Éric Rohmer as a Visual Filmmaker
This project was begun in 2019 as a long essay examining in detail the ways in which the filmmaker Éric Rohmer used interiors for tacit characterization in films from all three of his major film cycles (Six Moral Tales, Comedies and Proverbs, and Tales of Four Seasons). It has now morphed into a book project which is currently paused pending the completion of Weaving at Black Mountain College: Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and Their Students. The book will examine the visual side of Rohmer's inimitable style, which has been little discussed in English.
Excerpt
Blanche’s apartment is clearly new. They haven’t yet put in the landscaping outside. Inside, her rooms are sparsely furnished with simple white melamine furniture and a loveseat and armchair of bent wood and white canvas. If the furniture isn’t from Ikea, it’s from somewhere similar. While we never see a full view of her bedroom, through an open door we glimpse a TV located on the floor, and the low position of her bed suggests that her mattress might be on the floor too. It’s a first apartment and she’s slowly acquiring furniture. As in so many of Rohmer’s interiors, pride of place is given to a large, modernist metal and wood bookcase, filled with lots of books but with one empty shelf bearing a silver teapot and one blue teacup. Overall, the feeling is clean and uncluttered—almost airy—and very white. That a woman named Blanche lives in a white apartment in a conspicuously white building seems like more than coincidence. Although she dresses in bold colors, she nevertheless—like Louise in Les Nuits de la Pleine Lune—matches her rooms. This is where she is most free to be herself. She is at home.
The first time we see Blanche’s apartment, Lea has come for a visit. Blanche shows her around and points out the views to notable landmarks, but what Lea—who lives either with her parents or at her boyfriend’s place—envies most is Blanche’s control over her own space. “It’s great to have a place where you can change things,” she says. “I can’t at my folks’. At Fabien’s I don’t feel at home. I’d love to turn things upside down, but I won’t.” While Lea’s statement is revealing for her own character (her desire is not really for a space of her own but for the license to rearrange someone else’s), it also serves to reiterate to us her clear understanding that this is Blanche’s space. Throughout their conversation, first about the apartment and then about men, Blanche moves from standing to sitting on the floor to leaning her elbow on the coffee table to sitting in a chair. Her physical ease claims the space as hers.
Once we understand that her apartment represents the space in which Blanche is her truest self, each subsequent visit to Blanche’s apartment is weighted strongly with emotional consequence. By the time of our second visit, the plot is well underway. Lea has left for vacation with another man, and Fabien and Blanche have connected and realized their similarity. She is perhaps already falling for him, but doesn’t know it yet. When she meets Fabien and Alexandre in town, her connection with Fabien is immediate and warm, but when Alexandre, to whom she remains deeply attracted, offers to give her a ride to Paris she clams up and begins making excuses until he finally leaves without her. She walks into her apartment and kicks her shoes across the room, giving in to her tears and her frustration at herself. “You’re really hopeless,” she says to her crying face in the bathroom mirror, slapping herself in anger. Her home is the place where she is also free to give voice to her insecurities. The room itself cannot comfort her, of course, but her apartment signals the constancy of her truest self. Her attempts to appeal to Alexandre fall so flat because she is trying so hard to suppress her self in his presence.