“no longer is the passion of it, but the work, that is, the action of the people, which has chosen the cinema as a theme.” The film critic Maurice Schérer, who wrote this sentence in 1951 in the journal “Cahiers du Cinéma”, was as a film Director under the name of Eric Rohmer is famous with films whose protagonists make typically vacation, at the beach or on the shore of a lake, or at least for the time of the film’s plot so much time that you can extensively talk about themselves and their relationships.
Patrick Bahners
feuilleton correspondent in Cologne and is responsible for “Humanities”.
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In the cited essay, which is, as the title of the Pascal quote, “How vain painting” is, and Rohmer, the film art of the literature, the classical subject of the human inner world. The cinema should not go, according to Rohmer here in a competition, because it finds its substance in the outside world, a world of bodies, things move through the room. The Film is emotions, is only possible if he sees you as things, as causes of Gestures or facial movements. The so-considered feelings “dictate” physical movements “in every Moment”. The Film “only to the extent in the Painting of feelings, as they arise from our incessant relationships with the things”. Rohmer requires, therefore, a naturalistic model of causality, a closed mechanistic view of the world.
the seducer is a craftsman
As the most beautiful Film ever Rohmer boasts in his essay the silent film “Nanook of the North” from 1922. In the documentary by the American Director Robert J. Flaherty, we see an Eskimo at work. “Nanuk builds his Habitation, hunting, fishing to feed his family.” The “beauty” of his activities reveals, according to Rohmer, in time, by getting to know you “slowly”. In Rohmers eyes of the hunter, fisherman, provider shows, the Flahertys Film, even more beautiful than the warriors, of whom the epic Poet to sing. “In contrast to the epic hero we know the size of our hero in the course of his struggle, and not because of a victory, so an acquired thing.”
Here are the “dangerous existence condition” of the film is that the only things in the picture, as an advantage. The literature is a System of References. The fight is supposed to be the effort and risk value, is not obvious. The victory must come the speech, the beauty of the prize must be transferred to the fight, but it remains an assertion. A literary Recount is indirectly, pushes and falls back. What each of the talk is, is a sign for something else. In contrast, Rohmer postulated that films are “in their best moments always have the subject-matter”, “what”, and not the consequences and results, “state of triumph or of sorrow.” Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, the Gangster Scarface, and the private Detective Marlowe, “are all you clever as clumsy craftsmen, we assess, depending on the execution of the works” and not according to their success. This should also apply to the character of the seducer.