ABSTRACT
In 1983, having watched Stromboli (Roberto Rossellini, 1949) for the first time, Eric Rohmer declared that he had decided to abandon, once and for all, the Sartrean influence that had hitherto been so important for him. This chapter explains this conversion by way of a close analysis of the film, and describes the extent to which it shaped Rohmer's subsequent vision and theory of cinéma. Stromboli, can be divided into two parts: one alluding to Sartre's notion of freedom qua emancipation from the gaze of the Other, while the other, adumbrating Kant's notion of the Sublime and his views on ethics more generally, squarely moves away from Sartre and into unmistakably Kantian territory instead.
