Abstract
Eric Rohmer’s influence on filmic chroniclers of love within the auteur canon is widely recognized. This essay seeks to situate his oeuvre within a different cinematic historiography: that of genre cinema in general and romantic comedy specifically. In so doing it answers Celestino Deleyto’s call for a reappraisal of films usually seen as outside mainstream genericity from this perspective.1 Given that genre is a site of exchange between filmic institutions and audiences, both of which—even in the case of the more specialized audience targeted by Rohmer—interact with culture more broadly, the point of such an approach is to examine the role played by Rohmer’s work in mediating historically and locally specific notions about coupling and romance. In other words, this analysis will reinsert into a particular social context films that have most frequently been understood to exist as “pure cinema.” outside history.
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Notes
Celestino Deleyto, The Secret Life of Romantic Comedy (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009), 2–3.
Richard Dyer, Only Entertainment (London: Routledge, 1992).
See Roberta Garrett, Postmodern Chick-Flicks: the Return of the Woman’s Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 121
and Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young, “Introduction,” in Chick Flicks: Contemporary Women at the Movies (New York: Routledge, 2000).
See René Prédal, “Le Cinéma français et les genres,” Cinémaction 68 (1993): 54.
Geneviève Sellier, “La Nouvelle vague, un cinéma à la première personne du masculin singulier,” Iris 24 (Autumn 1997). An updated version of this argument appears in English in Geneviève Sellier, Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema, trans. Kristin Ross (Durham: Duke UP, 2008).
Pascal Bonitzer, Eric Rohmer (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1991), 13.
Derek Schilling, Eric Rohmer (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2007), 156. Schilling also notes the bizarre fact that EAmour l’après-midi was remade by American comedian Chris Rock in 2007 as the rom-com/drama I Think I Love My Wife, 48.
Colin Crisp, Eric Rohmer: Realist and Moralist (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988), 9.
Ginette Vincendeau, “Family Ties,” Sight and Sound 18:8 (August 2008): 17.
; David R. Shumway, Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy and the Marriage Crisis (New York: NYU Press, 2003).
Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 61.
Alain Masson, “Le Capricorne souverain de l’onde occidental: sur les Comédies et proverbes,” Positif 307 (September 1986): 43–45.
Erica Flahault, “La Triste image de la femme seule,” in Un siècle d’antiféminisme, ed. Christine Bard (Paris: Fayard, 1999): 391–400.
Amy Burns, “‘Tell me all about your new man’: (Re)Constructing Masculinity in Contemporary Chick Texts,” Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network 4:1 (2011). Web. Accessed April 9, 2013. http://ojs.meccsa.org.uk/index.php/netknow/article/view/65
Raphaëlle Moine, “Remaking Romance: French-Style Love Story into US Romcorn” (lecture, Graduate Seminar, King’s College London, January 6, 2008).
Ginette Vincendeau, “Daddy’s Girls (Oedipal Narratives in 1930s French Films),” Iris 8 (1988): 70–81.
Ginette Vincendeau, “Family Plots: the Fathers and Daughters of French Cinema,” Sight and Sound 1:11 (March 1992): 14–17.
Noel Burch and Geneviève Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes du cinéma français (Paris: Éditions Nathan, 1996).
Celestino Deleyto, “Between Friends: Love and Friendship in Contemporary Hollywood Romantic Comedy,” Screen 44:2 (2003): 167–82.
Keith Tester, Eric Rohmer: Film as Theology (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 159–62.
Frank Krutnik, “Love lies: Romantic Fabrication in Contemporary Romantic Comedy,” in Terms of Endearment: HollywoodRomantic Comedies of the 1980s and 1990s, eds. Peter William Evans and Celestino Deleyto, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1998), 30–31; “Conforming passions?: Contemporary romantic comedy,” in Contemporary Hollywood, ed. Steve Neale, (London: BFI, 2002), 140.
Pascal Bonitzer, Eric Rohmer (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1991), 88–89.
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© 2014 Leah Anderst
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Harrod, M. (2014). Auteur Meets Genre: Rohmer and the Rom-Com. In: Anderst, L. (eds) The Films of Eric Rohmer. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011008_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011008_9
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