ABSTRACT
Eric Rohmer (1920-2010) is a filmmaker whose wide body of work, made over a fifty-year period, is famous for its critical engagement with the tenets of cinematic realism. With a few important exceptions, Rohmer’s films, according to Joël Magny’s detailed analysis of his style, are marked by transparency, where cinematic technology is in service of as clear and unmediated as possible a view of empirical, observable reality (Magny 1986: see especially 14—19: see alsoCrisp 1988: 8-11). Direct sound, natural light and long shots are used alongside focal lengths, camera heights and angles that echo those of standard human visual perception to respect the intrinsic reality of what is being filmed, in a gesture which harks back to André Bazin’s desire that film should record perceptual reality as closely as possible. So great is Rohmer’s interest in capturing the effects of natural light that his long-term collaborator as director of photography, Nestor Almendros, reports that when they were filmingPauline à la plage/Pauline at the Beach(1982), Rohmer would often delay shooting by several hours in order to capture certain lighting effects (Desbarats 1990: 19). Such anaversion to interfering with the effects of natural light, and seeking through technology to allow the cinematic apparatus to approach the rendering of things as they are ontologically, has important repercussions for Eric Rohmer’s color filmmaking. First, Rohmer’s work in and on color is indebted to broader debates concerning realism and the image, to the extent that we can see his theoretical discussions of cinematic color as bound up in wider discussions of realism. Second, Rohmer’s decision to attempt to preserve the effects of natural light through his color work has important repercussions for filmic meaning. Last, Rohmer develops a paradoxical use of color, where it both hides and reveals the presence of the film-maker through a play of “invisibility” (color transcribed through natural light) and “presence” (color as part of a carefully controlled palette decided by the film-maker). This paradox of presence and invisibility echoes the theological argument of Rohmer’s filmmaking and color comes to have a key role in explicating his films’ meditation on the place of God in the world of his characters.
