I read the obituaries, regular readers will know, avidly. More and more, as I age, those who die were known to me, or influential in my life, few more so than Eric Rohmer who has died at the age of 89.
My serious interest in the cinema is intertwined with my youthful sporting career. Lacking any hand-eye co-ordination, and being slightly built, though tall, I was pretty useless at rugby, hockey and cricket, the games of autumn, spring and summer terms at my school. I have some scars to show from my time on the rugby field, but no caps or colours.
When we entered the sixth form, things relaxed and unless one was good enough to be in the first XV or X1, the Tuesday and Thursday afternoons of mud, ice and communal showering under the lascivious eye of a master could be replaced with other activities. I enjoyed cross-country running, a completely different activity to the sprints I was so bad at on sports days. Then came the chance to take up squash. In those days the school had no squash courts, so we used those at theCambridge University Real Tennis Club on Grange Road. I was, of course, a rotten squash player, lacking speed and any ability to hit the ball. However, the great thing about this arrangement was that there were frequently no spare teachers to supervise us, so, provided we turned up and signed in, we could then treat the afternoon as our own. So I would frequently take myself to the Arts Cinema in All Saints Passage.
This was a period when, for me, cinema meant French cinema, and at the Arts I saw Truffaut, Chabrol, Resnais, Godard. I also saw one Godard film, Tout va bien, in the small hours of the morning in the entirely suitable setting of a student occupation of the University’s Sidgwick site. All appealed to me, but none more than Rohmer, in particular Claire's Knee, released in 1972. I loved the slow and subtle pace of the story of the hero’s obsession with a young girl and her knee. His characters do not always come out of Rohmer's films well. He described superbly the fallible process by which they stumble their way through the moral issue at the centre of the plot. In later life I have sought out his films and I think his masterpieces were the series Comédies et proverbs and, above all, his tetralogy , Contes des quatre saisons
I have not yet see his last film, one of his historical excursions, Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon.
My serious interest in the cinema is intertwined with my youthful sporting career. Lacking any hand-eye co-ordination, and being slightly built, though tall, I was pretty useless at rugby, hockey and cricket, the games of autumn, spring and summer terms at my school. I have some scars to show from my time on the rugby field, but no caps or colours.
When we entered the sixth form, things relaxed and unless one was good enough to be in the first XV or X1, the Tuesday and Thursday afternoons of mud, ice and communal showering under the lascivious eye of a master could be replaced with other activities. I enjoyed cross-country running, a completely different activity to the sprints I was so bad at on sports days. Then came the chance to take up squash. In those days the school had no squash courts, so we used those at the
This was a period when, for me, cinema meant French cinema, and at the Arts I saw Truffaut, Chabrol, Resnais, Godard. I also saw one Godard film, Tout va bien, in the small hours of the morning in the entirely suitable setting of a student occupation of the University’s Sidgwick site. All appealed to me, but none more than Rohmer, in particular Claire's Knee, released in 1972. I loved the slow and subtle pace of the story of the hero’s obsession with a young girl and her knee. His characters do not always come out of Rohmer's films well. He described superbly the fallible process by which they stumble their way through the moral issue at the centre of the plot. In later life I have sought out his films and I think his masterpieces were the series Comédies et proverbs and, above all, his
I have not yet see his last film, one of his historical excursions, Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon.
Obituaries:
The Guardian
Le Monde
Gilbert Adair's appreciation in the Guardian
