Eric Rohmer’s Talking Heads: Listening to the Classical Text in La Bruyère

Abstract

Rohmer’s career from 1959 to the early 1970s had three facets: film criticism, fiction film, and short nonfiction films, incorporating documentaries made for Les Films du Losange¹ and 28 for television. Until recently the latter were the least known part of his oeuvre. It has taken until 2012 for their importance to be marked by the release of a four-DVD set produced by the National Center for Pedagogical Documentation, the centerpiece of which is 12 films mostly made in 1964 and 1965 and treating primarily literary topics.² I will be looking at one of them, Les Caractères de La Bruyère,³ from 1965. Virtually nothing has been written about this film, in part because it has been difficult to see until the CNDP release and in part because La Bruyère is a little-known author in the English-speaking world, though in France he is one of the greatest of the French classiques. ⁴ It stands as a small gem of pedagogic filmmaking, its original context, but no less as a prism through which we can assess Rohmer’s development and vision in the period immediately preceding his first successful feature, La Collectionneuse, filmed in 1966 and released in 1967, which in its style and production really inaugurates his remarkable career as a filmmaker, soon followed by the international success of Ma Nuit chez Maud in 1969.