were clear:
One of the goals of this new review of film criticism and news, which is absolutely independent of any organization, is to contribute to the expansion of the movement undertaken by film clubs to promote a greater knowledge and a more effective comprehension of the art of film. The editors of our review have secured the regular collaboration of Claude Mauriac, André Bazin, Roger Leenhardt, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Lo Duca, Pierre Bailly, Jean Boullet, Alexandre Astruc, Maurice Schérer, etc.61
La Gazette du cinéma had prestigious contributors, an affordable price of 15 francs, four large-format pages on glossy paper, and was available in a dozen Paris bookshops; it was published under the auspices of the Librairie du Minotaure, which specialized in the seventh art.
Schérer was able to launch La Gazette because he had the help of Francis Bouchet, a devoted, resourceful young man who was also a movie lover, whom he met at the same time as he met Jacques Rivette. The two younger men had gotten to know each other four years earlier at the Oiseaux film club in Rouen. There, in an isolated house on the heights above the provincial city, they had made an initial short film, Aux quatre coins, in 16 mm. In 1948 they moved to Paris, where Bouchet met Roger Cornaille, who hired him to work in his Minotaure bookstore. Bouchet aided Schérer, serving as a kind of editorial assistant. He had enough ambition for both of them: why not take advantage of the decline of L’Écran français to launch “an unbiased film journal that was curious, learned, and intelligent”62 and could bring together cinephiles from both left and right around the common love of films? Not a review but a real newspaper: “Our model was Le Monde,”63 Bouchet admits, referring to his beginner’s audacity. A Monde of cinema, on four large pages per month, mixing Schérer’s young friends from the CCQL with the best-known writers of the new criticism. Thanks to Georges Kaplan, Schérer’s student at Sainte-Barbe, who had been promoted to editor in chief alongside Francis Bouchet and whose father owned the Maison du Livre Étranger on the rue Éperon, La Gazette found a printer, the Beresniak company on rue Lagrange. An art gallery run by Nina Doucet on the rue Dragon provided a home for the venture.
However, the true headquarters was the Royal Saint-Germain, a bistro on the famous boulevard Saint-Germain, where the editorial committee met several times a week from ten in the evening until midnight. Those who attended included, in addition to Schérer, Bouchet, and Kaplan, the most regular contributors: Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard—then better known under the Germanic pseudonym Hans Lucas—Pierre Bailly, Jean Domarchi, Étienne Chaumeton, Guy Lessertisseur, and Jean Douchet. Douchet recalled the wrap-ups: “La Gazette was discussed in a bistro and it was produced in the little room where Schérer lived. The ritual of crackers and tea meticulously prepared by le grand Momo was already being established. The venture of La Gazette in 1950 foreshadowed Les Cahiers du cinéma.”64 Gégauff also came by regularly. François Truffaut volunteered for the army and was sent to Germany. “My old fellow,” he wrote to Schérer (who was a dozen years his junior),
I hope you’re going to devote your best efforts to La Gazette instead of making vague, inaudible, hermetic films. I’m undergoing training for Indo-China. It’s hell: I’m being martyred, subjected to incredible discipline, overworked, trudging through snow or in mud up to my belly, going on forced marches with 32 kilograms on my back…I’ve made up my mind, now I’m ready to put a halt to all this by becoming the editor of an informational magazine for the TOA [troops of occupation in Germany] in Baden-Baden. I need a letter from you. I’d be paid 30,000 francs a month, promoted to a higher rank, and I could fuck until I dropped and smoke until I couldn’t talk; in short, I’d be living in an earthly paradise. I just need you to write on a letterhead: “I certify that M. François Truffaut was an editor of the monthly magazine La Gazette du cinéma from May to October 1950. He did a series of seven reports and twenty-two critical articles or film analyses for us. We were entirely satisfied with his work and he left La Gazette du cinéma of his own accord to pursue his military career.” Don’t laugh, I’m completely serious.65 If you make a film, don’t forget that cinema is an art of the small, inconspicuous detail, and that it consists in doing lovely things to lovely women. Please say hello to Rivette for me. Don’t forget that on the other side of the Rhine a friend is counting on you: if I die in Indo-China, it’ll be your fault!66
Truffaut later tried to desert, but was caught and ended up in a military prison.
Three thousand copies of the first issue of La Gazette du cinéma were printed in late May 1950. Distribution was a problem from the outset, because the kiosks did not sell La Gazette. So film lovers—led by Bouchet, Kaplan, and Schérer—hawked the newspaper in front of movie theaters on the place de l’Odéon and in cafés on the boulevard Saint-Germain. Bouchet wrote that “he did so, but discreetly, with a certain reticence.”67 However, Rohmer was to speak of this period as one of the happiest of his life: “We already knew each other so well, and we talked about films. The period of grace in which we all liked the same things in cinema had arrived. That was the time when La Gazette du cinéma was founded. It was naïve to launch into that; I’d financed part of it, and friends had given a little money as well. But we were lucky, we found customers among the members of the film club, and we made a profit on the newspaper’s first issues.”68
In five issues (and six months of existence, from May to November 1950), La Gazette du cinéma published about twenty significant articles, as well as notes on current films and the main film festivals. Alexandre Astruc wrote the lead article in the first issue, “Notes sur la mise en scène,” in which he contrasted theater and cinema. The following month, it was Jean-Paul Sartre who was on the front page of La Gazette. This was a great editorial coup. Francis Bouchet had met Sartre’s secretary, Jean Cau, at Gallimard, and gotten him to give the first issue to the philosopher. Sartre liked it and offered the paper a scoop, a long text running over two issues, “Le cinéma n’est pas une mauvaise école,” that praised a cinematic education and greatly pleased the CCQL group. It was a flashback to twenty years earlier, in which Sartre saw himself again as a young teacher in a lycée in Le Havre, and admitted how much he had been moved to return to the movie theater and to the “art that did not yet know it was an art”69 that had shaped his childhood. In this autobiographical article, the philosopher, who was at that time a central figure in French intellectual life, recognized the importance of “a cinematic education” in his career. In another important piece Jean Douchet went to Equirre in northern France where The Diary of a Country Priest was being made and came back with an interview with Robert Bresson.
In September 1950 the lead article, “Pour un cinéma politique,” was signed by Jean-Luc Godard,70 then a young critic of nineteen. It was one of his first articles, and in it he praised, surprisingly enough, Stalinist cinema, taking a view opposite to that of the readers and his friends. On the basis of a certain number of films seen in the shambles of the CCQL, Godard lauded the beauty of the bodies, the lyricism of the movements, and the vital energy of a cinema that he judged on a strictly formal basis. He went even further in his effrontery when he lumped the cinema of propaganda into a coherent whole and praised the other side, Nazi films—which, from the point of view he adopted, amounted to the same thing: Leni Riefenstahl’s “sensational” shots and the “maleficent ugliness of the Eternal Jew.” In the name of that aesthetics of political engagement, Godard deplored the gratuity and emptiness of French cinema, which he urged to learn from the epic: “You French filmmakers who lack scenarios, you wretches, why have you still not filmed the distribution of taxes, the death of Philippe Henriot, or the marvelous life of Danielle Casanova?”71 Striking one blow on the right (Henriot, the collaborationist pamphleteer), another on the left (Casaova, the Communist member of the Resistance), Godard confused the issue and sought to shock the left-wing intellectual. Starting with its fourth issue, in October 1950, La Gazette adopted a smaller format, making it possible to increase the number of pages to eight. Another young critic, twenty years old, occupied an increasingly important role: Jacques Rivette published a damning front-page summary of the second Festival du Film Maudit in Biarritz and contributed, in the fifth issue, a long article on Alfred Hitchcock’s most recent film, Under Capricorn. There was no sixth issue, because the review was not sufficiently profitable. Francis Bouchet explains: “We were stuck. One day in November 1950 the printer, to whom we owed money, told us: ‘It’s over.’ It was as sudden as that.”72
Compared to Astruc, Rivette, or Godard, Maurice Schérer wrote relatively few articles for La Gazette du cinéma; he mainly wrote notes on old films seen at the Cinémathèque (Chaplin’s City Lights, Carl Theodore Dreyer’s Två Människor, D. W. Griffith’s One Exciting Night). At first he played a directing role and had others write rather than writing himself. However, in November 1950, he explained how he fell under the spell of Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli. This article is essential because Rossellini’s film was a revelation for Schérer: “Personally I see only a few works that in our time so magnificently and so directly praised the Christian idea of grace, and that without rhetoric, by the evidence alone of what it shows us, proclaims more openly the wretchedness of man without God. It may be that today cinema is the only one of all the arts that is able to move on these heights without stumbling, the only one that can still make room for the aesthetic category of the sublime.” Schérer saw Rossellini’s film, which starred Ingrid Bergman, in a preview showing in early September 1950. It marked an important stage in his life, a conversion. “It was Rossellini who turned me away from existentialism,” he acknowledged. “That took place in the middle of Stromboli. In the first minutes of the film I recognized the limits of the Sartrian realism to which I believed the film was going to limit itself. I hated the way of seeing the world it encouraged me to take, until I understood that it was also encouraging me to move beyond it. And then the conversion happened. That’s what is amazing about Stromboli, it was my road to Damascus: in the middle of the film I was converted and I changed my way of seeing things.”73
Moreover, the appearance of the pseudonym “Éric Rohmer,” or at least its first public use, dates from this time. On the front page of the third issue of La Gazette, for September 1950, we find “Director: Éric Rohmer.” The use of a pseudonym was common in the press and a few of the young critics close to Schérer had used one: Jean-Luc Godard was already “Hans Lucas,” François Truffaut was soon to be “Robert Lachenay” or “François de Montferrand,” while Claude Chabrol chose the alias “Jean-Pierre Gouttes.” In Schérer’s case it was not merely a matter of literary dandyism or a way of being able to place more articles in newspapers, but rather the idea of creating a double who would shield him from the eyes of his students, friends, and especially his family. In particular he wanted to spare his mother—who was so frightened by his examination failures, so concerned about his teaching career, so preoccupied with having a good reputation and with Catholic humility—the shame of knowing that her son was an artist or a bohemian.
As we have seen, in the spring of 1946 the novel Élisabeth was published under an initial pseudonym, “Gilbert Cordier.” In late 1949 a second pseudonym appeared; it is all the more mysterious because it never had a public incarnation: “Antony Barrier.” He was an experimental filmmaker, an avant-garde artist; a few of his short films were shown at the sessions of the Latin Quarter film club. In January 1950 an article on Antony Barrier was published in the Bulletin du ciné-club du Quartier Latin by “Jean d’ER” (sic), which looks like a first step, via the initials, toward “Éric Rohmer.” If Schérer chose “Rohmer,” it was perhaps by pure invention, pure imagination—the filmmaker always backed that interpretation—but isn’t it possible to see in it a twofold personal reference? Sax Rohmer (itself a pseudonym for Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward) was a popular English writer whom Schérer had read, an author of crime novels and the creator of the character Fu Manchu; his books had been translated into French in the 1920s. Then there is Régis Rohmer, a curator at the archives of Corrèze in Tulle and a historian of the Hundred Years’ War, whom Schérer must have known about because his father had worked with him. But what about “Éric”? It may be an anagram of Maurice Schérer’s own name (Maurice Schérer). This was the first time that such a forename appeared in Schérer’s life and work, but it was already better than Gilbert.
First Short Films
Maurice Schérer had all the greater need for a pseudonym when he began making his first films, an activity his mother would have regarded as even more disreputable. Several of these films have been lost, or else destroyed. Some have nonetheless resurfaced after fifty years: for example, Bérénice, in the form of a forgotten VHS tape found in a corner of Rohmer’s study. And The Kreuzer Sonata, whose images were in the offices of Films du Losange, while the sound track was in Rohmer’s personal archives.74 Maurice Schérer’s desire for cinema perfectly illustrates a preference for 16 mm film peculiar to the period, as Jean Cocteau said in Combat in 1949: “The 16 mm camera is not only an apparatus but also a spirit. It is cinema returning to its basis, given a freedom that is almost always paralyzed by money and by the weight and lack of flexibility of 35 mm cameras and their rails.”75 This predilection for 16 mm is crucial: in the late 1940s, many of the desires for stories, fictions, narratives, and stagings were imagined and realized in 16 mm, the typical format used by young filmmakers. In the late 1940s, Alexandre Astruc, who himself made this kind of film, wrote in La Gazette du cinéma: “The cinema has already changed the face of intellectual history. Today, a Descartes would hole up in his room with a 16 mm camera to film, or try to write while filming, the Discourse on Method.”76
Schérer was also a supporter of 16 mm, of these filmed essays arising from the spirit of amateurism and lightweight technology. However, on one occasion, writing in Les Temps modernes in 1949, he was skeptical: “Let us give up basing too great hopes on the use of 16 mm. Except for some documentaries that have the advantage of dealing with an exceptional subject, as in the case of Jean Rouch’s excellent films about black Africa, we see only too many pseudocinematographic poems in which the lone hero, wandering about as if sleepwalking, has nothing to offer a fidgety camera but the features of a face distorted by cheap anguish. Nothing seems capable of replacing a studio with its homogenous lighting and movable walls. Up to this point, 16 mm appears to be nothing more than a school, albeit an excellent one, for those who burn with the sacred fire and are not afraid to make films that will never be shown.”77 An odd text in which the author begins by rejecting technical amateurism in favor of quality filmmaking in a studio and then treats it as a possible training ground for young people who are driven by “the sacred fire”—that is, himself.
Once he moved beyond these hesitations, Rohmer showered unreserved praise on amateur filmmaking, a school of cinema he defended for himself and his friends in the CCQL. The exercise was profitable, because it made it possible to assert oneself while at the same time regenerating cinema by the simplicity and poverty of its means. While 16 mm was an economic necessity, it was also a claim: it is both a good school and an opportunity to make films rapidly, lightly, as if the filmmaker saw himself as compelled to invent. In October 1949, the Bulletin of the Latin Quarter film club announced the creation of a “group on the work of the filmmaker Antony Barrier” organized by “three young members of the film club,”78 who were in fact Schérer and his two students from Sainte-Barbe, Froeschel and Kaplan. Thus we enter the Antony Barrier period, about whom some mad fantasies have been propagated, notably by Paul Gégauff, who presents him as a perverse, fetishistic, sexually obsessed experimental filmmaker. In one of his rare comments on the subject Rohmer explained that “I had a colleague at Sainte-Barbe who taught courses on theater for his own amusement and produced plays. For my part, I amuse myself by teaching courses on cinema. One of my students, Kaplan, objected: ‘But sir, you criticize this or that film, you should make some!’ I replied that I had no camera. ‘I have one, sir, I’ll lend it to you.’ That’s how I began to make movies.”79
With film lent by the Latin Quarter film club, Schérer and his two young companions invented a filmmaker for whom they organized collections at the sessions. They gave him a voice in the Bulletin, then made 16 mm shorts that were shown during some of the CCQL’s meetings. Paul Gégauff played in some of these little films; Rivette edited them; and Godard shot a few scenes, his first for the cinema.
Antony Barrier was introduced in the CCQL’s Bulletin in November 1949, in a report by Chantal Dervey (no doubt another pseudonym) on the making of a 16 mm film in front of Notre-Dame, directed by “a tall fellow with short brown hair wearing a khaki shirt, Antony Barrier, a young American avant-garde film director who has just won the prize given in the United States for the best amateur film.”80 The report continues: “We see that Antony Barrier makes maximum use of the most recent technical discoveries. The couple moves toward the camera until the viewfinder frames the heroine’s mouth, at the very moment when the hero reveals to her the secret she had been trying to make him confess to her. The 16 mm camera is a marvelous instrument.”81 Two months later, Schérer himself, concealed behind the pseudonym Jean d’ER, wrote a wildly enthusiastic review82—which he invented from A to Z—of Barrier’s supposed film The Boy of the Portrait (J’aurais pu vous aimer). André Bazin, in Cinémonde, “had to surrender to Antony Barrier, who has been able, to the third degree, to extract from the very superficiality of the profound all the profundity that it contains,” while Jean Boullet in La Semaine de Suzette, Armand Cauliez in La Revue du cinéma, Claude Mauriac in Les Temps modernes, and Frédéric Froeschel in Pravda were overcome by delight on discovering the film’s “controlled audacities.” Obviously Maurice Schérer, in La Revue surréaliste, expressed tautologically his admiration for…himself: “I like this film very much. Finally cinema that is cinema because it refuses to be cinema. The originality of the subject is that it is without pretension and has a very classical simplicity. In what does its novelty consist? it will be asked. But doesn’t progress often consist in moving backward?”83 Schoolboyish humor, self-parody, childishness—Rohmer’s tone is found entire in these often secret meanders that juxtapose the most elevated thought about cinema with the most ironic mockery of it.
According to the concordant testimony of Labarthe, Chabrol, and Rivette, Antony Barrier soon showed his first films at the CCQL, in the spring of 1951. They all mention having seen D’amour et d’eau fraîche: rhapsodie sexuelle sur Saint-Germain-des-Prés, also known as Sexual Rhapsody, an investigative film conducted by a young American artist. André Labarthe recalls “a [pendulaire] shot filmed by Rivette, who was very proud of it,” and describes one of the first of Godard’s shots, the one that ended the film: “For a rather long time, you looked at a street urinal, and finally a girl came out of it.”84
In spring of 1950, Éric Rohmer made his first film under his own pseudonym, Journal d’un scélérat (The diary of a scoundrel). It was thirty minutes long, was filmed in black and white, and starred Paul Gégauff. Although the film itself was almost entirely lost, a ten-page, handwritten scenario remains. The main character, “H.,” is a seducer who moves from woman to woman, clearly inspired by Gégauff. From his window, he has spotted a pair of lovers who regularly meet on a bench, Françoise and Bernard. He cannot wait to seduce the girl, which he succeeds in doing with the help of a thug, Frédéric, who threatens to rape her. Comforting her, persuading her to go to his apartment so that he can give her a piano lesson, H. makes love to her and ends up abandoning her when Bernard learns that he has been betrayed. He returns to his cat and his piano.
On the back of a bill from LCM Laboratories dated June 13, 1950, Schérer wrote down editing notes, mentioning the two main actors: “Paul” [Gégauff] in the role of H…and “Josette” [Sinclair]85 in the role of Françoise. Finally, a manila envelope sent from Paris by Georges Kaplan on July 28, 1950, to Maurice Schérer, who was then visiting his parents in Tulle, contains fragments of a 16 mm negative. The title in the credits is clearly visible, and some forty fragments of twenty frames each make it possible to reconstitute about one minute of the film: we see Gégauff, half-naked, taking a fully dressed blonde woman in his arms while another woman, brunette and distant, watches.
The Jud Süss Affair
This period of intense moviegoing, criticism, and filmmaking ended in confusion and polemics. If La Gazette abruptly ceased publication in the autumn of 1950, it was not solely because of the accumulated debts to the printer Beresniak. And if at the same time Maurice Schérer and Frédéric Froeschel ceased working with the Latin Quarter film club, it was not simply because they had moved on to other things. The atmosphere had deteriorated. After Gégauff, drunk and violent, had for the umpteenth time broken a bottle and threatened customers, La Gazette’s team had been thrown out of its headquarters at the bistro Royal Saint-Germain. Francis Bouchet, who was tired of these constant shenanigans and was more left-wing, close to the communists, distanced himself from the group and went off to do his eighteen months of military service. Furthermore, the methods Froeschel used to attract people to the film club’s sessions were based on provocation, the attempt to do something attention-getting: for example, he had a man walk up and down the boulevard Saint-Germain wearing a sandwich board and promised to show Nazi propaganda films such as Veit Harlan’s Jud Süss (1940) or Hans Steinhoff’s Hitlerjunge Quex (1933). This focused attention on the CCQL and drew a response from communist students while at the same time mobilizing neo-Nazis who showed up ready to fight.
In October 1950, this tactic worked a little too well. It provoked a major protest demonstration and a scandal on the national scale. Hundreds of students from Jewish associations, war veterans, former deportees, and communist, socialist, or Catholic militants assembled in front of the movie theater on the boulevard Saint-Germain and demanded the prohibition of the showing of Jud Süss that had been scheduled for October 6. On October 3, Paris police headquarters issued an order prohibiting the showing. “Considering the posters put up on the public streets announcing the showing of the film Jud Süss at the Latin Quarter film club; considering that the film Jud Süss, which is Hitlerian in inspiration, lacks the visa of ministerial authorization, that it is surrounded by publicity, and is for that reason likely to cause serious disturbances of public order: (1) the Latin Quarter film club’s showing of Jud Süss on Friday, October 6, 1950, at the Cluny Palace theater is prohibited; (2) the chief of the municipal police and the officers under his command are to execute the present decree.”86
On the morning of October 3, the police occupied the Cluny Palace, seized piles of the Gazette du cinéma and material suspected of being neo-Nazi propaganda, and then went to the Hôtel de Lutèce on the rue Victor-Cousin to arrest the president of the CCQL, Maurice Schérer, while another police squad arrested the CCQL’s commercial director, Frédéric Froeschel, at his apartment at number 3, boulevard Saint-Michel. A few days later, in the National Assembly a deputy addressed the minister of the interior, demanding “the cessation of these provocations that openly appeal to the darkest times,”87 and expressed his wish that the film club and its financing be investigated. According to all the testimony given directly to the police, Froeschel did not have a copy of Jud Süss; it was a nothing but a publicity stunt. That is what saved the two film lovers, who were held for only one day and were released without being indicted or tried.
However, the CCQL smelled of brimstone: that was the end of its direction by Schérer and Froeschel. On December 1, 1950, the UFOCEL (Union française des offices du cinéma éducateur laïque) filed a complaint against Schérer and Froeschel for “fraudulent affiliation.”88 Froeschel’s father, exasperated by these repeated scandals, denounced the CCQL, which claimed to belong to the UFOCEL, and decided that he would no longer financially guarantee the film club. A month and a half after the Jud Süss affair, the secretary of the UFOCEL, Marcel Cady, resolved to settle the matter and demanded that Maurice Schérer and his young assistant resign. His letter was threatening: “I would rather not have to reveal all the reasons that have led to the exclusion of your association in the event of an investigation.”89 Schérer obeyed: he resigned as president of the CCQL. Three months later, the film club, having been purged, resumed its activities with a new director, Jean-Michel Aucuy, who this time affiliated the club with the International Avant-garde Film Group (Cercle international du film d’avant-garde). In March and April 1951, the club’s bulletin reappeared under the title Bulletin du nouveau CCQL. On the program for the following May 25 was Jud Süss, but in the “anti-racist 1934 version”90 starring Conrad Veidt, which had been made by Lothar Mendes in England. That was a way of exorcising the affair.
Moreover, the last issues of La Gazette du cinéma gave rise to a virulent polemic on occasion of the second Festival du Film Maudit in Biarritz, in September 1950. They led to a major break among French cinephiles. Organized by Objectif 49 and run by Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, this festival was strongly criticized by the upcoming generation of cinephiles gathered around the CCQL and La Gazette du cinéma. Jacques Rivette launched the offensive in issue number 4, reproaching the Objectif 49 team for its claim to superiority and its arrogance, and also for its bad choice of films. “It remains for us to render our verdict,” the young critic wrote at the end of his article. “Objectif asked us to attend, but didn’t show up. What conclusion can we draw but this one: ‘Objectif destroys.’ ”91 This dispute is important, because it reflects the fragmentation of French criticism: the generation of Bazin, Doniol-Valcroze, Objectif 49, and the new criticism was opposed by another ten years younger, that of the CCQL and La Gazette du cinéma, people like Rivette, Godard, Truffaut, and Chabrol, a generation led by the elder Schérer. The choice of films, the critical arguments, the place in the cinematographic milieu, the ideological positioning—all that differentiated them, sometimes in a radical way. Maurice Schérer found himself in a strange place, uncomfortable but strategic. By his age and culture, he seemed already part of the new criticism, a member of Objectif 49, conversing with Bazin, Doniol-Valcroze, and Astruc on equal terms. But he felt closer to the younger cinephiles, who were provocative, sometimes violent, and made themselves look like hoodlums or were politically unsavory. Gégauff and Froeschel embodied this group to the highest degree, fascinating in the way of young intellectuals at odds with the establishment. When in 1951 the older cinephiles founded Cahiers du cinéma, a review that became the center of French writing about film, the younger ones dreamed of only one thing: taking the citadel by assault. Maurice Schérer was to play a pivotal role in this critical battle.
The Beginnings of Cahiers du cinéma: the “Schérer school”
Léonide Keigel was a developer and film distributor, a Resistance fighter, and a member of Objectif 49 who owned the Broadway, one of the finest movie theaters in Paris, located at the foot of the Champs-Élysées. In late autumn 1950, he decided to invest in a project proposed to him by Jacques Doniol-Valcroze: a review that would perpetuate the memory of La Revue du cinéma and thus honor its founder, Jean George Auriol. The project had been rejected by all the publishers Doniol-Valcroze had previously contacted, notably by Le Seuil. Gallimard, the publisher of La Revue du cinéma, had not granted the right to use its title, but the model was there: small format, rather long, well-behaved texts composed in a literary mode by well-known critics, writers, and filmmakers, a few elegant full-page or half-page illustrations, with a yellow cover. The first issue of the new review, whose offices were at number 146, avenue des Champs-Élysées, appeared in early April 1951: Les Cahiers du cinéma was born.92 Its editor in chief, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, had as collaborators André Bazin, the leading critic of the time,93 and Joseph-Maria Lo Duca, who had worked for La Revue du cinéma and was soon to disappear from the masthead.
Cahiers du cinéma asserted itself with a certain prestige as the meeting place of the new criticism, the flagship of the motley group of fragile and ephemeral publications that made up postwar France’s cinephile fleet: Raccords, LÂge du cinéma, Les Amis du cinéma, Saint Cinéma-des-Prés, La Gazette du cinéma, and others. Doniol-Valcroze, who was around thirty, was an elegant, affable, polite man who had genuine literary and musical culture. He came from a large Protestant family in Geneva. A leftist and a former member of the Resistance, he got involved in cinema after the Liberation, at the behest of Jean George Auriol. Diplomatic, seductive, and a ladies’ man, he gathered all kinds of competence around him. He was the one who coined the review’s title, in February 1951, during a discussion in a café with Bazin and Keigel; it was he who contacted personally most of the critical writers who were contributing to Cahiers du cinéma. He made things run smoothly, managed to reconcile contraries, maintained the best possible relations with the institutions of French cinema, went to meet recognized filmmakers, and aided by his wife Lydie, who was the copy editor, handled most of the everyday work: preparing each issue, ordering supplies, reading contributions, rereading them, doing layout and production, and organizing delivery to subscribers.
The critical soul of Cahiers was André Bazin, who was surely one of the world’s most important “cinema writers.”94 In 1951, at the age of 33, he was already a leading figure, and he was the review’s conscience. Thanks to his countless articles—two thousand six hundred in fifteen years—written for diverse periodicals (Esprit, LÉcran français, France Observateur, Le Parisien libéré, Radio-Cinéma-Télévision, Cahiers du cinéma, Arts, and others) until his death in November 1958, Bazin provided the tone, the opinion, the analysis, and the theoretical depth, but also the line, because he was not the last to enter a dispute when he thought it necessary to do so: against Sartre regarding Orson Welles; against Louis Daquin, Georges Sadoul, and the communists regarding American cinema or the myth of Stalin in Soviet films; against all the young critics whom he repeatedly accused of “neoformalism,”95 the cult of style at the risk of ignoring the questions of the present time, even of drifting to the right. In the couple they formed in the direction of Cahiers du cinéma, Doniol-Valcroze was the publisher, the diplomat, the representative of the review to the outside; Bazin was the brains, the pedagogue, and the writer, the guarantee of a certain coherence in the line taken and critical points of view. He was incontestably the one who attracted (and sometimes worried) the youngest cinephiles, for whom he was either a spiritual father96 or an intimidating authority or a guardrail: he was the one who ultimately decided whether a text would or would not appear in Cahiers.
It was logical that Maurice Schérer, who had contributed to La Revue du cinéma and was already a well-known critic, should soon publish work in Cahiers. His first piece, commissioned by Doniol-Valcroze, appeared in issue number 3, in June 1951. The eight-page article was entitled “Vanité que la peinture” and, drawing mainly on examples taken from Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North and from F. W. Murnau’s Tabu and Sunrise, demonstrated the glory of cinema, which replaces painting in the order of the arts by refounding beauty on the basis of capturing the movement of things themselves. Cinema is the art of its century because it naturally combines aesthetic representation with realism, whereas all the other arts are now compelled to exaggerate, to provoke, to take refuge in grimaces. Schérer’s text made a great impression, and at the time the very young Claude Chabrol even went so far as to call it “the most trenchant article on cinema that has ever been published.”97
Over a period of four years, Schérer contributed a dozen important pieces to Cahiers.98 He did not scatter himself, and established his reputation by the quality of his writings, not by their number. His work is characterized by a remarkable consistency of choice and line: among contemporaries he discussed almost exclusively Renoir—the American or postwar Renoir, which was unusual—Hitchcock,99 Rossellini,100 Howard Hawks,101 and Fritz Lang,102 whereas among the earlier filmmakers he wrote mainly about Murnau, whom he showed to be a major author in the history of cinema. There is only one incongruous oddity in the absolutely coherent corpus of early texts published in Cahiers, and that is the choice to devote a long study, in March 1952, to Isidore Isou, an avant-garde lettriste whom Schérer managed to connect with “things as they are” and with an astonishing power of realistic imagination.
If Schérer rapidly established himself as an authoritative critic in Cahiers du cinéma, he nonetheless remained the leader of a group, continuing as the head of the CCQL. More than that: thanks to him, this faction published an increasing number of pieces in Cahiers. Schérer constantly had his young protégés write for it. The conquest of Cahiers soon became the objective of the group that had been orphaned by the demise of La Gazette. This did not happen without resistance or polemics, and the instrument of this critical strategy was Alfred Hitchcock, around whom controversies about cinema crystallized at this time.
The generally held opinion among critics, whether French or American, was that since he began working in Hollywood, Hitchcock had lost all originality and ambition, limiting himself to a superficial brilliance as a “master of suspense.” His films were popular, attracting millions of spectators, but many intellectuals scorned his decline to a mere moneymaker. In Cahiers du cinéma itself, this view was widely shared, notably by André Bazin, who did not care for Hitchcock, considering him artificial and vain. In November 1951, the review opened its columns to the skepticism of Herman G. Weinberg, its correspondent in New York and a promoter of cinema at MoMA. He reduced the “Hitchcock system” to a cynical “popcorn factory” intended to please young spectators: “Hitchcock tries desperately to dazzle us with technical tours de force and blows to the solar plexus. I fear that is no longer enough. He seems to no longer have much to say.”103 Hitchcock, who had not yet entered the pantheon of unchallenged masters, was the filmmaker about whom French critics argued at that time.
In March 1952, Jean-Luc Godard, then twenty-two years old and recommended by Schérer, wrote a piece on Strangers on a Train for issue number 10 of Cahiers, offering an ardent defense of Hitchcock’s film. With humor, the insolent young critic ended his article on a corrosive note: “The reader will have noted that every point in this article was directed against the editor in chief.” He could not have been clearer. According to him, Hitchcock had a “directorial virtuosity” that made him the equal of Abel Gance or Dreyer. Finally, and this is what establishes the filmmaker’s greatness, for Godard, Hitchcock is the true modern: “To be sure, Hitchcock challenges reality, but he does not escape from it; if he enters into the present, it is to give it the style it lacks.” Thus the director of Strangers on a Train is the only one who knows how to combine stylization and realism, making films based on “the inseparability of the camera, the filmmaker, and the camera operator with respect to the reality represented,” a formula taken word for word from Maurice Schérer’s critique of Notorious.
This praise of Hitchcock did not go unnoticed. Pierre Kast, a respected critic and a former member of the Resistance who was on the left, replied two months later, also in Cahiers: “I see, of course, what is concealed behind the Schérer school’s excessive, pleasantly hypocritical or youthfully paradoxical praise of Hitchcock’s recent manner.”104 Was this school, whose point of view Jean-Luc Godard had just expressed, the crucible of the new film criticism? The debate quickly flared up again as Hitchcock’s films came out or were shown again. Two months later the “Schérer school” expressed itself through the intermediary of its leader himself, apropos of The Lady Vanishes, a 1938 English film that some critics of the time considered its creator’s masterpiece. Schérer polemically insisted that this film, though “certainly perfect,” was “inferior to Rope or Strangers on a Train.” He asks: Why is Hitchcock so great just now and in Hollywood? “Because he is the one who pays the most attention to the brute power of the thing he is showing.”105 Schérer closes his article with a plea: “No, Hitchcock is not simply a technician, but one of the most original and most profound authors of the whole history of cinema.” The battle for the recognition of Alfred Hitchcock as an auteur was clearly launched in Cahiers du cinéma.
Challenged by Pierre Kast, Maurice Schérer responded in Cahiers (no. 26, August–September 1953) with the manifesto of this critical battle, an important stage in the conquest of the review by the group from the CCQL. The article was entitled “On Three Films and a Certain School,” an explicit reference to the “school” that was said to bear his name and to disturb Cahiers. As a kind of introduction and justification, he began by clarifying the point at issue:
Since Pierre Kast did me the honor of making me the leader of a school that perhaps shines more by the ardor of its adepts than by their number, a school that André Bazin placed at the extreme—I accept that—of critical dogmatism, let me speak as the interpreter of the tastes of a group that is, to be sure, a minority, but nonetheless a minority that is part of the editorship of a review whose eclecticism, within a common love of film, is a sufficient guarantee of its competence and seriousness.
Schérer then locates his adversaries on the critical terrain, suggesting that they speak from that “left that associates the cinematographic value of a work with the virulence of a certain social demand.” Finally, as a major component of his argument, Schérer proposes a triad of auteurs: rather than Huston, Chaplin, and De Sica, Bazin’s favorites, Schérer chooses Renoir, Rossellini, and Hitchcock. For him, the new films by these directors—Renoir’s The Golden Coach, Rossellini’s Europe 51, and Hitchcock’s I Confess—are the only ones that make it possible to “be modern.” All three of them offer a realism that reveals the profound inseparability of the material order and the spiritual order. In Hitchcock’s work, this involves a way of recording the real (the continuity of the action, suspense) that reveals “the mental torment visible on the hero’s face.” The hero’s face thus becomes “spiritual flesh.” Since Hitchcock was the only one of the three masters whose status was contested, Schérer concludes his manifesto by referring to him: “I want film criticism to finally free itself from the ideas dictated by its elders, to examine with new eyes and a new spirit works that I believe will prove much more important in the history of our time than the pale survivals of an art that no longer exists.”
But it was only in October 1954 that the controversy over Hitchcock in Cahiers came to an end with the victory of his supporters and the publication of a special issue entirely devoted to his work. This issue is a landmark, because it places Hitchcock at the center of a metaphysical, even Dostoyevskian, interpretation of an auteur haunted by the eyes of God.106 Schérer presents this interpretation in an article, “À qui la faute?” (Who is to blame?) that begins with this sly wink: “In this issue devoted to the most brilliant of technicians little attention will be given to technique. One must not be too surprised to find in it, instead of terms like ‘tracking,’ ‘framing,’ and ‘lens,’ and all the atrocious jargon of film studios, more noble and accurate terms such as ‘soul,’ ‘God,’ ‘devil,’ ‘concern,’ ‘redemption,’ and ‘sin.’ I can see the reader frowning. That may be all right for Renoir and Rossellini, who do not disdain philosophical traits, but does this master humorist deserve or even claim such an excess of honor? And yet…”
The final impediment to the review’s shift toward Hitchcock and its takeover by the Schérer school was André Bazin himself. Up to that point he had not intervened in his Cahiers regarding these quarrels. But Godard, Schérer, Rivette (in an important article on I Confess published in September 1953), and Truffaut and Chabrol (in their long interview with Hitchcock in the special issue) forced him to enter the debate. In issue number 27 (October 1953), Bazin took an explicit position supporting John Huston, a committed left-wing filmmaker who was critical of America, against Hitchcock, whom he limited to the role of a superficially brilliant technician. “Since I am reproached for shaking my head on hearing Hitchcock’s name,” he wrote, “to clarify my view I shall say that it seems to me obvious that the creator of I Confess has a personal style, that he is the inventor of original cinematographic forms, and that in this sense his superiority to Huston could be considered incontestable. But I nonetheless maintain that John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage or even The African Queen are works far superior to Strangers on a Train. Because the subject also counts for something, after all!”107 Although there was a basic understanding between Bazin and the young writers grouped around Maurice Schérer regarding themes such as realism or the correspondence between the material and the spiritual in art, they could establish no dialogue on certain judgments of taste and certain choices that the Hitchcock dispute reveals. However, the Schérer school undoubtedly emerged from this critical duel stronger than ever.
Confronted by the group from the CCQL, which Doniol-Valcroze said was practicing “critical absolutism,”108 André Bazin could have protested. He could also have opposed its rise to power. But he was clear-sighted enough to see in this movement federated around Maurice Schérer the future of Cahiers du cinéma. Thus, in February 1955, the editor in chief asked himself: “How can one be a Hitchcockohawksian [trans. note: Apparently an amalgam of Hitchcock and (Howard) Hawks]?” and wondered about the motivations of the young Turks who were defending a pair of Hollywood filmmakers who were then still largely scorned. To be sure, he offers a critical analysis of the arguments and strategies of this “little group of our collaborators whose preferences run counter to generally received opinion.” But paradoxically he defends this school, recognizing its energy, passion, erudition, style, and tone. “Since there is a misunderstanding, let us try to understand precisely the adversary’s arguments”: that is in substance his reasoning, and it illuminates in a very suggestive way the main aspect of André Bazin’s personality: he listens to the Other. This tolerance allowed the Schérer school to take over Cahiers du cinéma in the mid-1950s.
“Life was the screen”
At that point, the little group led the life of cinephilia in Paris. However, everyone says that this life without money was rather dreary and meager. Cinephiles spent their time in movie theaters, in bistros where they discussed films, in editorial offices, and in tiny editing studios, swamped with work, avoiding social life and literary cafés, going out only enough to maintain a few professional relationships. That is what Éric Rohmer wrote:
For us, there were no “good years,” no “belle époque,” and ultimately, if we can make any claim, it would be to say, with Nizan: “I won’t let anybody say that the age of 20 was the best time of our lives.” Those years were not the most unhappy, but they were rather gray: we were living on hope alone, we weren’t living at all. When we were asked: “What do you live on?” we liked to reply: “We don’t live.” Life was the screen, it was cinema.109
Each person’s private life remained secret. A residue of puritanism remained in these young people. Between them there were, of course, bonds of friendship, but no familiarity. Godard put it well: “It was a little like the way it was in old Protestant families, we didn’t talk much about our lives. We were nevertheless experiencing things and knew what was going on, but we pretended that didn’t exist. We knew that so-and-so was so-and-so’s girlfriend, but that was all; what they said to one another was another world. It’s true that it was taboo, introverted. We were a kind of clergy—what is called une chapelle—did St. Paul and St. Matthew talk about their temptations?”110
Paul Gégauff, the most extroverted, left a somewhat more personal and intimate portrait of Maurice Schérer between the ages of 30 and 35, when he was still a bachelor, still living cheaply in his furnished room at the Hôtel de Lutèce. “He was a decent, honest fellow, very professorial,” Gégauff says. “Within the white walls of his room, everything counted, every penny, every cracker, every tea-bag. He remained very well-groomed, but severe, no frills of any kind. We were young and broke, and he always gave us a little money, but we had to give him some kind of proof, from a metro ticket to a train ticket, by way of the grocer’s bill.”111 Although he lived on little, in accord with a spirit of thriftiness that sometimes verged on stinginess, Maurice Schérer was already established in life. After his years working as a substitute teacher at the private Collège de Sainte-Barbe, or as a tutor at the Montaigne and Lakanal lycées, he applied to be taken into the National Education system as a secondary school teacher certified in classics and with the rank of bi-admissible. His age, his limited experience, and his status as a bachelor without children prevented him from being assigned to a post in Paris and even sent him rather far into the provinces. For several years, he refused to take up his post, preferring to teach in a nearby private school. In 1952, he was offered a position at the Henri-Brisson lycée in Vierzon, a little closer to Paris: 218 kilometers from the Latin Quarter. He was to teach there from September 1952 to end of the school year 1955.
Maurice Schérer’s archives preserve a few traces of this pedagogical activity, which basically took the form of courses on Latin and Greek. One of his groups of students gave him a copy of the official photo bearing this dedication on the back: “With fond memories from your students in 3e B.”112 The picture shows a tall, shy man amid sixteen students, fourteen-year-old boys and girls. In June 1954, he gave the speech at the prize award ceremony, on the theme of “the French spirit,” in which we sense both the pride in claiming a tradition and a certain self-mockery: “We academics are certainly not smothered by the weight of traditions. There is nothing austere or starchy in us, as there is in so many schools in old Europe. Our external appearance is affable, familiar, very modern. No old-fashioned uniforms, no beards or mortar boards, and our lycée is one of the last to maintain even the tradition that allows me to address you today. And yet the basic content of our teaching, our programs, our methods, have varied less over the past century than in other more conformist countries.”113 All this left no deep mark on Maurice Schérer, who recalled little about these years of frequent trips to Vierzon, “a not very interesting town”: “In the train on the way back, I often ran into a man who smoked a great deal, which made me shy away. But by his remarks, I understood that he taught philosophy at the Henri-Brisson lycée. One day, I learned that his name was Gilles Deleuze, but I never spoke to him.”114 Real life was elsewhere, at Cahiers du cinéma, where he was taking charge along with his young friends, and in the films that he already had in his head.
Projects were multiplying, henceforth signed or cosigned “Éric Rohmer.” Le Carrefour du monde, dated May 1951, is a very ambitious, sixteen-page scenario very unusual among those of Rohmerian inspiration, a kind of prefiguration of a historical film like Triple Agent, made fifty years later. It follows the character of Karel Carossa, a Hungarian fascist leader who has taken refuge in Paris. Pursued by Budapest’s communist secret service, he is led to commit suicide in the middle of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.115 In the same period we find the first version of a project to which Rohmer was to return several times, well into the 1960s, without ever being able to carry it out. It is another story of suicide, Une femme douce, a modern adaptation of a story by Dostoyevsky.116
With Paul Gégauff, Rohmer wrote La Roseraie, a film project that they published in the form of a short story in Cahiers du cinéma in September 1951. It greatly resembles the story Claire’s Knee written by Maurice Schérer two years earlier and made into a film twenty years later, though here the fetishism concerns the ear of a very young woman, under which an older man places a kiss. Rohmer also worked with François Truffaut, notably on a project entitled L’Église moderne; for a time they hoped Roberto Rossellini would make it into a film when he was living in Paris and hanging out with the young Turks. There was a real connection between “le grand Momo” and “la Truffe,” as is shown by this note scribbled by Truffaut to Schérer when he was feverishly preparing his very first short film, Une visite, in December 1954:
Old knave, dear villain, crooked friend, and scoundrel brother, this is to inform you that I have countless things to reproach you for, starting with, with…You’ll find out later! Know only that I’m offering you a chance to redeem yourself: you have to immediately lend me and also take to Cahiers everything you have in your lair that in any way resembles filmmaking equipment: lights, projectors, wires, film, money, etc. So stop messing around and phone me here at Cahiers, tomorrow if possible, otherwise you’ll soon hear from me. Everybody here is fond of you, but more than one of us will hate you if you turn out to be incapable of helping out your friends and acolytes. Ave Maurice, and hope to hear from you soon.117
But it was Godard to whom Rohmer was closest and with whom he shared several ideas for films: in particular a modern version of Faust, signed with the pseudonym Antony Barrier, in which the man sells his soul to the devil and becomes an abstract painter who decides to make a living by producing copies of Van Gogh. Mephistopheles is his agent, salesman, and gallery owner. When the painter, who has become rich, meets a young woman and wants to marry her, the police come up with a stratagem that allows them to arrest the artist and his mentor. In Éric Rohmer’s archives we also find a fifty-page scenario signed “Hans Lucas “ (as we have seen, this was Godard’s pseudonym) and entitled Odile; it was no doubt the very first scenario written by the future director of Breathless.
Rohmer and Godard also devoted a great deal of energy to a first ten-minute film, Présentation, which was based on a nine-page story Rohmer had written. He summed it up this way: “Idea that the strongest moment of the attachment is that of its betrayal. One never regrets so much what one is leaving, [as one does] at the moment when one makes up one’s mind to leave it forever.”118 The little film was actually made, in two days, one in December 1951, the other in February 1952. Alongside two actresses, Anne Coudret and Andrée Bertrand, Godard played the role of the young man, Walter—somber, black glasses and overcoat, freezing to death—who flirts with the two girls, Clara and Alice. During a strange cooking scene in which the flirtation becomes insistent, he ends up choosing Alice, who cooks a steak and shares it with him before giving him a quick kiss. Rohmer says he gave Godard this role with a certain enthusiasm: “I thought of him because he was handsome. I’ve always thought he was an actor. He has an actor’s body, and a slow, very distinguished way of speaking.”119 Godard helped locate the outside scenes, taking Rohmer, who wanted to film in the snow, to the ski resort of Saint-Cergues in the Swiss Jura Mountains, and then he helped construct the set of the kitchen in a Paris photography studio. Rohmer recalled: “I can see us again, Godard and me, sweating blood and water, carrying up the stairs a range that a neighborhood merchant had lent us. The pots and pans had been borrowed from the owner of my hotel. That’s the tragic-comic side of the beginnings. I really learned my trade through amateurism.”120 In May 1952 Cahiers du cinéma published the “story” of the film below a photo in which we see Godard, called “Nick Bradford,” with this caption: “After Présentation, Guy de Ray is going to make, in collaboration with Hans Lucas, a cinematographic story, Week-end d’amour.”
Though hardly conclusive—“It’s a film that is interesting as an archive, as a document,” Rohmer himself later said121—this vaudeville in the snow allowed Rohmer to meet Guy de Ray, who really existed: a cinephile photographer and young critic (he coauthored with Schérer a text published in Cahiers du cinéma); de Ray conceived an admiring friendship for Rohmer and did everything he could to find money—he was quite resourceful—to produce Rohmer’s first attempts at filmmaking.
The First New Wave Film
On October 30, 1952, Maurice Schérer signed a production contract for his first full-length film. He associated himself with Guy de Ray and Joseph Kéké, a representative of the Paris Consortium for Cinematographic Production (Consortium parisien de production cinématographique, CPPC), whose headquarters were in Montreuil, to make a film entitled Les Petites Filles modèles, with a budget estimated at 24.6 million old francs (about $70,000). The production company provided 16.4 million francs, while Schérer provided 8 million, and agreed, like the rest of the team, to work for a share of the profits. Guy de Ray contacted Joseph Kéké, a twenty-four-year-old student from Benin whose family fortune came from palm oil plantations in his country. He himself was colluding with his relative, Paulin Kéké, and it was these three who founded, on July 20, 1952, the CPPC, a film-producing company dedicated to financing Les Petites Filles modèles, since the latter was its only project.122
This contract123 is the proof of an immense ambition. It was the first attempt made by a critic of the cinephile generation to accede directly to the production of a feature film without passing through the previously obligatory stage of assistantship. It was, in short, the first New Wave film.124 This precociousness is astonishing: at that time, the offensive against “quality French cinema” had not yet been launched in Cahiers du cinéma. To see possible alternatives formulated, one had to wait for the publication in January 1954 of François Truffaut’s “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français,” which denounced French “quality” and promoted the politics of auteurs. Les Petites Filles modèles was thus a case of practice preceding theory. This shows how much the criticism written by the young Turks was connected with their concrete cinematic ambitions, with their experiences of filming and editing movies.
Maurice Schérer loved nineteenth-century French authors, especially Balzac, a taste he shared with all the members of his “school.” But he had a special fondness for the Countess of Ségur, whom he had discovered as a child and then reread, as he said more than once, “every year.”125 In her work there are pre-Rohmerian characters. Of course, there are the girls, a motif that she established in French literature. But there is also a preoccupation with pedagogy, a concern for good manners and beautiful language, that may have touched the teacher of classical literature. The Countess of Ségur’s titles are also pre-Rohmerian: a collection of her short pieces is entitled Comedies and Proverbs. Finally, even the countess’s style seems to provide Rohmer with a text “almost ready to film right out of the book.”126 The abundance of dialogues, “particularly lively and fast-moving,”127 is a characteristic of her novels that is obviously preserved in Rohmer’s adaptation. He felt close to the Countess of Ségur because she does not emphasize her characters’ thoughts, preferring to describe their external actions. “Sophie Fichini’s adventures in Fleurville can compete with the most epic of Westerns,”128 he liked to say.
The novel Les Petites Filles modèles, which appeared in 1856, is set in Normandy, and follows the education of four little girls. It is a work without men, the fathers being either dead or absent. Camille, eight, and Madeleine, nine, live in the family chateau with their mother, Mme de Fleurville, and their maid, Élisa. After an accident—a carriage is overturned in a ditch—the survivors, Mme de Rosbourg and her daughter Marguerite, six, are invited to stay in the chateau. Then Sophie Fichini, eight, an orphan who lives nearby, arrives. Her haughty, cold stepmother has left for a trip to Italy, permanently abandoning Sophie. The curious and bold Sophie has become secretive, hypocritical, and insolent. Little by little, in contact with Camille, Madeleine, and Marguerite, and in the course of adventures that take them to the pond, the mill, the forest, and the path to the bread oven, where they face many dangers and several tests both physical and mental, Sophie learns the principles of virtue.
Rohmer’s archives contain several items important for tracing the work of adaptation, preparation, and then filming Les Petites Filles modèles, in particular, a hundred and fifteen handwritten pages in two school notebooks entitled simply “PFM” that outline his interpretation. However, this very literary scenario is divided, with the help of marginal annotations made in blue ink with a ballpoint pen, into three hundred and two shots, along with indications of the type of shot (three-quarter, wide, zoom, close-up), camera movements (tracking backward, tracking forward, panoramic), and shot/reverse shot scenes that indicate the author has carefully thought out the mode of shooting. The text has ten chapters corresponding to ten sequences of nine minutes each and to ten quasi-autonomous adventures.
The novel’s action takes place over a period of ten years; Rohmer deliberately condenses it into a few days and a ninety-minute scenario. Only the end of the summer has been changed; the arrival of the cousins is cut out and the family get-together refocused on Sophie’s adoption by Mme de Fleurville. The novel’s many moralizing commentaries have been abbreviated or omitted “in order to avoid slowing the rapid development of the story.”129 In general, the dialogues are preserved intact, and others are added, transposing into direct discourse passages that are conveyed indirectly in the novel. This also shows that the scenario is more than a mere film adaptation of the Countess of Ségur’s text Les Malheurs de Sophie, which Jacqueline Audry had already made into a film in 1946, using a scenario by Pierre Laroche. The latter imagined his heroine’s life as an adult, invented characters, and above all suggested a political interpretation of the period of the Second Empire. Rohmer considered this work “too free and easy,” whereas he claimed to have produced a “very faithful” adaptation that “followed the famous work to the letter.”130
A statement of intent explains the working conditions as the neophyte filmmaker conceived them in theory: “The making of this film must avoid the dangers of excessive expenditures. The conditions of its filming will not be very different from those of a fictionalized documentary. Scenes shot in a natural setting, with a minimum of technical equipment, mainly nonprofessional actors, no general director or set designer, since the owner of the chateau has kindly made what we need available to us. Only the costumes will be adapted or made from scratch, inspired by engravings in the Bibliothèque Rose.”131 That was a way of adapting to the financial limits of the budget (which amounted to about one-third of the usual financing of a French full-length film), but it was above all a kind of Rohmerian creed. It anticipates the way many of his later films were made, up to the 1990s: minimal crew and technical equipment, little-known or nonprofessional actors, natural settings, voluntarily doing without certain positions (set designer, assistant director, property person, dresser, make-up person), attention to the period style of costumes, documentary-style shots, filming in the order of the narrative and the scenario, and so on. The contract with members of the crew even stipulates one of the infrangible rules of life on Rohmer’s future sets, on-site lodging and meals—the latter prepared in this case by the mothers of the little actresses: “The difficulties of finding lodging in Normandy near the location where the film is to be made force us to lodge in the chateau of Champ-de-Bataille. The producers will provide for lodging, meals (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) and various other needs (laundry, etc.).”132 This is a veritable Discourse on Method of Rohmerian filmmaking.133
Writing less frequently for Cahiers du cinéma—he published nothing in that periodical from the summer of 1952 to March 1953—the new filmmaker devoted his time to preparing his first film. He contacted actresses: Josette Sinclair, who came from Nice and whom Gégauff had met while making Le Journal d’un scélérat, for the role of Mme de Fleurville, and Josée Doucet, who had been spotted in a short film made by Paul Paviot, Saint-Tropez, devoir de vacances, for the role of Mme de Rosbourg. He offered the role of the negative character Mme Fichini to Olga Varen (a.k.a. Olga Poliakoff), a friend of Rivette’s who had played in Le Divertissement in the spring of 1952 and was the elder sister of Odile Versois and Marina Vlady, with whom she had made her début on the Grenier-Hussenot company’s stage.
The casting of the little girls was more complicated, since Rohmer knew hardly anyone between the ages of seven and ten. Through acquaintances, he found Martine Laisné (Camille), Anna Michonze (Madeleine), and Catherine Clément (Marguerite), but he lacked a Sophie, the main character. So he hung around playgrounds, parks, and schoolyards, which did not fail to cause him certain problems that were probably exaggerated for comic effect by Claude Chabrol when he talked about this phase:
Intending to make a film of Les Petites Filles modèles, he thought it would be a good idea to seek his actresses 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.134
Finally, Rohmer found his Sophie on the street, not far from the Henri-IV lycée, walking alongside her mother with an ice-cream cone in her hand. Her name was Marie-Hélène Mounier, and she was eleven years old.
The whole film was made in natural settings in Normandy, where Rohmer looked for his “chateau of Fleurville.” After having considered shooting at the chateau of Gite, where the countess of Pitray, the Countess of Ségur’s granddaughter, had spent her childhood, he chose the chateau of Champ-de-Bataille, twenty-five kilometers from Évreux, near the village of Neubourg and surrounded by extensive grounds and a beautiful countryside. Built in the seventeenth century, it is a magnificent structure with two symmetrical wings embracing a formal courtyard, forty rooms, a French-style garden, and façades in the classical style. The production company rented it from the duke of Harcourt—at least one of the two buildings, the one with the living quarters—for a modest price, because the whole had not yet been restored and had suffered from its recent functions: it had been a hospital during the 1930s and had been requisitioned by the German army during the Occupation. There had been heavy fighting there after the landing in Normandy, and eight years afterward the chateau still showed signs of damage. The outbuildings were virtual ruins, the lovely garden was untended, and the paths had been destroyed in places by the treads of German tanks. However, Rohmer was quite satisfied when he visited this almost abandoned chateau in early June 1952 in the company of Guy de Ray: here was a place that he could pass off as the more modest home of the Ségurs—the one that inspired the countess in her novels.
The constitution of the technical crew completely escaped Rohmer. He thought he could call on his young friends, Jacques Rivette for the camera work and Jean-Luc Godard and Georges Kaplan as his assistants, more experienced technicians coming in only as complements, particularly for the equipment most difficult to handle, that concerning lighting and sound. But Rohmer, who wanted to film in a professional way, in 35 mm with synchronous sound, had to conform to the strict regulations of the CNC (Centre nationale de la cinématographie), which stipulated that unless a dispensation was granted, only those holding a professional certificate could hold the main positions during filming. The shots could be directed by a neophyte only with the help of a duly mandated technical advisor who had the real power over the filming. Rohmer was forced to yield and accepted a team improvised at the last minute.
Guy de Ray dealt with the CNC. On July 23, 1952, ten days before filming was to begin, he wrote to Rohmer:
Up to this point, everything is still going well. I’ve found a transformer and this afternoon I’m leaving for Neubourg. On Saturday I’m going with Mme Laisné to buy fabrics [for costumes], and I wish you could be there. I’m very annoyed because I absolutely cannot send you any money before Saturday morning, and it won’t get there until Monday. Don’t fail to take the ring to a jeweler and tell him that you’ll send the money next week to redeem the ring. The duke of Harcourt is very kind, but he wants me to take out fire insurance before occupying his chateau. Tomorrow morning I’ll try to hire Guilbaut [sic] and his wife as continuity people. Godart [sic] is terrible; he won’t arrive, I think, before next week. Don’t worry about anything, it will all be ready. Tixador is working hard, and for his part, the sound engineer seems as neutral as he is. I’m going to Neubourg to see about the electricity, the beds, a cook, and a maid. Regards.135
Here we have the most important technical assignments. Pierre Guilbaud, who had studied at IDHEC (Institut des hautes études cinématographiques) and was pursuing a respectable career as a first assistant, had been proposed by the CNC along with Henri Verneuil and Yves Allégret; he was joining as an advisor to the team that was being constituted. The camera operator André Tixador and the sound engineer Bernard Clarens (whose first job was working on Becker’s Rendez-vous de juillet) had already been chosen. Guilbaud suggested André Cantenys, his former classmate at IDHEC as first assistant, Jean-Yves Tierce as head camera operator, and his own wife, Sylvette Baudrot, as script girl; she had just worked with Jacques Tati on Les Vacances de M. Hulot and later pursued a long career with Alain Resnais, Gene Kelly, and Roman Polanski. Seven other technicians completed a crew that was still young but of genuine quality, relatively small for a film “in the French manner” at the time, and yet already much too large according to Rohmer’s conception of filmmaking.
An Unfortunate Adventure
When the whole team arrived at the chateau in early September 1952, an impressive amount of equipment was waiting for them there: two powerful arc lights, a generator, a camera trolley, and tracking rails. At the last minute, the first day of shooting had been delayed until the thirteenth. The filming was difficult.136 Living conditions in the chateau were impractical: the abandoned building had no running water, no telephone, and no heat. Everyone slept on the upper floor, on cots borrowed from the Neubourg army barracks. Various incidents impeded the progress of the filming: sudden transformer breakdowns, the noise made by tractors in the middle of plowing season. The generator was not powerful enough and it turned out to be impossible to light both the chateau and the forest at the same time, as Rohmer wanted for certain scenes.
However, the most serious problem was dissension within the team. Pierre Guilbaud, the technical advisor, says this about it:
My first impression was not very good. Rohmer was a neophyte, naïve, and soon encountered rather grave difficulties. For example, the notion of which way a character was looking did not exist for him, and often the shots could not be matched with one another. He didn’t think about the montage that was going to come later. He was learning his trade. He had preconceived ideas, came in with a storyboard and shots set in advance, and really had no awareness of the constraints.137
Conflicts with the crew were frequent, especially between Rohmer and the camera operator, André Tixador, or the script girl, Sylvette Baudrot.138 Most of the technicians soon became skeptical, and they ended up clucking over the way Rohmer directed the children who, according to the sound engineer Clarens, “spoke in a very false voice.”139 The children’s parents began to complain, particularly as autumn approached, with the first cold spells, weariness, and the scenes in the pond, where the girls had to go into the frigid water.
Rohmer was isolated, uneasy, forced to accept compromises that he considered fatal, and had hardly any allies on the shoot, even though he could count on the actresses Josette Sinclair and Olga Varen, who were his friends. Guy de Ray was not sufficiently present, being forced to view the rushes in Paris and to negotiate on behalf of a production that was still fragile. Rivette, Truffaut, and especially Godard repeatedly came to the shoot at Champ-de-Bataille, but that didn’t help matters. They were perceived as members of a cinephile clan without any field experience, arrogant, and even downright shady. One day, the typewriter used to prepare the daily reports disappeared, and Sylvette Baudrot was furious. Suspicions fell on the teenager who was taking care of the rented horses and carriages and who had been hired at the insistence of an organization that helped juvenile delinquents re-enter society. The crew was astounded when a few days later it learned that it was Jean-Luc Godard who had made off with the typewriter in order to sell it. This was the same Godard whom Gégauff describes going through people’s coat and jacket pockets during the preparatory tests for the film.140
It was again Jean-Luc Godard who did an interview with Éric Rohmer for Les Amis du cinéma. When it was published in mid-October 1952, right in the middle of filming, it threw oil on the fire. Rohmer mentions the film he is making and denounces “French technicians’ routine way of working, which hampers inspiration,” complains about being “flanked by a technical supervisor” whom he accuses “of slowing down work through an abusive fear of certain technical taboos,” and concludes with a plea for new methods:
The methods of filmmaking have everything to gain from being revolutionary, even if that means, paradoxically, that cinema is better suited than any other [art] to magnify a conception of man that is also that of Racine or Goethe. The true lesson of Italian cinema has not yet been understood by everyone. It is positively implausible for a camera operator to tell you: “Don’t do this, I won’t be able to light it. Don’t move your actors around too much, I’ll have to redo my lighting…” It has to be said: our cameramen lack boldness and I believe that schools like IDHEC are not likely to give them any. On the contrary.141
The atmosphere at the shoot was obviously affected by these remarks.
The filming was nonetheless completed on November 8, 1952, after fifty-two days of work. Three hundred and forty scenes were shot, a few more than the storyboard planned, and the crew, though it still had reservations, felt that the film “could be edited”142 and that it should be possible to carry it through.
Jacques Rivette did a first, light editing, but the CNC’s regulations called for a professional: the film was therefore entrusted to Jean Mitry, a historian and theoretician of cinema but also a writer, who had just collaborated with Alexandre Astruc on Le Rideau cramoisi. He worked on Les Petites Filles modèles for more than a month in January and February 1953, along with his assistant, Cécile Decugis, an intern who recalls “a few rather delicate transitions” but does not at all have the impression that they faced “insurmountable problems.”143 The technicians who were present at a preliminary showing in March 1952, notably Pierre Guilbaud, Bernard Clarens, Sylvette Baudrot, and Cécile Decugis, all agree in emphasizing that the film was not incoherent, that it was “a good job.”144 At that point there remained only a small amount of work to be done: the music, the mixing, the polishing of the sound montage, and certain sound effects. Another month and the film, which was about an hour and twenty minutes long, would be finished.
That was when the coproducer from Benin, Joseph Kéké, halted the film. Three successive meetings were arranged with Guy de Ray, Éric Rohmer, and Pierre Guilbaud, but they got nowhere. Kéké remained firmly opposed to investing another centime in the project. Since the film had no distributor and Guy de Ray had no available funds, it was impossible to find a financial solution. However, the amount that was needed was small.
There is probably another explanation for the sudden and final abandonment of Les Petites Filles modèles, as Pierre Guilbaud sensed when he met with Joseph Kéké; he refers to “a young man at bay” and “a shady affair.”145 A newspaper clipping preserved in the archives might shed light on this. It is entitled: “My demands 2 million from Kéké.”146 It is an unsavory story. Joseph Kéké had met Lucette My, a striptease dancer, and offered her a role in the film being made. “But of course,” the journalist explains, “he could not assign roles without checking to be sure that the anatomy of the future stars who were putting their destinies in his hands corresponded to the tastes of the audience—in this case his tastes.” There was a fight; Lucette My was molested, slapped, suffered a broken tooth, and filed a complaint, demanding 2 million francs in damages, with interest. Is that the explanation for the difficulties that suddenly plagued Éric Rohmer’s film: a coproducer in trouble with the law?
The negative of the film was long stored at the LCM laboratories and then, after the company went bankrupt, it was transferred to a firm that bought it, GTC. That was probably when it was lost. Only a few fragments of the film survive, having been taken out for checking by the assistant camera operator or to prepare photos for the press. In Rohmer’s archives there are twenty-five pieces of film that allow us to illustrate about fifteen sequences. There are a few photographs of the shoot, taken by Rohmer, Baudrot, or Guilbaud: we see the girls working at a table, directed by the filmmaker, who is holding the scenario in his hand, or resting in the garden. There is also a picture of Godard, who had stopped by; he is holding a doll in his hands and joking with Guy de Ray. Another photo shows the whole film crew arriving at the station in Évreux. Standing at the extreme right of the picture, Rohmer is wearing a shy smile.
What can be said about this lost film? For the apprentice filmmaker, it was an unhappy experience, even if he was almost able to complete it. The filming, the quarrels with the crew, the mockery directed at him that challenged his competence, the sudden halt—all that certainly bruised him. It emphasized the difficulty he had in asserting his authority and making himself understood by others. Rohmer henceforth preferred to forget Les Petites Filles modèles, and never mentioned it in interviews. There are rumors suggesting that he himself might have destroyed the film. Once, in the outtakes from the program Cinéastes, de notre temps, preuves à l’appui recorded in May 1993, he spoke about this film, with considerable annoyance: “I had the extremely unhappy experience of making a feature film very early on, Les Petites Filles modèles, the most unhappy of all, in fact, in which my cinematic ambition almost perished. I don’t know why I launched into it, but in short it is absolutely certain that it was a failure.”147
That was not exactly what those who saw the film at the time thought, though it is true that there were not many of them. Obviously, it was not yet a Rohmerian work, but Guilbaud found in it “a certain charm.”148 Claude-Maris Trémois, a journalist at Radio-Cinéma-Télévision who reported on the filming and saw a copy of the work, wrote: “I can vouch for the quality of Les Petites Filles modèles, I saw it, and the intelligence of an Éric Rohmer could appeal to audiences.”149 It was an important experience for Rohmer; starting in the 1960s, he was to see to it that his works were produced and directed in accord with his own methods and cinematic principles. And he did so with all the more conviction and energy for having suffered the humiliations of this aborted adventure.
Rohmer’s Thought
Although the filmmaker’s first attempt was a failure, the critic was now the center of attention.150 Between the summer of 1951 and the spring of 1957, he wrote forty articles for Cahiers du cinéma and, also starting in 1956, the column “Books and Reviews.” Through his regular comments and his choice of auteurs (Hitchcock, Rossellini, Hawks, Renoir, Dreyer, Nicholas Ray, Welles, Bresson, Ingmar Bergman, Kenji Mizoguchi, Anthony Mann), he embodied a taste and a way of thought characteristic of Cahiers, taking part in the polemics with Positif, which were then violent, and defending the politics of auteurs. At Cahiers, he was “our goal-keeper,”151 as he says in issue number 68, using a metaphor that he pursued further in his articles on sports teams on the screen. Writing in a focused and serene way, with discernment and constancy, in his longish articles (averaging ten pages) Rohmer established a simple, serious, classical, limpid style that was sometimes slightly contorted or pompous, as distant from Astruc’s lyricism as from Bazin’s demonstrations full of imagery, which had been his two initial models.
As Cahiers’ ideologist, he was particularly attached to the concept of mise en scène, which for a critic of that review most precisely defines, from start to finish, the taste for cinema. In an important piece on Joseph Mankiewicz’s The Quiet American, he explains: the “mise en scène is nothing other than the registration of a spatial construction and bodily expressions.”152 The director (metteur en scène) registers bodies put in relation in a space, that is the form of cinema as it might appear beyond all literature, painting, or psychologism. As a criterion for judging films, mise en scène calls for a criticism that is able to recognize its beauties. In October 1956, Rohmer called this kind of criticism a “critique of beauties.”153 He based this on a few classical authorities: “Alain had made this law one of his hobbyhorses, invoking Chateaubriand and his idea of the ‘critique of beauties.’ ” A two-headed quotation, a double repercussion: the “critique of beauties” is a pedagogy (the reference to Alain) and moreover it is visionary, the only kind of criticism able to recognize the mark of genius in what is scorned (cinema, and even more the cinema defended by Rohmer). The “critique of beauties” can thus be defined as the education of the eye: it is a matter of learning to recognize, to see, the beauty peculiar to cinema. To see beauty is to ignore the conditions under which a film is made (its context, its history, its reception), to concentrate attention on the fragments of mise en scène in which the auteur reveals himself. In the critical practice of Cahiers du cinéma, this philosophy had a consequence that Rohmer pointed out in January 1957: “Since its foundation, Cahiers has adopted the critique of ‘beauties’ as its rule. The review of a film is usually entrusted to the one among us who is able to find the most arguments in its favor.”154 This involves a kind of moral requirement. With a few exceptions (an article by Rohmer on John Huston’s Moby Dick, which he makes a countermodel, a foil, the object of an “accusation of ugliness”155), this ethic remained the rule for critical writing in Cahiers: “The ideal,” Truffaut wrote in June 1957, “would be to write only about filmmakers and films you like.”156 Truffaut himself, the head polemicist, was in fact situated at the antipodes of this ideal, while Rohmer embodied it in the Cahiers tradition.
A disciple of Bazin, Rohmer nonetheless distinguished himself from his elder by offering his own definition of realism on the screen. It is also infused with spirituality; in his case this is a matter of a faith in the cinematic exception—inspiring in him a veritable system of the arts in which the seventh is to literally save the others from their sclerosis. Thus Rohmer revived a debate that had more or less fallen into abeyance since the 1920s and that concerns the supposed specificity of cinematic art (which would distinguish it and allow it to assert itself as a kind of writing, or a language, in its own right). He sees cinema not in terms of language but of ontology; its goal is not to say differently what the other arts express but to say something different. The spiritualist nature of such an assertion is clear, and it was made at the same time that the young cinephile discovered Rosselini’s Stromboli. It is tempting to identify Schérer the young teacher abandoning his excess of culture and disappointed literary hopes as the fantasized double of Ingrid Bergman in the last images of Rossellini’s film. Far from being the seventh art, cinema is the first. It is the site not only of a resurrection, but also of a salvation, charitably showing the way for arts that have gone astray.
This is the source of Rohmer’s obsession with classicism. By inverting a formula borrowed from Rimbaud that Rohmer uses as an epigraph to one of his first articles, we could sum up all his writings in a single credo: “We have to be absolutely classical.”157 A classicism among the ruins, as consubstantial with the chaos of the postwar period as Beethoven’s music or Balzac’s novels were with the period after the French Revolution. The cinema is definitely invested with a redemptive mission, that of exhuming the mythical underpinnings that the twentieth century is no longer capable of seeing. Of rediscovering, beyond catastrophe, the secret of an indubitable beauty.
The keystone of this construction is Rohmer’s “Le Celluloïd et le Marbre,” his theoretical magnum opus, a series of five articles published in Cahiers du cinéma in 1955.158 Moreover, the first installment, dated February 1955, is the first article he signed with the name Éric Rohmer, and it seems finally to rise to the level of his cinematic ambition. At the outset, Rohmer writes that he would like to be “the Boileau of an art too new to fear [critics like] La Harpe,”159 speaking “not in the name of the man of the street but of the enlightened movie lover who is, moreover, cultivated.”160 He set out to do nothing less than examine all the arts, the better to establish the ultimate sovereignty of cinema. Each study is presented as an assessment of an artistic discipline, always reduced, in the final analysis, to the role of a prestigious foil. It is up to cinema to reincarnate the classical ideal that the other arts are said to have abandoned.
This has to do with cinema’s nature as a mechanical, impersonal instrument: it is the impartiality of the movie camera and the limits it imposes on human intervention that constitute the historical opportunity and at the same time the aesthetic supremacy of cinema. It is clear how much this idea, apparently loyal to Bazin’s idea of realism, moves imperceptibly away from it: Rohmer does not give priority to any stylistic device. In Bazin’s work, ontology is connected with the specificity of a grammar and also with a literary mimesis—which is said to allow the filmmaker to equal the great American novelists in terms of profusion and scale. Nothing of the kind is found in his disciple, who is even more Hawksian than Hitchcockian: the camera’s “objectivity”—which he praises even in documentaries or in the televised rebroadcasts of sports exploits filmed in real time—ends up seeming to be a self-sufficient value, as the twofold witness to a truth and a beauty that will be manifested by themselves. Rohmer thus formulates a paradox: “We are told over and over that cinema is an art even though it is based on a mechanical mode of reproduction. I assert exactly the contrary: the power of reproducing exactly, simply, is cinema’s most certain privilege.”161
However, according to Rohmer, the filmmaker asserts himself not against the arts but among them: if he is capable of expressing a truth that belongs to him alone, if he is capable of reawakening a faith that has become rare in Western culture, it is at the cost of a continual, conflictual dialogue with the other arts—which will reveal all the better the singularity of what he has to say. And he will also reveal his peculiar privilege: that of seizing artistic emotion at its source, without giving it time to reflect or be alienated by words. This is, to be sure, an idealistic vision, and might be considered dated. But it remains that it makes Rohmer one of the greatest modern thinkers on cinema, because this vision is based (not unlike that of André Gide or Paul Valéry) on a sort of eternal return of the return, on a never-ceasing relaunching of the classical idea.
On the Right?
The reader will have understood that the connection Rohmer makes between modernity and tradition makes him a conservative, even reactionary thinker—but one who discerns in the classical the “true revolution.”162 As he wrote with a cheeky art of provocation in Les Temps modernes, in his view the “values of conservation” have priority over those of “progress” the better to establish themselves in the present, and even in the future. Many texts written in the 1950s illustrate this reactionary thought through two main interpretations of the seventh art: its Christian spirit and its Westernness.
In Cahiers du cinéma, number 3, Pierre Kast, a secular leftist who was Rohmer’s principal opponent at the review, defends Clouzot’s Le Salaire de la peur against “those who gargle with water from Lourdes,”163 and entitles his article “Un grand film athée” (A great atheist film). He concludes this way: “Le Salaire de la peur is a film that implies neither a supreme being, nor a Providence, nor religiousness, not even a heaven: it is a film that is entirely self-contained.” Rohmer replied two months later by praising Roberto Rossellini’s Europe 51. Under a title as explicit as Kast’s, “Génie du christianisme” (Spirit of Christianity),164 he responds to Kast directly: “Be an atheist and the camera will offer you the spectacle of a world without God in which there is no law other than the pure mechanism of cause and effect.” In counterpoint, he develops an overtly spiritualistic analysis of Rossellini’s film and of cinema in general, borrowing a certain number of arguments and motifs from the Christian Bazin. According to Rohmer, Europe 51 offers us a “metaphorical art like that of stained-glass windows,” in which “a woman sets the grace of her vocation against the grimace of the world”: the soul is bared. For Rohmer, this dimension can appear only through the density of bodies, their very materiality: “The genius of cinema is that it can discover such a close union and at the same time such an infinite distance between the realm of bodies, its material, and that of minds, its object.” In this “miraculous” correspondence between mind and body, which everything might be thought to separate, cinema finds its truth.
More generally, in the mid-1950s the line taken by the Schérer school was often constructed on the basis of a spiritualist approach to the great realist film directors. In this sense, Hitchcock inaugurated a series of “religious films” in his work that perfectly illustrate the “metaphysical” interpretation advocated by his defenders at Cahiers and that confirm their reading of cinema as a religious account of the real. Between I Confess and The Wrong Man, the line taken by the Rohmerian Cahiers seeks to be so much in accord with Hitchock’s themes that Truffaut, with his schoolboy attitude, could write: “The Cahiers du cinéma thanks Alfred Hitchcock, who has just made The Wrong Man solely to please us and prove to everyone the truth of our exegeses.”165 Bazin had found in Rossellini the ideal example of the perception of cinema he was forging in the late 1940s; in the same way, in Hitchcock the Cahiers found the verification of the Christian interpretations mischievously advanced by Rohmer, Chabrol, Truffaut, and Rivette. The eldest of the young Turks put it bluntly: “Christianity is consubstantial with the cinema”;166 for him, the latter was “the twentieth-century cathedral.”167
Right in the middle of the period of decolonization, at a time when the “events in Algeria” were turning into a war of liberation, Rohmer’s positions regarding the Western nature of cinema took a downright reactionary turn. The subject recurs frequently in the work of the critic, the “decent man of the twentieth century”: “Cinema is not made for children but for old, solidly civilized people like us.”168 For example, Rohmer sees in Hollywood the ancient city or the Florence of the Renaissance, a “land of classical and spiritual creation,”169 that of the West: “I am convinced that for a talented and fervent filmmaker the California coast is not the hell that some people claim it is, but the homeland that was Italy in the Quattrocento for painters, or Vienna in the nineteenth century for musicians.”170
Classicizing cinema, Rohmer conferred homelands on it: Hollywood, Rossellini’s Italy, Renoir’s France. Drawing on the dogma of the “great creative nations,”171 he saw in the seventh art a “revenge of the Occident,”172 as he put it in an analysis of Murnau’s Tabu. This film, which Rohmer preferred over all others in the history of cinema, was made by the German filmmaker among the Tahitian natives, and thus very far away from the West. Published in March 1953, this distinctly tendentious article turns the island of Bora-Bora into a “classical land” and its exotic inhabitants into “Western beings”: “Under their tanned skins, it is white blood that he [Murnau] causes to flow in the veins of these Polynesians, a race whose origin is contested and whose contact with Europeans merely increased their native languor. […] Of all the works of our time, the exotic Tabu is the one that makes my European fibers vibrate the most deeply, grips my heart and soul, whereas Gauguin flattered only the intellect and the modern West’s morbid desire to burn what it formerly adored.”173
In the fourth installment of “Le Celluloïd et le Marbre,” Rohmer returns to this racial idea and to the supposed Westernness of cinema.
I deny neither India nor Japan the right to make films, any more than I deny them the right to build skyscrapers or automobiles, but I believe that the traditions to which those peoples remain attached are less fertile than our own. The cinema is a kind of clothing so well adapted to the form of our bodies that others cannot wear it without creasing it in the wrong places and splitting its seams…You have very little chance of making skilful use of this unprepossessing toy if the latitude and longitude of your birth have not endowed you with a dense past on which you can base yourself. We Occidentals are the people most suited to cinema, because the screen is repelled by artifice, and we have a more acute sense of the natural. The ethnologist can demonstrate all he wants that here no absolute judgments can be made, that it is just as normal to squat on a mat as to sit on a high chair like Homer’s heroes. It would be hard to convince me that a race that loves sports played in a stadium is not more in conformity with the rule of the species than one that is devoted to yoga exercises. What matters to me is that a civilization, ours, has voluntarily confused the notions of ideal beauty and nature, and that it has attained, in that very way, an incontestable universality.174
This theory of cultural particularisms that divide the world into autonomous creative cells forming a hierarchy in which the West (the only civilization suited to produce a universal art and way of life) is supposed to be at the top is an old traditionalist idea. It was widely illustrated by the racist thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Arthur de Gobineau, Gustave Le Bon, Cesare Lombroso, and Charles Maurras. This controversy had just been stirred up again by a famous dispute between Roger Caillois, as a defender of Western supremacy in the arts and thought, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, an ethnologist who relativized the supposed superiority of classical civilization in his book Race et Histoire.175 Rohmer, who sided with Caillois, was ultimately only applying to cinema, with a certain audacity, this idea of the superiority of the West. In fact, according to him, a non-Western filmmaker could achieve beauty176 only by adopting Western rules and values. Thus the African-American music in King Vidor’s film Hallelujah, forgoing its “original languor,” owes its genius only to the “happy marriage between African blood and Christian spirituality,”177 and Mizoguchi, renouncing “yoga exercises,” “touches us so intimately not by depreciating the West but because, having begun from a very distant point, he arrives at the same conception of the essential.”178
Another aspect of Rohmer’s discourse is the rejection of Western guilt with respect to colonized peoples. He not only ignores but rejects a view that is critical of colonization and respectful of what is different:179 in a word, cinema has nothing to learn from “oppressed nationalities.”180 In the name of art, the fate of the classical universality borne by cinema is destined to survive: “I do not believe that the explanation of our period, the most recent, by a fatum is the most profound, or the most attractive for art: Isn’t sacrificing to this deceased deity the West’s immense current error?”181
This ideology clearly places Éric Rohmer on the right-wing side of the French political chessboard. However, he did not situate himself that way, and distrusting excesses and extremes, he adhered to a strict “disengagement”: it was a form of prudence, of reserve, of the rejection of simplifications, as much as a mode of tolerance. But other people—his adversaries, of course, such as the critics at Positif and Pierre Kast at Cahiers—nonetheless thought Rohmer was a man of the Right. And so did André Bazin, who admitted in a letter to Georges Sadoul in which he worried about the rise of a rough group at Cahiers that Schérer wasn’t exactly a left-wing writer.182 An understatement that Godard confirmed in an interview: “At that time Rohmer had a ‘right-wing’ aspect that must have bothered Bazin, who was ultra-secular.”183 Louis Marcorelles, a young critic of the early 1960s, was also to mention in a letter written to Rohmer ten years later the “traditionally right-wing line that you incarnate at Cahiers, which made me hate what you wrote,” but which nonetheless “by provoking me caused me to revise nearly all my ideas about film.”184
Rohmer’s life showed a number of signs of conservatism at that time, and not only because he was a practicing Catholic. Since 1955 he had been a subscriber to and an attentive reader of La Nation française, the royalist weekly edited by Pierre Boutang, a Maurrassian philosopher and intellectual to whom he was said to feel close. He was also a member of an association called the “Louisquatorziens,”185 zealous defenders of the “genius” and the “thought” of Louis XIV, which was organized by an eccentric, Georges Comnène, the self-proclaimed “duke of Santiago of Compostela.”
Finally, several of Rohmer’s close friends in the 1950s openly flaunted extreme right-wing or royalist ways of thought and commitments. We have already mentioned the case of Paul Gégauff, a tough in his provocativeness, a right-wing dandy in his pose. Another longtime friend, Philippe d’Hugues, represents a young, right-wing, laissez-faire cinephilia, enlightened and elegant, with whom we can also associate Pierre Restany, the organizer of the film club Les Jeunes Amis de la liberté at Sciences-Po, and also André Martin and François Mars, future contributors to Cahiers du cinéma. There were cinephile affinities, a common cult of Hitchcock, but also political ties, with the members of the CCQL: anticommunism, the refusal to be politically engaged on the Left, a certain fascination with the provocative anticonformism connected with a love for Hollywood films. And even a deviant taste for Nazi films.
A certain Jean Parvulesco, who had arrived in Paris from Romania in December 1950, met Schérer at the Royal Saint-Germain and hung out with the members of the CCQL and the contributors to La Gazette du cinéma without ever writing for it. He proclaimed himself, openly and without ambiguity, a “fascist” militant and ideologist. He rapidly became a close friend of Schérer and Godard, and he also attended the Sorbonne and the Institut de filmologie. He later described a brotherhood of arms among the three young men, who met regularly in Rohmer’s room in rue Victor-Cousin for nightlong discussions. He was to defend a political interpretation of this friendship:
This was always an extreme right-wing group, except for Rivette. Of course, nothing was shouted from the rooftops, but in our talk among ourselves it was clear. Gégauff was right-wing as a pose, Godard as a dandy, Truffaut was fascinated by collaborators, whom he considered real heroes, while Schérer was a great mystic, Catholic and royalist. When a few years later people had to make their political sensibilities public, they all skedaddled, it was instinctive in them, and the extreme right-wing tone disappeared.186
But it persisted in Parvulesco, a militant supporter of French Algeria and a member of the Secret Army Organization, who was exiled to Spain, where he became a film critic for the Phalangist review Primer Plano. He was the first Iberian cinephile to write about the New Wave, supporting Godard’s and Chabrol’s films, but presenting the renewal of young French film as a “fascist revolution.”187 Godard paid ambiguous homage to him in Breathless by giving his name to the character of the writer played Jean-Pierre Melville. The real Parvulesco remained a close friend of Éric Rohmer right to the end.
The 16 mm Laboratory
After the unfortunate episode of the professional making of Les Petites Filles modèles, Éric Rohmer turned with relief to less constraining and more inspired experiments with 16 mm film. But henceforth he was no longer alone, an isolated pioneer of amateur film. All the young Turks started making films.188 In the credits for most of these films, they ended up playing all the roles, Godard as an actor, producer, and then director; Jacques Rivette as a camera operator, writer, or filmmaker; François Truffaut as an assistant or curious onlooker; Claude Chabrol as a director, producer, or lender of an apartment (notably for Véronique et son cancre, which Rohmer filmed there); Charles Bitsch and Michel Latouche as camera operators; Suzanne Schiffman, Jean Gruault, and Claude de Givray as assistants; Agnès Guillemot and Cécile Decugis as writers; Paul Gégauff as a source of inspiration or scenarios; Olga Varen, Anne Doat, and Nicole Berger as leading muses; and Jean-Claude Brialy, Gérard Blain, and Jean-Paul Belmondo in the leading male roles.
For his return to 16 mm, Éric Rohmer had several of his own stories in mind. In February 1953 he took up again, in the form of a seventy-six-page scenario, a tale he had written a few years earlier, La Tempête. In it, he juxtaposes four young people toying with their feelings around the heritage of a count who is partly bankrupt and lives in a large manor house on a Breton island. Another, less developed scenario set on an island, La Fille de 18 ans, a typescript of fourteen pages, is undated but was probably written during the same period. It is a variant of La Tempête that takes place on the island of Arz in the Gulf of Morbihan. In the first scene, which is very close to the initial plans for the film A Tale of Winter made forty years later, two swimmers rise out of the waves, Philippe, 23, and Christine, 18; they kiss and make love on the beach. In Rohmer’s archives we find another three-page outline of a film entitled Sur un banc, whose field of action consists of two benches in a public park through which a gallery of characters passes from morning until evening: from an old man watching the children to a bum, from a young mother to a grumpy old lady, from a dreaming intellectual with a book in his hand to lovers.
In autumn 1954 Rohmer made in one weekend, in a large house in Meudon belonging to the parents of his actress, Teresa Gratia, a film adaptation of a story by Edgar Allan Poe, Bérénice.189 This fifteen-minute film shows a shy and tormented young man, Egaeus, played by Rohmer himself, who gradually becomes fascinated and obsessed by his cataleptic cousin’s teeth. In a contrasting black and white that recreates a fantastic atmosphere, madness overcomes the characters: Bérénice moves from prostration to convulsion, while Egaeus avoids the light or unveils himself in the shadows, like a vampire obsessed by his dental fetishism. The style suggests a crepuscular postexpressionism, that of Murnau or Jean Epstein. Rivette shot the film, then edited it. It was made without sound; a sound track was then added by using JEL tape recorders that the writers at Cahiers du cinéma had been using for several years to record their conversations with filmmakers they admired. Bérénice’s very crude sound track is preserved in Rohmer’s archives. After the text of the monologue inspired by Poe’s story, read by Rohmer, we hear very clearly the latter talking with Godard for about twenty minutes in the offices of Cahiers about films they’ve seen recently.
In early 1956, Rohmer began filming in 16 mm a new adaptation, The Kreuzer Sonata, based on a short story by Tolstoy. He adopted the principle, inspired by Sacha Guitry, of a voice-over commentary on silent actions seen on the screen, and wrote a sixteen-page manuscript scenario. The whole text is divided into thirty-two sequences for a total length of about forty minutes. In a series of flashbacks, the story goes back to a year earlier, as far as the first meeting between a brilliant architect about thirty years old, played by Rohmer himself, and a pretty but self-effacing girl (played by Françoise Martinelle), during a party in a cellar in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Very soon after they meet, he asks the girl to marry him, and she accepts. But shortly after their marriage, both of them realize that they do not love each other. The husband has met a talented, “very highly regarded” young critic who is very different from him, played by Jean-Claude Brialy. He introduces the young man to his wife. They like each other. The husband becomes jealous and stabs his wife to death. But the spectator wonders whether this tragedy existed only in the jealous husband’s imagination, and in that of Rohmer, who was able to project onto the character played by Brialy his ambiguous relationship with Gégauff.
Rohmer once again called upon his friends: Godard bought the film with the money he earned as a press attaché at Fox—he is credited as producer and appears in the film during the party filmed at Gégauff’s apartment. We also glimpse, during a short sequence filmed at Cahiers du cinéma, the whole editorial staff of Cahiers du cinéma, grouped around Bazin. Once again, it was Rivette who edited the film along with Rohmer. The couple’s apartment was lent by Georges Kaplan, a friend from CCQL. Obviously, Beethoven’s Sonata for piano and violin, no. 9 (called “the Kreuzer Sonata”) accompanies the film.190 The sound track also contains fragments of the same composer’s Diabelli Variations for the piano as well as bits of jazz: Jelly Roll Morton’s “High Society” and Louis Armstrong playing “Dallas Blues.”
The technique of creating a sound track by using a tape recorder was not without risks. During the projection of the film at the Studio Parnasse in September 1956 the tape recorder repeatedly got out of synch, forcing Rohmer to interrupt the showing to reconcile the commentary with the development of the action. However, according to several concordant reports, this showing had a certain impact on the cinephiles gathered at the Studio Parnasse. It revealed to them a director with talent. It was the first time that Rohmer the filmmaker had impressed an audience of initiates, who had up to that point chiefly admired his critical writings. Claude Chabrol, Jean Douchet, Jean Gruault, Claude de Givray, and André Labarthe all said that they had the feeling of witnessing the birth of a cinematic world inhabited by a singular personality, as did Pierre Rissient, a twenty-year-old cinephile who had been invited to the showing: “What was fascinating was Rohmer himself, playing his role in a nervous, almost neurotic way. We had the feeling that we were entering his psyche, seeing a madman like a subjective camera, and we heard his voice commenting on his actions as if in a paranoid delirium. I loved this film, it was fascinating and revealing. It was the only time, I think, that he displayed himself so openly.”191
Professional Critic
Éric Rohmer’s double personality has no doubt never been as open to view as it was at the end of 1956. On the one hand, a grimacing specter haunting the silent, black-and-white 16 mm films, a vampire driven toward virginal girls, and a dandy finally stripped bare by his uncontrollable fetishism. On the other hand, a respected critic writing precise, clear, measured, resolutely classical prose, succeeding in justifying as the expression of beauty par excellence an art often considered minor by the intellectuals of his time, a thinker dealing with the seventh art and engaging in dialogue on an equal footing with André Bazin. Éric Rohmer was the only one of the young Turks who enjoyed an unchallenged aura within the critical community, even before the advent of the New Wave. Truffaut was famous and feared, but attacked; Rivette was admired, but reproached for his extreme dogmatism; Godard and Chabrol remained obscure and despised.
This recognition was crowned by an offer made by Truffaut that allowed Rohmer to become a genuine professional critic. On April 17, 1956, he sent Rohmer a message: “Dear Maurice, Arts has run out of material: you have to take advantage of this before Friday. Bring me a ‘secret’ about something or other (American comedy, the crime film, whatever. Or a director, dialogue, adaptation, Balzac and cinema, or Poe, or Stevenson, etc.), readable, very readable. We can also imagine that you might write two or three critical articles while I’m in Cannes…Your friend Truffe.”192 Rohmer did as Truffaut asked and submitted an initial article, “Des goûts et des couleurs,” published the following week in the column “Le secret professionel,” which accepted reflective articles on cinema.
In two and a half years, Rohmer wrote 180 articles for this weekly, sometimes occupying the whole of the cinema page, with two or three texts appearing alongside one another. Arts-Spectacles, the review founded by the rich gallery owner and art lover Georges Wildenstein, was one of the most influential and interesting periodicals of the 1950s.193 It owed its reputation to two editors in chief, Louis Pauwels in the early 1950s and Jacques Laurent starting in 1954. Pauwels modernized what was originally only a catalogue of exhibitions by giving it the mission of dealing with all the domains of the arts and culture, especially literature and shows. The tone was often polemical, doing battle against “thesis literature” and politically engaged artists in general. The weekly imposed its elegant and learned style on the prestigious contributions by Cocteau, Jacques Audiberti, Henri de Montherlant, Jean Giono, Marcel Aymé, and others. Laurent brought in still more brilliance and novelty. The author of Les Corps tranquilles was also, under the pseudonym Cecil Saint-Laurent, the creator of Caroline Chérie, a considerable success that gave him the means to found the review La Parisienne and to buy Arts, which he ran and relaunched as a “journal d’humeur et de parti pris” (a journal of temper and commitment).194 He attracted his friends, polemical writers and journalists, both the cream of young right-wing writers and a few snipers from the other side: Roger Nimier, Antoine Blondin, Michel Déon, Matthieu Galey, André Parinaud, Alexandre Vialatte, Boris Vian, Jean d’Ormesson, Jean-René Huguenin, Jean-Loup Dabadie, and Philippe Labro. The cultural choices were often impertinent, the style omnipresent, and major interviews with currently prominent artists gave depth to a weekly that was situated in the very rich landscape of the cultural press in the 1950s, alongside, from right to left, La Parisienne, Opéra, Carrefour, Nouvelles littéraires, and Lettres françaises. Arts had an inimitable manner: it was simultaneously an in-depth review (through its investigations, its interviews, the high standard of its articles), a magazine of current cultural events (through the diversity and extent of its criticism covering all the domains of the arts, literature, and shows), and a committed journal. A steely gaze, cheeky tone, anticonformism, polemics—and a spectacular format, presenting articles like a daily paper, with provocative big headlines on page one—all that made it an effective platform. Arts was a success, some weeks having more than seventy thousand readers.
At the beginning of 1954, Jacques Laurent entrusted the cinema page to his friend Jean Aurel, a critic and filmmaker. This was an important decision, because in the weekly press film criticism was influential, as is shown by the columns written by Jacques Doniol-Valcroze in France Observateur, Claude Mauriac in Le Figaro littéraire, and Georges Sadoul in Les Lettres françaises. In the spring of 1954, Aurel had the inspired but risky idea of entrusting this page to a young man of 22, François Truffaut, who had just shocked Paris society with his article “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français,” published in January in Cahiers du cinéma. Thanks to almost a thousand articles, in four years the young critic was to give this cinema page a considerable weight: it was often polemical, unfair, annoying, but always lively, full of opinions and discoveries, imbued with a droll and inventive tone. In Arts, Truffaut waged his “press campaigns”195 with verve, passion, and a certain craftiness; it was there that he imposed his choices and his filmmakers, gave a militant and convincing turn to the politics of auteurs, fought against “quality French cinema” and its illustrious representatives, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Claude Autant-Lara, Jean Delannoy, Yves Allégret, and René Clément.
When he asked Rohmer to come help him at Arts, Truffaut was overwhelmed, the victim, as it were, of his own success. He was trying to make his first professional short film, Les Mistons, he was being asked for articles by a number of periodicals (Le Temps de Paris, La Parisienne), and he was working as an assistant to Roberto Rossellini. He had to go to the Cannes Festival in late May 1956, and knew that at the review in Paris there would have to be a critic who could write about all the current films. By choosing Rohmer, he was covering his back: his reputation as a serious critic was already made. Rohmer was neither a double nor a substitute, but rather a complementary critic, more measured, polyvalent, classical. This worried the management of Arts, especially André Parinaud, the editor in chief, who conveyed his concerns to Truffaut in a message sent on September 7, 1957: “I would like to know if you still take your work at Arts seriously. The cinema page has lost its dynamism. Your little friends, like Éric Rohmer, however competent they may be, don’t know their trade, and on that subject I think M. Rohmer should do his apprenticeship somewhere else. I ask you to tell him that.”196
Truffaut supported Rohmer and succeeded in imposing him on Arts. Although Parinaud was not entirely wrong regarding Rohmer’s lack of experience as a journalist and his lack of “dynamism”—his style was clearly less vivid and captivating than Truffaut’s—he did not suspect the critic’s capacity for work or the real pleasure that he took in this job. Rohmer enjoyed forging an alternative mode of writing in his great theoretical texts published in Cahiers. To be sure, he groped his way at first—but he created an eminently pedagogical style to enter into dialogue with his reader, to inform him or her, to lead the reader to discover unforeseen motifs in a film, to revisit a filmography in a few words, to understand unsuspected works. These are columns written day by day, referring to films many of which were for many people forgotten and forgettable, but this form of coded and calibrated writing allowed Rohmer to deepen the art of convincing.
Later on, he rarely talked about this experience, which was often ignored until half a century later, in an interview conducted in 2008 but never published: “A reader had to be addressed who was not a cinephile like the reader of Cahiers. The articles were shorter and were generally criticisms of current films, in a bright style, with cookie-cutter formulas. Let’s say that Arts was a public forum, while Cahiers was more a withdrawn temple. Truffaut loved this journalistic practice of criticism, I was certainly less at ease, but it wasn’t disagreeable.”197 Films came out on Fridays; the critic had to see them immediately and write fast on Saturday morning so the articles could appear the following Tuesday. “I often saw the films with Truffaut or others,” Rohmer went on, “we talked about them, and then I wrote in the café every Saturday morning. It was also at that time that I got the ‘green card’ that was reserved for journalists writing about films and allowed me to get into movie theaters without paying.”198
Truffaut and Rohmer made a good duo in Arts, and occupied virtually all the space, from May 1956 to the end of the following year. In this association we see a Truffaut who is a strategist, who juggles articles and films, assigns roles depending on the periodicals, rereads texts at great speed, cuts, reworks, imposes, and coddles or attacks. His instructions are precise, his eye sharp. Above all, he protected Rohmer, who became in his hands a kind of Truffaldian creature. A strange relationship between the two men, in which the elder by twelve years, though one of the most recognized theoreticians of the time, lent himself (perhaps in part to earn a little more money) to the game his younger colleague was making him play.
In the middle of the summer, on August 9, 1956, Truffaut took over the controls at Cahiers while Rohmer went on vacation for a few weeks. In the letter he wrote him, we can see the nature of their relationship: “Everything or almost is going well here. We’ve done all the layout ourselves (Rivette, Bitsch, and I). This issue will have a certain look. For Arts, it would be all the better if you sent me the planned article on women and cinema. Better especially if you could return to Paris before the twenty-sixth in order to see us, Doniol[-Valcroze] and me, before we leave for Venice, for both Arts and Cahiers. The Schérer file in my drawer is getting thicker and thicker; it will allow you to put together the next issue. Send me a note and don’t forget the cinema, your friends, Paris, journalism, your scenario, and all the rest. Get a tan and accept my friendly regards.”199 At the end of August, Truffaut handed control over to Rohmer and offered him a little advice before leaving to cover the Venice Film Festival for Arts:
So far as Cahiers is concerned, correlate the photos with the texts, handle relations with the print shop, the proofs, the layout, Bitsch will be of great help to you there. As for Arts, it may be a little more delicate unless you can go to work around 8 A.M. on Monday morning, as I do every week. For the “Selection” and “Cinema News” sections, you can get help, but you’ll have to handle the “Film Criticism” section yourself, unless I can do one or two secondary films in advance before I leave Paris. I’ll also leave you a file of photos illustrating my articles from Venice. I’ll send rather long articles so you won’t have to find “secrets” in the pile to fill the gaps. In short, everything will go fine, I’m sure. All you have to do is put your letter alongside mine to realize that your typing is much better. Another triumph of the university man over the self-taught man! If you are also faster than I am, then…It’s true that I don’t use my left hand for either eating or working.200
Well trained, Rohmer learned his trade and became a true film journalist. After a few months, he knew how to shoot down in flames a mediocre French film or Hollywood fluff, report on a festival, its multiple films, and its atmosphere (the Venice Film Festival in September 1957), locate and convey what was new and exciting in a Western by Anthony Mann, and follow Jayne Mansfield’s exploits in Frank Tashlin’s films The Girl Can’t Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, which he placed very high in his personal pantheon. And even how to cross swords with respected international institutions: “Friendly Persuasion, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, offers a perfect definition of the worst kind of academicism.” This headline ran across six columns on the front page of Arts on May 24, 1957.
Truffaut also managed to get Rohmer’s work into La Parisienne, a literary monthly similar to Arts that had been founded by Jacques Laurent and was directed by François Nourissier. There, too, Truffaut, who had been writing a column for a few months, needed a collaborator, and sent Rohmer a message in the spring of 1956:
I can’t give La Parisienne my usual article. Nourissier agrees that you can replace me. So by 6:20 tomorrow evening you should take him an article on les films presque maudits, the ones that haven’t had enough success this year, or haven’t been sufficiently discussed: L’Amore, La Paura, Lifeboat, Night of the Hunter, Anatahan, Night and Fog, Arkadin, The Man with a Golden Arm, Smiles of a Summer Night, and—watch out, Nourissier has a high opinion of it—La Pointe courte.201
Once again, Rohmer took advantage of the opportunity. In a little less than two years, he wrote ten columns in La Parisienne before it ceased publication in the spring of 1958. They were film reviews, reports grouped by themes, connected by the relaxed, conversational tone and the familiar, logbook style.
A Mature Man
In the autumn of 1956, Henri Langlois presented at the Cinémathèque française a retrospective showing of Alfred Hitchcock’s British films. Claude Chabrol and Éric Rohmer, who were among the first “Hitchcockohawksians,” did not miss a single film. The first wrote: “Momo and I saw everything again, and we discovered certain films from the British period. […] Then we wrote this book […] I took the British phase, he took the American phase. With two exceptions; I wrote about two American films and he wrote about two British films. I won’t tell you which ones; we’ve kept that secret for more than fifty years!”202 Jean Mitry, who supervised a collection of books on film at the Éditions Universitaires, told Rohmer he would like to publish this work.
For Rohmer and Chabrol, this was a kind of victory: since the late 1940s, they had been defending Hitchcock against the great majority of critics, and this book, the first of its type on his work, would be an argued response to his detractors. Rohmer had already written on almost all Hitchcock’s recent films, from Notorious and Rope to The Wrong Man. The ten films of the 1950s made Hitchcock, as Rohmer wrote in the conclusion to the book, “one of the greatest creators of forms in the whole history of cinema. Perhaps only Murnau and Eisenstein can be compared with him in this respect.”203 Rohmer brought together his writings on Hitchcock that had appeared in La Revue du cinéma, La Gazette du cinéma, Cahiers du cinéma, Arts, and La Parisienne, and added ten more on the films made between 1940 (Rebecca) and 1945 (Spellbound) that he had not discussed.
The argument consists in revealing a powerfully metaphysical inspiration in Hitchcock’s work, marked by the themes of guilt, dereliction, revelation, redemption, and sanctification, to the point that Rohmer, with subtle self-mockery, wrote on the yellow folder in which he kept the typed pages he was collecting for the book “Metaphysical Alfred by Zig and Puce.”204 In an interview conducted a few decades later, Rohmer retraced his discovery of “a metaphysical artist”:
The three films I admire most feature James Stewart, which is not unconnected with my support for them, since I think he is the perfect actor for Hitchcock. They are Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo, which were made between 1954 and 1958. The real subject of these three films is the same: Plato’s philosophy. They are films in which a space-time of the transcendent is made visible.205
The reactions to this little fifty-page book published in September 1957 were generally lively. Most of the reviews mocked its argumentative tone and its philosophical pretensions, while at the same time recognizing that the analyses had a certain brio. For many critics, to talk about Hitchcock in this way was not serious criticism, or rather it was too serious for a director who had always been considered artificial and trifling. Only after a series of consecutive masterpieces (North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds, Marnie) and the publication of a book of conversations between Hitchcock and Truffaut in 1966 did Hitchcock make his definitive entry into the pantheon of great filmmakers.
At the time, some people were outraged that such a book was published by Éditions Universitaires. They denounced it as an imposture, a deviation into mysticism and right-wing ideology. For example, Ado Kyrou, the intellectual leader at Positif, who wrote in Les Lettres nouvelles:
Hitchcock, promoted by the British who, being poor in the realm of cinema needed to laud their national products, and then promoted again by Hollywood, which likes directors who are always prepared to follow producers’ fashions, has just been promoted a third time by critics using him as a vehicle for their personal propaganda. In their work he becomes a canvas on which theories can be embroidered; his pitiful thrillers become menacing eagles, and his little gags are loaded with ultra-metaphysical meanings. Only too happy to see himself dragged toward the summits (even if they are the summits of fascism), Hitchcock plays along. He smiles, he appears more and more often in his own films, and he makes money, a lot of money. His errors become brilliant discoveries; his gaps are filled with profound meanings; his personal tics increase tenfold, his so-called themes take on the proportions of symbols; and a whole group of young people is thereby led, not only toward a boring cinema (which is, after all, not a serious problem) but also toward a neo-Nazi culture.206
The violence of this attack is astonishing, and its politicization is surprising. It took André Bazin to cool down the polemics by offering, in Cahiers du cinéma, praise for this stimulating work of interpretation, even if he remained basically inimical toward Hitchcock: “The intellectual, ideal, the virtual spectacle that Chabrol and Rohmer arouse in our minds is surely as good as Hitchcock’s best film.”207 Bazin’s article was a kind of dubbing: in it, he paid homage to the thought and pertinence of Rohmer, who had succeeded him as editor in chief of Cahiers. In fact, weakened by illness, the founder of the review had handed it over in the spring of 1957 to Rohmer, who was two years his junior, and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze. Soon afterward, Doniol-Valcroze began making films, and Rohmer sailed the vessel by himself.
The head of Cahiers du cinéma, a contributor to Arts, a columnist at La Parisienne, the author of a first book on his favorite filmmaker, and the holder of the precious green card that allowed him free access to film theaters, Maurice Schérer had definitively become Éric Rohmer, one of the most respected critics of his time. From then on, he lived on this work, as a legitimate professional: the payments from La Parisienne (3,000 francs per article) and Arts (around 1,000 francs per week), along with the half-time salary he earned as head of Cahiers, allowed him to take leave from the National Education system, giving up his position at the Vierzon lycée as well as the drudge work at the Montaigne and Lakanal lycées. He still lived frugally, but more comfortably than in the early 1950s.
One Saturday evening in December 1956, at a dance at the École des Mines, this very shy man had the nerve to approach a young brunette who was herself very reserved, and whom he had already “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 just 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 definitively over and he left, after fifteen years of Bohemian renting, his furnished room in the little Hôtel de Lutèce on rue Victor-Cousin.