In an age of clickbait politics and algorithmic attention spans, there’s something quietly revolutionary about refusing to manufacture drama. Rohmer’s refusal to manipulate emotion – to cue violins or insert melodrama – wasn’t an act of naivete; it was a challenge. He trusted the viewer to feel on their own. And he trusted that real life, in all its mundane complexity, could be enough.
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To love Éric Rohmer is to love discomfort – or at least to learn how to sit with it. It also means resisting speed. Rohmer’s films don’t cut quickly, escalate, or deliver resolution on cue. In an era of autoplay and algorithmic gratification, this feels not only antiquated but actively defiant. And yet his work endures – not in spite of that slowness but because of it. Rohmer teaches us how to watch again, how to listen without demanding answers. It means loving the shot that lingers too long, the conversation that circles back on itself, the moral question with no resolution. Rohmer didn’t just resist narrative conventions – he dismantled them quietly, without spectacle, almost politely. And that’s why he remains one of the most misunderstood filmmakers of the French New Wave.
While Truffaut gave us kinetic energy and Godard blew the form apart, Rohmer offered something slower and more patient. His films feel deceptively light: people walk, talk, flirt, doubt, and sometimes change. That’s it. But beneath that surface lies a commitment to form, ethics, and aesthetic precision that rivals his more radical peers. Rohmer’s politics were conservative, yes. But his cinema? That’s where things get interesting.
Eric Rohmer at the Cinémathèque Française, 2004. Public domain photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and Smdl
As editor of Cahiers du Cinéma from 1957 to 1963, Rohmer championed a purist form of auteur theory, one that prized moral seriousness and classical aesthetics over politics. Even as his colleagues moved toward cinematic revolution, he clung to a belief in enduring values – placing Renoir and Murnau above agitprop. His conservatism wasn’t incidental. It was editorial policy.
It’s tempting to read Rohmer’s work as apolitical because it avoids the overt signifiers of leftist filmmaking – no barricades, no strikes, no manifestos. But that’s a mistake. His films engage with morality, freedom, gender, and power in ways that are deeply ideological, even when they don’t announce themselves as such. He wasn’t making propaganda; he was crafting a worldview – one long take at a time.
Rohmer’s films unfold in time, not in plot. His characters are often young, privileged, indecisive. They talk a lot – sometimes aimlessly, sometimes with great clarity. What unites them is a search for meaning, or perhaps the illusion of it. In films like My Night at Maud’s or Claire’s Knee, the protagonists engage in moral gymnastics, trying to justify their desires as philosophical commitments. Rohmer doesn’t let them off the hook. But he doesn’t condemn them either.
There’s something deeply democratic in that gaze. In Rohmer’s world, every character gets their say. No one is flattened into an archetype. The women in his films, often smarter and more self-aware than the men, aren’t punished for their complexity. They’re allowed to be contradictory, opaque, even wrong. That alone makes his work feel radical in a cinematic tradition that so often reduces women to symbols.
And then there’s the form. Rohmer’s visual style – sun-drenched natural light, static camera, minimal coverage – isn’t lazy or amateurish; it’s deliberate. He sought a kind of cinematic asceticism, a stripping away of excess to get closer to the truth of a moment. In this way, his films share more DNA with Bresson than with his New Wave peers. But unlike Bresson, Rohmer embraced chance. He let the world in.
The Green Ray: Delphine, unmoored and uncertain
In The Green Ray, we follow Delphine, a lonely Parisian navigating summer without a travel companion. She drifts from place to place, awkward in groups, uncertain of what she wants. The plot, such as it is, consists of missed connections and aborted plans. But Rohmer treats it with the gravity of a war epic. Every decision matters. Every silence speaks. And when, in the film’s final moment, Delphine sees the green flash of sunset she’s been searching for – an optical phenomenon few people ever witness – it feels like a miracle. Not because anything grand has happened, but because something subtle has shifted inside her.
The optical phenomenon known as the green ray, captured in Rohmer’s final shot.
That’s Rohmer’s magic. He doesn’t deliver catharsis; he earns it.
A similar moral delicacy appears in Pauline at the Beach, where adult characters entangle themselves in self-serving philosophies of love and desire, each claiming moral high ground while behaving with staggering inconsistency. It’s the teenage Pauline, quietly observing, who emerges with the clearest sense of right and wrong – not through polemics but through attentiveness. Rohmer doesn’t punish complexity; he honors it.
Pauline at the Beach (1983): Pauline observes – quiet, watchful, and morally clear-eyed.
Pauline briefly removed from the contradictions of the adult world she’s been forced to observe
This interrogation of moral performance is even more pronounced in My Night at Maud’s, one of Rohmer’s most explicitly philosophical works. Here, the protagonist Jean, a Catholic engineer, spends the night in conversation – sometimes flirtation – with the charming and secular Maud. The film becomes a game of logic and longing, where every glance and gesture is weighed against Pascal’s Wager. Jean insists on virtue but drips with hypocrisy; Maud, by contrast, is grounded, skeptical, and more emotionally honest. Rohmer builds the entire film on conversation and tension – sexual, ideological, and moral. What’s radical isn’t just that nothing happens, but that everything feels like it could. The suspense lies in restraint. By the end, the film hasn’t resolved its questions – it has only complicated them. And in that refusal to simplify, Rohmer doesn’t preach Catholicism; he reveals its internal contradictions.
My Night at Maud’s (1969): Pascal’s wager looms quietly behind every gesture in Maud’s churchgoing debates.
In Rohmer’s world, the most charged scenes are the quietest ones.
In a cinematic landscape often obsessed with urgency, Éric Rohmer practiced patience. He didn’t just film characters – he listened to them. He didn’t just craft scenes – he observed. This isn’t a stylistic footnote; it’s a worldview.
Jean retreats into books, not to find answers, but to avoid the ones he already knows.
The Rohmerian gaze resists domination. His camera rarely moves unless it must. It doesn’t surveil. It doesn’t interrupt. Instead, it waits – sometimes to the point of discomfort. That’s not an accident. It’s ethics made visible.
In an age of clickbait politics and algorithmic attention spans, there’s something quietly revolutionary about refusing to manufacture drama. Rohmer’s refusal to manipulate emotion – to cue violins or insert melodrama – wasn’t an act of naivete; it was a challenge. He trusted the viewer to feel on their own. And he trusted that real life, in all its mundane complexity, could be enough.
This approach feels particularly resonant now, when so much cinema relies on spectacle as shorthand for seriousness. Think of the “prestige” biopics or the Oscar-bait trauma narratives. They insist on weight. Rohmer, in contrast, offers air. His films don’t try to prove anything; they just are. And in doing so, they reveal what more bombastic films often obscure: that morality is lived in fragments, in offhand comments, in missed connections. That politics doesn’t only happen in the streets – it happens in . . .
If Godard shattered the cinematic apparatus to wake his audience up, Rohmer simply handed them a mirror. He didn’t need to scream. He needed to be present. And in a medium so often used to dominate, that presence is its own kind of resistance.
Éric Rohmer didn’t make revolutionary cinema in the traditional sense. He didn’t set fire to the frame or lace his films with manifestos. But he understood something just as subversive: that watching closely, listening fully, and refusing to flinch from ambiguity is its own kind of radical act.
Rohmer’s conservatism was not the chest-thumping nationalism of the Reagan era or the militarism of the Cold War right. It was quieter, more philosophical – a blend of Catholic humanism, monarchist nostalgia, and classical ethics. In today’s polarized frameworks, it’s easy to mistake that for reactionary dogma. But Rohmer’s films aren’t sermons – they’re moral laboratories. He wasn’t defending tradition so much as investigating its erosion.
In a movement obsessed with rupture, Rohmer practiced resilience. While Godard demanded you wake up, Rohmer asked if you’d sit still long enough to actually feel something. He didn’t scream; he lingered. And that patience – so often mistaken for passivity – is what gave his films their quiet power. He understood that sometimes the most political thing a film can do is simply refuse to perform.
To call Rohmer’s work apolitical is lazy. Worse – it’s dishonest. His characters might not overthrow governments, but they confront something equally slippery: themselves. Their failures, contradictions, blind spots – these are the battlegrounds of moral life. Rohmer’s camera doesn’t judge, but it doesn’t look away either. And in a culture addicted to certainty, that’s a form of defiance.
Rohmer refused to flatter the viewer. He asked you to lean in, to wait, to wrestle with your own discomfort. That’s not in spite of politics; that is politics. Not the kind that wins elections, but the kind that asks what kind of person you are when no one’s watching. In Rohmer’s world, ambiguity isn’t a flaw – it’s a method. He doesn’t choreograph moral clarity; he exposes its absence. This makes his cinema an outlier not just in political content but in political form. There are no heroes in Rohmer’s films, no villains either. Just people – often paralyzed by thought, capable of self-deception, and occasionally, grace. That refusal to deliver judgment is itself an ethical stance. In a medium addicted to catharsis and clean arcs, Rohmer’s restraint becomes radical. He demands we do the work ourselves – not just of interpretation but of reflection.
That’s why Rohmer still matters. Not because he fit neatly into the revolution, but because he didn’t. He stood at the edge of it, questioning the terms. And in doing so, he expanded the frame. He showed that political cinema needn’t be loud to be forceful. That moral clarity could emerge not from slogans but from silence. That patience is not passivity, but discipline. In standing apart from the revolution, Rohmer gave it contour. He may have been the outlier – but without the outlier, the shape of the movement remains incomplete.
If the French New Wave was a manifesto, Rohmer was the dissenting footnote. And sometimes, the footnote is what history gets right.
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All images are screenshots from the films.
