The Cinematheque

Perhaps no other filmmaker has mined the interior moral life with more success—and more wit, irony, and intelligence—than Eric Rohmer (1920−2010). His sublime cinema navigates the gaps that exist between our thoughts, our feelings, and our actions—the differences between what we think and what we feel, between what we say and what we do. It is an intimate, literate, and remarkably nuanced cinema, revealing an artist with the deftness and depth of a great novelist, an artist more than worthy of the impressive literary comparisons (Stendhal, Balzac, Pascal, Jane Austen, Henry James et al.) so often invoked to describe his work.

As evidenced by our retrospective heretofore, the bulk of Rohmer’s distinguished, decades-spanning career can be surveyed through his trio of acclaimed cycles: Six Moral Tales (1962−1972), Comedies and Proverbs (1981−1987), and Tales of the Four Seasons (1990−1998). But some of the cinéaste’s most accomplished and formally-audacious films were crafted outside of those series, as stand-alone works untethered to an overarching theme or conceit. Affectionately titled ​“Ancient and Modern,” this program of four series outliers features three of Rohmer’s dazzling and daring historical literary adaptations The Marquise of O (1976), Perceval (1978), and The Lady and the Duke (2001), plus a playful, oft-neglected comedy about modern life, 4 Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1987).