Eric Rohmer Integral

Extraits des films des Frères Lumière, avec les commentaires de Jean Renoir et Henri Langlois sur les débuts du cinéma et la conservation des films.

Delphine's traveling companion cancels two weeks before her holiday, so Delphine, a Parisian secretary, is at loose ends. She doesn't want to travel by herself, but has no boyfriend and seems unable to meet new people. A friend takes her to Cherbourg; after a few days there, the weepy and self-pitying Delphine goes back to Paris. She tries the Alps, but returns the same day. Next, it's the beach: once there, she chats with an outgoing Swede, a party girl, and a friendship seems to bud; then, suddenly, Delphine bolts, heading back to Paris. As she waits at the Biarritz train station, a young man catches her eye; perhaps a sunset and the sun's green ray await. (Arrow Films)

This book examines the theoretical affiliations between the most notable proponent of literary realism, Honoré de Balzac, and two understated but key representatives of the French New Wave, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette. It argues that their film criticism, which gradually led to the establishment of a common aesthetic vision of cinema (the “politique des auteurs”), owes more to Balzac and the nineteenth-century novel than to any intellectual trend of the immediate post-war period.

A middle-class woman engages a younger woman, Véronique, to give private tuition to her lazy and undisciplined son. Having made no progress in mathematics, Véronique attempts to get the young boy to write an essay, but without success. Why waste time writing in two pages what you can say in two lines? Also Véronique is bored and, at the end of the lesson, she goes away, while the boy returns to his toys.