Garage Screen. Éric Rohmer

Date

Place

Garage Screen summer cinema

DESCRIPTION

One of the key directors of the French New Wave along with Godard and Truffaut, Éric Rohmer was an intellectual with an acute sense of beauty. This summer, Garage Screen is showing the earliest of his film cycles.

One of the leaders of the French New Wave, a novelist and critic writing on film and literature, the editor of Cahiers du cinéma during its best years (1958-1963)—in his films, Éric Rohmer created a wonderful world apart from the raging reality and filled with admiration of the endless beauty of living.

Directing what could be described as fairy tales in a modern setting, Rohmer often worked in cycles.

Six Moral Tales, screened at Garage, is the first of his three large cycles and fully representative of his cinematic style, combining elaborate lightness of narrative, with a feeling of a summer holiday in a resort town; brilliant and eloquently written ‘random’ dialogues with an astute analysis of human desire.

All films in the cycle explore the controversial, contradictory and impossible choices we make as lovers. The drama unfolds on the level of unconscious desires: while men rationalize their preference for a certain ‘type’ of women, they are irrationally drawn to less predictable and therefore more dangerous relations. With the exception of Claire's Knee, all films also feature internal monologues, which relieves them from theatricality. With each film, Rohmer like a composer introduced new variations to the main theme, inspired—despite the films’ apparent sentimentality—by Plato’s philosophy, or by the moral questions raised by Blaise Pascal and Søren Kierkegaard.

Like his teacher and colleague at Cahiers du cinéma, the renowned film theorist André Bazin, Éric Rohmer was a devout Catholic, and believed that cinema is there to reveal to man the beauty of God’s creation, ‘to make us see the world with different eyes and to admire, as Pascal said, things whose originals we don’t admire.’

Each screening will be accompanied by a lecture about the director, delivered by film critic and French cinema expert, Mikhail Trofimenkov, film critic and translator, Inna Kushnareva, philosopher and film critic, Oleg Goryainov, and psychoanalyst Viktor Mazin.

Schedule

Lecture. Éric Rohmer: The Filmmaker by Mikhail Trofimenkov

In the short opening lecture introducing the retrospective, well-known Russian film historian and French film specialist Mikhail Trofimenkov will speak about the cinematic pathway, as well as the theoretical views and contexts of Éric Rohmer’s oeuvre.

Date
June 8, Thursday
Time
21:30–22:00
Place
Garage Screen summer cinema

Screenings: The Bakery Girl of Monceau and Suzanne’s Career

The first two films of the cycle—The Bakery Girl of Monceau and Suzanne’s Career—were released on the same day and form a dilogy within the cycle. In these shorts, we first meet Rohmer’s typical protagonist facing a romantic choice and a signature story about the quest for love, paradoxes of desire and self-deception.

The Bakery Girl of Monceau
Director Éric Rohmer. France, 1963, 23 minutes
16+

Suzanne’s Career
Director Éric Rohmer. France, 1963, 54 minutes
16+

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Date
June 8, Thursday
Time
22:00–23:30
Place
Garage Screen summer cinema

Lecture. Éric Rohmer: The Aesthete by Inna Kushnareva

Film critic and translator Inna Kushnareva will touch upon Éric Rohmer’s aesthetic attitudes. Her lecture will feature the director’s theoretical texts (the compilation of articles “The Taste of Beauty” and others), the traces of classical painting iconography which he used in his films, as well as Rohmer’s loose screen adaptations of literary works whereby the director follows in the footsteps of the eighteenth century belles-lettres tradition.

Date
June 9, Friday
Time
21:30–22:00
Place
Garage Screen summer cinema

Screening: La Collectionneuse

The third film of the cycle introduces the art theme. As the protagonist is planning to open an art gallery, he realizes that he himself is being watched and evaluated by the charming temptress Haydée, with whom he is sharing a mutual friend’s mansion in the French Riviera. The two housemates begin a game where each is desperate to win by letting the opponent make the first move and bids soar like in an auction.

La Collectionneuse
Director Éric Rohmer. France, 1967, 90 minutes
16+

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Date
June 9, Friday
Time
21:30–22:00
Place
Garage Screen summer cinema

Lecture. Éric Rohmer: The Christian Philosopher by Oleg Goryainov

The lecture by philosopher and film critic Oleg Goryainov is devoted to the motifs of Christian, and in particular, catholic thought, and references to the philosophy of Blaise Pascal and Søren Kierkegaard in the director’s films.

Date
June 10, Saturday
Time
21:30–22:00
Place
Garage Screen summer cinema

Screening: My Night at Maud’s

One of the seminal films of the decade, My Night at Maud’s brought Éric Rohmer international acclaim and was nominated for the Palme d'Or and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Projecting Pascal’s famous argument for believing in God onto a relationship between a man and a woman, Rohmer, however, stops short of answering the question about choosing morality over passion.

My Night at Maud’s
Director Éric Rohmer. France, 1969, 105 minutes
16+

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Date
June 10, Saturday
Time
22:00–23:45
Place
Garage Screen summer cinema

Lecture. Éric Rohmer: The Psychoanalyst by Vicktor Mazin.

The lecture by psychoanalyst, film theorist and critic Viktor Mazin will unveil the attraction of the French director’s plots for Lacanian psychoanalysis. Prior to the screening of Claire’s Knee (1970), Mazin will discuss Rohmer’s characters’ eccentric logic of desire, using this film as his main reference.

Date
June 11, Sunday
Time
21:30–22:00
Place
Garage Screen summer cinema

Screening: Claire's Knee

The fifth ‘moral tale,’ awarded the Grand Prix at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, Claire's Knee is loosely based on one of the Contes moraux by the eighteenth century French novelist and philosopher Jean-François Marmontel—a collection of stories that also gave name to Rohmer’s cycle. Another literary element to the story is the character of Aurora, the novelist who unwillingly encourages people to succumb to their desires.

Claire's Knee
Director Éric Rohmer. France, 1970, 105 minutes
16+

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Date
June 11, Sunday
Time
22:00–23:45
Place
Garage Screen summer cinema

Lecture by Katya Fedorova: Style in the films of Eric Rohmer

In her lecture Katya Fedorova, journalist, critic and media consultant, will talk about the interconnection between cinema and the fashion industry, the styles of the 1960s and 1970s, using examples from the movie series Six Moral Tales by Eric Rohmer, and why fashion style from the film Love in the afternoon is relevant again today.

Date
Monday, June 12
Time
21:30–22:00
Place
Garage Screen summer cinema

Screening: Love in the Afternoon

The sixth and final film in the cycle is the most openly erotic picture by Rohmer, with the 1960s’ icon Zouzou (French model Danièle Ciarlet) in the role of the old flame seducing the protagonist. Faithful to the key themes and style of his previous films—the Pascal’s Wager-style love dilemma, the elegant composition where every gesture is loaded with meaning (cinematography by Néstor Almendros)—with Love in the Afternoon Rohmer steps into comedy territory, the married protagonist fantasizing about a device that could suppress the will of women around him. Female characters from other ‘moral tales’ appear in cameos during a dream sequence, all played by the same actresses.

Love in the Afternoon
Director Éric Rohmer. France, 1972, 95 minutes
16+

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Date
June 12, Monday
Time
22:00–23:45
Place
Garage Screen summer cinema