Éric Rohmer is not only one of the finest filmmakers of the twentieth century; he is also one of the most original and influential theorists of cinema. He is perhaps unique among major movie auteurs in having spent his first decade and a half of professional life as a teacher of Greek and Latin language and literature. When Rohmer is described as a classicist, this is not merely a matter of a vaguely classicizing aesthetic program. Classics was his profession. Yet by curious paradox, his classical formation left few visible traces on his oeuvre either as a critic or a cineaste. Overt use of Greek and Latin literature is at a minimum until the last phase of his career as a filmmaker. How are we to understand his classicism?

Rohmer did not begin making feature films in earnest until he was in his late forties, but in the following four decades, he released more than two dozen full-length features, along with a large body of shorter films, most of which were produced for educational television. He was even more prolific as a writer about film.

While Rohmer’s work is perceived as profoundly intellectual and is self-evidently the creation of an erudite man, it is often difficult to trace specific allusions or references in his films unless they are explicitly adaptations of literary works. This is partly because he digested his influences so thoroughly, but mainly because of his philosophical views on the relationship of cinema to reality. His aesthetic and theoretical classicism made it impossible for him to produce the sort of self-consciously artful work that his peers among the French New Wave directors of the 1960s were fond of creating.

Our examination of Rohmer’s classicism will culminate in his 1992 film Conte d’hiver (A Tale of Winter), in which Plato is extensively discussed by one of the characters, alongside Hugo and Pascal. Shakespeare is also a major presence in this film, as a very different kind of classic. Yet Rohmer’s films are rarely this self-conscious, and even here the relationship of the film to high-culture reference points is ambiguous and equivocal. Rohmer’s general distrust of intellectuals is ironic given how many of the main characters in his films could be described thus. Was there really any need for that librarian to recite Hugo or read out a passage from Plato’s Phaedo to the woman he wants to marry?

At the moment there is a great deal of academic writing about Rohmer and his work, but almost none of it is of an adequate standard. Scholars of film studies, even in France, rarely have a deep background in philosophy, Latin, Greek, German, or French literature or a grounding in high culture of the sort that would illuminate Rohmer’s oeuvre. I myself am almost entirely unequipped to deal with the filmmaker’s Kantianism or his lifelong engagement with German Romanticism. But luckily, those who are interested in this subject generally have at least two high-quality starting points for research. The first is a 2014 biography by Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe, which was published in English in 2016 as Éric Rohmer: A Biography. The second is Marco Grosoli’s 2018 monograph Éric Rohmer’s Film Theory (1948–1953): From “École Schérer” to “Politique des Auteurs.”

The biography in particular provides a useful road map to the Rohmer archive, which was deposited in June 2010, five months after Rohmer’s death, at the Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine. Among the twenty thousand items in one hundred forty document boxes are Rohmer’s teaching notes and Latin compositions, as well as the usual letters, documents, notebooks, drafts, sketches, and literary remains to be expected from an artist as restlessly prolific as Rohmer. But for the moment we lack a detailed picture of Rohmer’s classical background. We will only be able to discern this aspect of his formation clearly when some scholar takes the time to sift through these materials systematically to determine the precise depth and extent of Rohmer’s engagement with Latin and Greek.

This investigation is based on the assumption that Rohmer’s reading in classical authors was broad rather than profound, and went no further than the Latin and Greek texts on which he was examined or was compelled to teach during his time as a lycée professor. There is little evidence that he engaged much with ancient literature after 1957, when it ceased to be a professional necessity. Also, the peculiar qualities of his references to Plato in his films suggest that he engaged with these dialogues largely as classroom texts for students of Greek, whether as a student or a teacher himself. Much of Rohmer’s apparent Platonism, such as it was, seems to have been received by osmosis from his deep reading of Kant, Hegel, and Schiller. Plato often seems to him a source of arresting philosophical myths rather than a primary inspiration for his thought.

Before dealing with any of Rohmer’s films, we should look at his academic background for clues to his unusually literary approach to cinema. Rohmer’s real name was Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer; he was born at Tulle in central France on March 21, 1920. He came from a culturally ambitious family: His brother was the noted philosopher and gay rights activist René Schérer, who died in 2023 aged one hundred.

Rohmer and René were both educated at the Lycée Edmond-Perrier in Tulle. The future filmmaker was notably proficient in Latin, Greek, and mathematics, as well as sport. But his greatest loves were reading and theater. The Rohmer archive preserves papers related to a 1933 stage production that was based on Virgil’s first Eclogue. Rohmer translated and adapted the text and starred as Meliboeus. It is not known how the performance was received, but he kept up his theatrical activities consistently until July 1937, when he earned a seventeen in his double-bac in philosophy and mathematics.

In September of that year, Rohmer became a boarder at the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris to prepare for the entrance examination for the École normale supérieure. He specialized in Latin, Greek, and German. Although he studied hard, he may have devoted a little too much energy to French literature, not to mention his newfound interest in cinema: He passed the written exam but failed his orals in July 1939, and the following year he had no oral exam because he failed the written one.

During the Occupation, Rohmer, his brother, and his parents settled in Clermont-Ferrand, where René began studying for the École normale supérieure entrance exams while Rohmer began his licence-ès-lettres classiques at the local university. A familiar pattern re-asserted itself: In spring 1943, he passed the written exam but failed the oral exam for his agrégation in classics, but he at least passed the qualifying examination to work as a classics teacher. In 1947 he made one final attempt at the agrégation, and failed again. He became a schoolmaster, commuting from the Latin Quarter to various provincial schools when he could not find an adequately remunerated post in Paris. For a few years he was a colleague of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze at the Lycée Henri-Brisson, Vierzon; but they never met, because the school was more than one hundred twenty miles from Rohmer’s very modest home in the fifth arrondissement of Paris.

Evidence related to Rohmer’s teaching career is patchy in many respects, although we have at least one striking piece of documentation in the form of a speech that he gave in 1948 at the annual prize-giving ceremony at the Lycée Sainte-Barbe, which was then one of the top private schools in Paris. Part of the text is quoted in the Herpé–­Baecque biography. Rohmer declares himself proud to belong to the “battalion of Latinists” and tells his audience that Latin

is a cultural tool, to be sure, but a tool of a refined form of culture reserved for the few. With it, we do not live entirely in our own time . . . and is that a bad thing? Mastering Latin is less a privilege than a mission, to pass on from generation to generation. Along with the mathematical problem, it remains the best criterion of intelligence available to us. It is a gymnastics of the mind just as essential as physical exercise to the body. Latin allows us to keep the messiness of life out of our schools.

A little later he makes a declaration that seems to foreshadow his eventual departure from classics teaching for creative pursuits:

Let us free ancient authors from commentaries, from the welter of sophisms and clichés. Let us get to know them as they were; let us seek to discover in what way they were modern and resemble us.

Finally, he gives one of his first public hints of his definition of classicism in the arts: “The sense of balance, of harmony, suggests that we respect tradition in its contemporary aspects.” It was some years before he fleshed this out more fully, of course. Let it also be added that his definitions of classicism seem to have shifted in emphasis more than once, between 1955, 1965, 1985, and his last interviews in the early part of this century.

The Lycée Sainte-Barbe did not pay very well, but Rohmer’s time there marked the beginnings of his dominance over French film criticism throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. School administrators enabled Rohmer to organize a film club, first for his pupils and then for the broader public. On December 9, 1948, the Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin was formally incorporated, with Rohmer as the first president. Every major young director, screenwriter, and critic of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s seems to have been a member; and Rohmer acquired the nickname by which his friends in the film industry knew him to the end of his life, “le grand Momo.”

Pseudonyms were important for Rohmer. His mother disapproved of the cinema and preferred to think of her elder son as a moderately successful classics teacher since he had not succeeded in the university system in the way René had. She died at the age of eighty-four in 1970, never realizing that her academic failure of a son was an internationally renowned film director. In May 1950, Rohmer helped create La Gazette du cinéma, and in September of that year he first officially adopted his pseudonym Éric Rohmer, which is said to combine the names of the silent film director and phony autocrat Erich von Stroheim with that of Sax Rohmer, the pulp novelist who wrote the famous Fu Manchu series. Both components of the pseudonym were themselves pseudonyms.

When right-wing troublemakers in the Ciné-Club and La Gazette caused a public scandal, Rohmer’s career as a schoolteacher was saved thanks to his use of a pseudonym, so his mother was not the only consideration in terms of his reputation. After La Gazette was forced to cease publication, the team regrouped and came out in April 1951 with the first issue of Les Cahiers du cinéma, which remains the single most influential critical publication in film history. Although Rohmer kept a low public profile, his role in shaping the journal was central. His adversaries began to refer enviously to the circle that formed around him as the “école Schérer,” which extensively developed what we now know as auteur theory and also helped consolidate Alfred Hitchcock’s reputation as a major artist, when he was then considered little more than an exploitative popular director.

Thanks to Grosoli’s excellent book Éric Rohmer’s Film Theory, we can separate out distinct strands in Rohmer’s intellectual makeup. The first influence to mention briefly is Jean-Paul Sartre, who was the most fashionable intellectual of the post-war period, prominent as a novelist and dramatist as well as a philosopher and journalist. But as Grosoli makes clear, the Existentialist influence on Rohmer did not last very long, and by the age of thirty he had more or less outgrown it entirely. The filmmaker’s turn against Sartre, Camus, and Beckett was rooted more in instinct than reasoned objection: Something about Existentialist literature and drama repelled him aesthetically.

Rohmer’s interest in something like a Platonist approach to film theory can be traced to his relationship with André Bazin, the pioneering critic who died of leukemia in 1958 at the age of forty. Rohmer absorbed from Bazin a premise that he repeated consistently throughout his career. He held that the most distinctive aspect of film as an art form is its unique, unprecedented relationship to reality, which is radically different from that of literature, theater, or painting. Film doesn’t “say” or articulate something about reality; it shows it. As Rohmer said in an interview with Jean Narboni in November 1983,

for me, the important thing in film is ontology and not language. Ontologically, film says something that the other arts don’t say. In the end, its language resembles that of the other arts. If one studies the language of film, one finds the same rhetoric as in other arts, but in a rougher, less refined, and less complex style—an idea that leads nowhere except to say that film is able to imitate the other arts, that it does so with great difficulty, but that it isn’t always bad.

The other consistent strain in Rohmer’s public pronouncements on cinema, and art in general, is a Kantian vision of aesthetics. We should tread carefully in attempting to delineate this view, because Rohmer never seems to have fully thought it through, and his statements are not always internally consistent. He did, however, hold himself to the basic principles that “nature” may be provisionally defined as “the totality of appearances”; that the centrality of nature is transhistorical; and that art is eternally bound to nature. In his fascinating 1996 collection of essays De Mozart en Beethoven: essai sur la notion de profondeur en musique, he writes,

To represent the evolution of the fine arts as a natural and continuous process, by depicting it as a mere reflection or by-product, as the thermometer of a civilization, as the fruits of a worldview and of a sensibility which are every day different from the day before, would offend the fine arts, not honor them.

According to Rohmer, the goal of modern art (in the twentieth-century sense of the term that begins with Picasso) was to reproduce the filters of consciousness, thus making us see an object the way we ordinarily would. Rohmer distinguished this from cinema’s task, which also is to reproduce consciousness’s filters, making us see an object the way we ordinarily would, while at the same time allowing us to see it in the way that we ordinarily do. In other words, a painting is compelled to look in some way like our ordinary vision, and it makes us aware of our ordinary vision by departing from it. This is radically different from the phenomenon of cinema, which should be one with our perception.

Rohmer very interestingly proposes that in cinema the only real subject is time itself, presented in a spatialized, and thus objectified, form. This is best articulated in his 1972 dissertation The Organization of Space in F. W. Murnau’s Faust, which was published in 1977. The argument is too intricate to lay out here in detail, so we might stick for the moment to Rohmer’s more general pronouncements in De Mozart en Beethoven, as when he says,

There is no need for cinema to take us beyond common perception, since it is through its faithful reproduction, in its maximal objectivity that cinema, as an autonomous art, attains Being. Paradoxically, art will be all the greater and the more authentic if there is pure and simple copy and not willingness to interpret. This role reversal between reality and artist, opposite to the role played by the modern painter, introduces in its own way a transcendental dimension to the work, if only for the very particular and brand new conscience it gives us of the form of Time.

In other words, the role of the filmmaker is to record and conserve the ordered beauty of the world rather than to attempt its transformation. We might dwell a little longer on Rohmer’s vision of what modern art is to enable us to distinguish it later from his notions of classical art. The following quotation is also from De Mozart en Beethoven:

The modern vision of art is born from Kant, although this was not part of Kant’s original intentions. It refuses to consider the world as a thing in itself, and only contemplates the vision the artist has of it. In a painting by Cézanne, truth does not lie in its pseudo-conformity with the model; rather, it is to be found in the mark that witnessed the operation through which the painter perceived the model. . . .

From the Impressionists to Cézanne and the Cubists, space qua form of perception becomes the real subject matter of painting. The subjective and objective are reversed. Art and reality change roles. The Cézannian construction begets the reality of the painted object: the latter only exists insofar as it belongs to a whole regulated by strict laws, laws which are not a posteriori induced from our vision of the real, but which have an a priori control over such vision, laws originating from the very form of our sensibility. The painter gives us the opportunity to discover such laws through their very infringement, which the uninitiated mistakes for clumsiness.

All this may seem irrelevant to a discussion of film, but it was in thinking aloud about music and twentieth-century painting that Rohmer was able to develop an original notion of classicism as it related specifically to cinema. His first attempt to articulate this was a 1949 article for Combat entitled “The Classical Age of Film,” which began with the provocative statement that the “classical age” of cinema lay ahead in time, and not behind those who, in 1949, were still mourning the end of the era of silent films.

In that article, Rohmer impressionistically outlines a vision of classicism that must be realized by future filmmakers:

Verisimilitude, naturalness, unity of place and action, psychological depth—I bet these words are repeated more often than is thought by the critics, who are the most determined to limit cinema’s domain to news coverage and detective stories. Who knows? If one of them thought to re-read La Pratique du théâtre by the Abbé d’Aubignac, he might find the exact expression for which he yearns. Let us be the keepers of a classicism too young to fear its detractors. But let us be unflinching in our conviction.

Rohmer’s vision was not yet fully formed; he did not want to construct a straitjacket of theoretical propositions of the sort that strangled earlier attempts to realize a classicist aesthetic in the twentieth century. Rohmer realized that any new form of classicism would need to be based in philosophical principles rather than rigid stylistic strictures:

Art is a reflection of our time; isn’t it also the antidote? The cult of brutality is the vice of tranquil times; ours needs a more subtle drug. Not everything has been said about Man; a new art impatiently awaits its chance to speak. Let’s admit that we are ready to listen; we are tired of a common art to which we gladly lowered ourselves in the interest of being stylish, but that our infatuation has killed.

Rohmer developed his early vision further in his first essay for the Cahiers du cinéma, “Vanité que la peinture,” in which he claimed that cinema was not merely the art form of the future but that the other arts, including literature and painting, were exhausted, and increasingly inadequate in their current form for dealing with reality. He asserted that in breaking off from nature, modern art degraded man, whereas it ought to elevate him. Now that modern art and literature had run out of things to say, and had unsatisfying means of saying them, we should turn to a “classicism” within the cinema.

According to Rohmer’s provisional definition in 1951, in a classical art, the artist serves the transparency of nature instead of sticking “critically” out of it. Here, for the first time, he spelled out what he saw as the classical virtues: elegance, efficacy, naturalness, and sobriety. Like the French classicist critics of the early twentieth century, Rohmer identified classicism with the capacity to represent, with a detached serenity, the intricate, contradictory obscurities of human beings; he associated it with a sense of measure, of balance, of order, and of unadorned simplicity. Yet instead of building on the precedents of Sophocles, Pheidias, and Aristotle’s Poetics, Rohmer extrapolated his classicism from the films of Howard Hawks and Hitchcock.

Rohmer was instrumental in transforming Hitchcock’s reputation among critics. In 1957, he and the director Claude Chabrol wrote the first major monograph on the director, Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films. This is the first serious engagement with Hitchcock’s oeuvre to emphasize the director’s Jesuit education and Catholic background. Without exaggerating the director’s level of erudition, Chabrol and Rohmer refer vaguely to the “ever-present Platonism” in Hitchcock’s work. This seems to be superficial, or even largely accidental: They discuss his suspense film Rear Window in relation to the analogy of the cave from the Republic. This cannot have been a conscious intention on the part of the director or the creative team for Rear Window. Hitchcock’s Platonism, however defined, is an instinctive, intuitive, unconscious phenomenon. Rohmer seems to prefer this sort of Platonist, at least in the arts.

Like the French classicist critics of the early twentieth century, Rohmer equates classicism with the doctrines and traditions of the Catholic Church. In classifying Hitchcock as Catholic, he and Chabrol highlight aspects of his oeuvre that have rarely been self-evident to the majority of cinemagoers:

The relations between people, the concept of the couple, of the family, of adultery, all contribute to the designation of Hitchcock as a Catholic auteur. But he refuses and will continue to refuse to sermonize, to proselytize—so much so that audiences were quick to forget the essentially Catholic nature of his work. So much so that his films were to engender a complete misunderstanding about his intentions, since the spectator could not see beyond appearances.

Rohmer and Chabrol seem to have realized that for many readers this was a far-fetched theory:

Though Hitchcock is a practicing Catholic he has nothing of the mystic or the ardent proselyte about him. His works are of a profane nature, and though they often deal with questions relating to God, their protagonists are not gripped by any anxiety that is properly speaking religious.

Rohmer, who had not yet released a feature film when this monograph was published, may have been projecting his own future tendencies on Hitchcock’s oeuvre. Yet his position is ultimately convincing:

This simultaneous presence of God and Evil in the same person does not, however, constitute the mainspring of the drama, as it does in classical tragedy. Though Hitchcock’s protagonists participate simultaneously in guilt and innocence, it is impossible to discern the exact point at which these two extreme poles are balanced. Each of these two forces, the positive and the negative, seems to grow not inversely but proportionately; the guilt of the innocent will increase in proportion to his absolute innocence and vice versa. Or at least, if this strange state of equilibrium is never actually reached, we are made to glimpse it as a possibility, an asymptote against which all our good or evil resolutions will come up, and which defines the constitutive—or let us rather say the original—flaws in our natures. If free will manages to find its point of impact on the curve and more or less deflect its course, this can only be due to a miracle. And it is indeed a miracle, the miracle of Grace as much as of free will.

All of this is to say that Rohmer’s classicism has almost nothing to do with Homeric, Athenian, Hellenistic, or Roman culture. Instead, his classicism is the sort that was initially described by Stendhal in his famous 1823 pamphlet Racine et Shakespeare as an inferior alternative to Romanticism. This form of classicism looks back not to the Athens of Pericles or the Rome of Augustus but to the kingdom of France under Louis XIV in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when French culture was at its height in terms of power, prestige, influence, and originality. This dry, anti-Romantic vision of classicism enjoyed a resurgence after the Dreyfus affair, when it became dominant even among French writers and artists who were not necessarily anti-Dreyfusards.

Because there was no such thing as a classical film, Rohmer had to develop his concept by analogy rather than through appeal to a series of precedents. His classicism remains difficult to pin down precisely except as a pretension towards universality. In his mind, classic and modern were opposed concepts—with modern being the modernism of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Nicolas de Staël, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner; yet he also thought that what was classic was also truly modern, insofar as true art is primarily about achieving a certain harmony with nature.

Of course, there are a few competing influences on this vision. The first, and most important, is classicism as Frenchmen understand it, beginning from the restrained, rigorously Aristotelian dramas of Corneille, Racine, and Molière. Yet this Grand Siècle classicism somehow is made to cohere with a more general adherence to the so-called classic literature of the nineteenth century, with specific reference to the notably unrestrained novels of Hugo and Balzac. (Rohmer had unexplained prejudices against Stendhal; these are part of a discussion best ignored for the moment.) Critics have often discerned the influence of Pierre de Marivaux’s comedies on Rohmer’s oeuvre, but he always denied any special affinity with this or any other eighteenth-century French work that was considered classic, and we may take him seriously, because the resemblances between his scripts and Marivaux’s plays are at most superficial.

On the other hand, both Rohmer and Marivaux were fundamentally comic writers who were acutely conscious of working in the shadow of the seventeenth-century dramatists. As Rohmer admitted in a 2007 interview with Philippe Fauvel and Herpé,

To cast my actors, I make them read from classical theater such as Racine, Corneille, Molière . . . and I listen. I want them to be as careful with the prose as the verses. I am the opposite of those drama teachers who say, “Be natural! Don’t exaggerate!” When there’s a lot of information, you have to emphasize nouns and verbs.

Where Romantic-era German neoclassicism is concerned, the picture is muddier. Rohmer adapted the work of Heinrich von Kleist more than once. His 1976 film adaptation of Die Marquise von O was in fact made in German. And his 1980 adaptation of the play Das Käthchen von Heilbronn helped re-invigorate his series of films Comedies and Proverbs, which took up most of that decade. As for Goethe, one of Rohmer’s unrealized projects was an adaptation of Elective Affinities, and although he was ultimately unable to find a way to make this narrative suit his style of filmmaking, he certainly used elements of it in films such as L’Ami de mon amie in 1987. Yet the German Romantic influence on Rohmer was ultimately more philosophical than literary, and we should single out three texts in particular for their impact on his thought and practice: Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, and—above all—Kant’s Critique of Judgment.

One of the reasons Rohmer was so vague about the definition of his classicism was that it was allied to a set of political views that were socially unacceptable in much of polite society. Although he was generally circumspect when it came to revealing his position, it became impossible to deny it in the late 1990s. At this time, he began working on a project about the French Revolution that eventually became his elegant yet explosively controversial historical drama L’Anglaise et le duc (The Lady and the Duke). Henceforth it was undeniable that he was a monarchist. His final film, Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon (The Romance of Astrea and Celadon), was not merely an exercise in reactionary nostalgia but an actively counter-revolutionary statement rooted in Catholic, Gallo-Roman culture; the traditions of classical Latin and Renaissance French literature; and above all the hierarchical society of pre-revolutionary France.

The unmentioned dark influence on Rohmer’s views was Charles Maurras, the leader of Action Française, whose entire political program was to a great degree an aesthetic one. Rohmer was close throughout his life with Maurras’s most prominent disciple, the philosopher Pierre Boutang, who was exasperated with the filmmaker’s refusal to be straightforward about his intransigently legitimist, counter-revolutionary, illiberal views. But Rohmer’s lifelong friendships with far-right controversialists, including the monarchist agitator and journalist Philippe d’Hugues, were an open secret for decades.

The filmmaker’s liberal, progressive, and left-wing friends and colleagues almost never recognized the extent to which Rohmer agreed with such figures, even though he shared many of their tastes. Rohmer was able to hide in plain sight because he rejected the Maurrassian hatred of Kant, the Enlightenment, and Germans in general. Also, he was too curious and open-minded to adhere entirely to this French nationalist vision of classicism. For this vision was, in truth, a means of embodying absolutist monarchy by allowing no art, literature, or music that was not explicitly in line with the French classical tradition, even if incoherently defined.

Although Rohmer neither spoke nor read English, his version of classicism ultimately has more in common with that of T. S. Eliot than anyone else’s. Like Eliot, he maintained a position that was undeniably Maurrassian, without the rigid, intransigent dogmatism and inflexibility of the Action Française aesthetic program. Within this kind of classicism, what matters above all is a grounding in visible reality and eternal truths, some of which might not be self-evident without the rigorous exercise of reason.

Modern filmgoers are often surprised to learn of Rohmer’s essentially reactionary views because his films seem to be products of the sexual revolution rather than implicit critiques of post-Christian morality. His most famous film, Ma nuit chez Maud (My Night at Maud’s), which was released in 1969, is a case in point: The Catholics among the protagonists are hypocritical and unattractive, and they lack the wit to defend the faith that they claim to uphold, while the sexually liberated atheists feel like the heroes.

Rohmer’s series of six films known as the Contes moraux or Moral Tales are nowhere explicitly Platonic, yet they seem to demonstrate an implicitly elenchic approach to discussion: It would be fair to describe them as the result of what happens in a Socratic dialogue when there is no Socrates to lead the conversation. In an interview with Sight and Sound in 1971, Rohmer clarified—insofar as he ever made anything clear:

What I call a “conte moral” is not a tale with a moral, but a story which deals less with what people do than what is going on in their minds while they are doing it. A cinema of thoughts rather than actions. The people in my films are not expressing abstract ideas—there is no “ideology” in them, or very little—but revealing what they think about relationships between men and women, about friendships, love, desire, their conception of life, happiness (perhaps in my next film I’ll talk more about happiness . . .), boredom, work, leisure . . . Things which have of course been spoken about previously in the cinema, but usually indirectly, in the context of a dramatic plot. Whereas in the Contes Moraux this just doesn’t exist, and in particular there’s no clear-cut line of tragedy or comedy. You could say that my work is closer to the novel—to a certain classic type of novel which the cinema is now taking over—than to other forms of entertainment, like the theatre. And that, for me, is significant. I think I have contributed towards leading the cinema even further away from the theatre than it had already gone. My characters may do a lot of talking, but it takes more than dialogue to make a play. They don’t talk at all like people in a play—at least, I hope they don’t.

He adds, in a passing comment that recalls his attitude towards Platonic myth,

The cinema’s role, precisely, is to create the myths, as it did in Chaplin’s time, not to find all its sources of inspiration outside itself. Film, for instance, used to provide the themes for strip cartoons; now it’s the other way round.

This is worth keeping in mind when thinking about the mythical aspect of Conte d’hiver in particular. Instead of drawing on archetypical myths or creating new archetypes, as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and the great artists of the silent film era did, Rohmer tries to use film as a medium for Platonic myth.

In his Comedies and Proverbs, Rohmer the Catholic demonstrates an increasing fascination with the occult: The main characters in Les Nuits de la pleine lune (Full Moon in Paris) in 1984 and Le Rayon vert (The Green Ray) in 1986 have a deep, sincere faith in tarot cards and astrology as means of telling the future. Rohmer explained in a 1986 interview,

Astrology—which I really don’t believe in—plays a similar role in my films to the pagan supernatural in eighteenth-century authors’ work, when they had scruples about discussing Christian miracles. Personally, the Catholic Christian faith to which I am attached has inspired me from time to time. I allude to it in My Night At Maud’s, but from a sociological rather than a religious point of view. In Perceval, I emphasized its Christian character, whereas I could have chosen its Celtic character. Sometimes in my films there are vague allusions. But I would be incapable of treating a subject such as that of Thérèse [Alain Cavalier, 1986], a film I haven’t seen, or [Onze] Fioretti [de François d’Assise] by [Roberto] Rossellini, a film that made a great impression on me. But at the same time, I’m eager to show transcendence in a roundabout way, like a game. That’s how I use the theme of the stars, without believing in it, but without being a sceptic either, by which I mean being interested in people who believe in this area. I like people who have faith, even if I don’t believe in the thing they have faith in.

In the same interview, Rohmer reveals just how much his broadly Kantian principles of realism affect his approach to filmmaking:

There’s a second point which is much deeper and more sincere in my work, that’s the cosmological or even meteorological side. My films are made using meteorology. If I didn’t check the weather forecast every day, I couldn’t make my films because they are filmed according to what the weather’s doing. My films are slaves to the weather. To the extent that I don’t cheat and that I’m inspired by the weather, I have to be a weatherman. It’s the cosmos as a perfect work of art and as a natural marvel which attracts me. These are the miracles of nature. The green ray and the blue hour are the miracles of nature. This feeling about nature that I’ve always deeply felt I find difficult to integrate into my films which are always more psychological and morose.

Except in his historical dramas, Rohmer was often limited by his self-imposed strictures and principled austerity when it came to creating myth. He relied heavily on the charisma and beauty of individual performers to create an air if not of fantasy, then at least of exceptional qualities of the sort that are required for an archetypical narrative, according to his implicitly hierarchical, anti-egalitarian vision of reality.

Perhaps Rohmer’s finest series of films is his final one, the Tales of the Four Seasons, which he completed in the 1990s. The first of these, the Conte de printemps (Tale of Spring) was released in April 1990. Here we see a reference to Platonic myth that is introduced in a completely natural, convincing manner because it comes from the mouth of Jeanne, a philosophy professor at a suburban lycée. The plot of this film is slight and whimsical. Jeanne meets a music student named Natacha at a party given by Jeanne’s flighty college friend Corinne, who turns out not to be present at her own party.

Jeanne and Natacha form a bond because they are both bored and neither knows anyone else there. Jeanne offers to take Natacha home and then come back, making Natacha wonder openly whether Jeanne has come to see someone else whom she hopes to encounter later. According to Jeanne, this is possible, but not true. Her situation is far less interesting, and yet slightly absurd: She says that if someone put on the Ring of Gyges and followed her around all afternoon, it would still be impossible to understand her actions or words. She is compelled to explain the reference, because Natacha evidently has not read Plato’s Republic and doesn’t realize that the Ring of Gyges grants invisibility to its wearer. Yet Natacha got a sixteen in philosophy in her bac.

The Conte de printemps includes an unusual amount of philosophical discussion because all four main characters are highly educated. Jeanne’s father Igor works for the Ministry of Culture and dreams of being an art critic; Igor’s girlfriend Ève is working on her master’s degree in philosophy, with a dissertation on the painter Philippe de Champaigne and his relationship with the Jansenists—another recurring preoccupation of Rohmer’s, not just because he was obsessed with the philosophy of Pascal and the tragedies of Racine but because he attended Mass at the Church of Saint-Médard in Paris, which was notoriously the center of Jansenism in the eighteenth century, when it was plagued by the phenomenon of the convulsionnaires.

In a somewhat tense informal dinner party, the four characters discuss philosophy; Ève tries to use her superior knowledge of metaphysics to humiliate Natacha, or so Natacha thinks. Jeanne attempts to keep the peace by describing her approach to pedagogy: She claims to introduce her pupils to Kantian ideas without making them read Kant and explicitly compares one of her classroom discussions to a Socratic dialogue in the manner of the Theaetetus. But the focus of the discussion remains Kant. Rohmer often seems less interested in Platonic content than in, if you will pardon the term, Platonic form.

The richest of the Tales of the Four Seasons, and one of Rohmer’s very finest films, is his Conte d’hiver. It was released in January 1992 and was the first of the series to be conceived. Rohmer was inspired to write not just this film but the entire series by a B.B.C. television production of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale. Act 5, scene 3 of the play is performed onstage during the film, in French translation of course.

The heroine of this fairy-tale-like story is a hairdresser and beautician named Félicie, who is a single mother. Throughout the film she is depicted as spiritual but not religious, and holds deep convictions from which she never wavers. This is why, for example, she never would have dreamed of having an abortion when she found out she was pregnant as a result of a fling with a handsome chef during a summer holiday in Brittany. Félicie finds herself caught between three men: Maxence, her employer; Loïc, a municipal librarian whom she loves as a brother rather than a lover; and Charles, her long-lost love, who is the father of her daughter Élise.

As is so often the case in Rohmer’s films, the most intellectual character is nowhere near the most intelligent, or the wisest. Félicie’s would-be lover Loïc rivals Jean-Louis Trintignant’s character in Ma nuit chez Maud as one of the most unattractive self-described Catholics in French cinema. Loïc has an intellectual’s disembodied belief rather than real faith; Félicie’s natural, instinctive, childlike tendency toward faith forms the heart of the narrative.

In an unexpectedly pivotal scene, Félicie finds herself feeling out of place during a discussion among intellectuals at Loïc’s house. He argues politely with a superstitious “pagan” friend, Edwige, about her occult beliefs; she dismisses him as a closed-minded Catholic hypocrite who blindly obeys what the Catechism tells him—which is ironic given how flagrantly he ignores Church doctrine throughout the film, or demonstrates simple ignorance of standard Catholic teachings. But then, he is an intellectual rather than a man.

The discussion turns towards the immortal soul. Edwige and Félicie have no problem with metempsychosis, or reincarnation; nor did Hugo, whom Loïc quotes at some length. He wants to dismiss Félicie’s ideas about the soul, but he has no real answers to her questions, only citations from non-Catholic books. Félicie cannot love him, partly because she belongs to Charles and partly because her very notion of love is rooted in an impossible-seeming faith which is precisely analogous to the faith of a Christian—an authentic Christian, rather than a “Modernist” one like Loïc. Despite being simple and uneducated, Félicie gives voice throughout the film to suspiciously Platonic-sounding ideas, as though she were recollecting them. At one point in the narrative, she tells her sister, “I prefer symmetrical beauty. Remember: I’m also a beautician.” The pun works better in English than in French.

Toward the end of the film, Loïc takes Félicie to the theater to see The Winter’s Tale. Because of his excessive intellectualism, he fails to understand the action. He tries to rationalize the plot, while Félicie recognizes the need for faith, not merely as a commonplace piece of wisdom but as an essential element in Shakespeare’s narrative, which ends with a coup de théâtre miracle. She is not merely being playful when she tells him she is “more religious” than he is. His response is curiously double-edged, if not condescending and passive-aggressive. If he were God, he says, he would cherish Félicie specially, because she has suffered a great injustice yet is still prepared to sacrifice everything—her life, her happiness—for the sake of a lover whom she lost by accident. Loïc is too sophisticated to see that he is the one who is made to look foolish by this statement.

The conversation moves to Pascal and Pascal’s wager. Again the intellectual fails to impress the simple-minded hairdresser. She challenges his inability to defend the Catholic doctrines in which he doesn’t really believe by asserting that she believes in the immortality of the soul far more than he does because she believes that it existed before birth too. He suggests with a hint of self-pitying bitterness that Edwige was able to convince her while he was not; but she simply cannot understand why the soul cannot have existed before birth if it continues after death. Loïc asks what the soul could be without the identity of the ensouled person: If you have no memory of your interior life, you are no longer alive.

Félicie is unperturbed, even though she cannot logically defend her position. She has faith in it, just as she has faith that she knew Charles in a previous life. Loïc is taken aback: Félicie seems to have stumbled unwittingly on Plato’s defense of the immortality of the soul in the Phaedo. Later on, he reads her the relevant passage and explains the difference between an authentic myth and a Platonic myth, which he reduces to a mere tactic for explaining a concept rather than a phenomenon with an independent truth-value, or relation to reality. It is just a figure of speech.

Felicie finds his didacticism patronizing and patronizes him back, accusing him justly of believing nothing unless it has been written in a book. The next day, she reminds him that he has so little real faith that he doesn’t even feel wholly obliged to attend Mass on Sunday. She, who is not a believer in Catholic dogma, seeks to protect him from committing sins. Ultimately she is aware of the falseness in their relationship as well as in his faith. Her own strength of faith makes her wiser than the learned, even if the object of her faith turns out to be wholly unclear.

In this way, Rohmer was an authentically classical artist. His classicism is a matter not of references, allusions, or superficial echoes but of exemplifying classical virtues, and recalling them. In his work, he embodies them as Félicie does, rather than merely talking about them like Loïc.