Practicing What He Preaches? Continuities and Discontinuities in Rohmer’s Early Film Criticism and His Conte d’automne

Abstract

Early in his career, Eric Rohmer’s contributions to Arts, Cahiers du cinéma, and other cinema journals displayed the enormous range of his interests and served as a testament to his perspicacity and wisdom in assessing the interest and value of the films he critiqued. He wrote with equal acumen about Japanese cinema, the American Western, Italian realism, and, for example, Ingmar Bergman’s early films and Jean Renoir’s later ones. It is interesting to measure his immediate reactions to these films with the place they have come to occupy in the cinematic pantheon and to realize how prophetic were the great majority of his judgments.