MORAL STORIES


I’ve just watched several of Éric Rohmer’s films again - The Green Ray, The Aviator’s Wife, Pauline at the Beach - prompted to do so by an article suggesting that his films were appropriate viewing during 'lockdown' because many of his protagonists are emotionally trapped, struggling to change their confined and undramatic lives. Rohmer’s films are low-keyed; his characters, predominantly unremarkable and middle-class, slowly reveal their traits and characters as their stories unfold, and you eventually realise that most of them are interesting, even though they may at first seem irritating or unlikeable. They rarely stop talking and thinking about themselves, their dialogue, often amusing, being a peculiar mix of mindfulness and self-delusion that reveals some of the subconscious feelings and thoughts that underlie and motivate normal behaviour.

Rohmer’s skilful story-telling, which can be gripping, owes much of its effectiveness to his judicious restraint, which is evident, for instance, in a preference for viewing his subjects from a discreet distance and seldom in close-up. He is a  self-effacing film-maker, his work conservative and temperate, so I was startled when, having recommended The Green Ray to a friend with whom I rarely disagree about aesthetic matters, I received a reply saying that she finds Rohmer’s attitudes to young women ‘challenging’. (Later, as it turned out, she told me that she watched the film and had enjoyed it greatly). My friend’s comment, however, struck home and made me consider the question anew. I’ve long thought that most of the women in Rohmer’s films are more interesting than his men, and that he was unusually sensitive to feminine feelings and predicaments, so I began to wonder if I were only sympathetic to his views of women and femininity because they often reflect my own. It also occurred to me that in these ‘woke’ times such attitudes might be regarded at as old-fashioned, paternalistic, and condescending.

I discovered two articles that suggested that my views of Rohmer weren’t completely mistaken. In a piece on Claire’s Knee, the film critic Molly Haskell points to the wide variety of ordinary women who regularly appear in his films, all of whom ‘have problems as deserving of close attention as party girls and divas and more cerebral professionals’, adding that ‘he’s as interested (almost) in mothers as in ingenues’. She draws attention to their mutual bonding - ‘girls exchange secrets and advice, quarrel and make up; (they) stick up for each other, sometimes heroically, in the face of male intimidation’ - and concludes that Rohmer ‘watched femininity with a mixture of dispassion and empathy, often mocking the unconscious strategies by which men use women for their own purposes’. In the second article, published in the feminist film journal Another Gaze, Fiona Handyside notes ‘a nascent feminist sensibility' in Rohmer’s film cycle, Six Moral Tales, going on to say that this tendency became more pronounced in the later Comedies and Proverbs series, which often featured lead female characters. She adds that in The Green Ray Rohmer employed a female crew and cinematographer, as well as co-crediting Marie Rivière, the actor who played the main character, Delphine, with the screenplay.

I find it interesting that although Rohmer’s films are liberal in tone, he was nevertheless traditional in his moral opinions and a lifelong Roman Catholic. Another French film-maker of the time, Robert Bresson, even more widely admired and canonical than Rohmer, also held strong religious views, which are almost always evident in his ascetic and morally astringent films. I was reminded of this while browsing through Another Gaze after reading about Rohmer; by chance I came across a long essay on Bresson that  jarred uncomfortably with my understanding of his work. Focussing on Bresson’s supposed interest in ‘the female automaton’, a topic  apparently previously explored by Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière, McNeil Taylor writes about Bresson’s ‘misanthropic vision’ and need for complete control over his actors, arguing that many of his films ‘encouraged and enabled subsequent generations of male filmmakers to capitalise on women’s suffering in the name of mannered artistic profundity’. This is a misunderstanding of Bresson’s style and convictions.  Like Rohmer, but more radically, Bresson was interested in people who felt imprisoned in impossible situations and in how they found strategies to deal with or escape from them. Bresson’s Catholicism led him to believe that suffering often had meaning, if only because it can lead to spiritual transcendence, and whether or not one agrees with his world view, it seems  perverse to take Bresson’s work out of context and to assess it retrospectively in terms of currently fashionable critical theory.

One of this year’s unexpected pleasures was the abundance of new music by Gillian Welch, who is notoriously careful about what she  releases to the public. As The New York Times noted in a long article, the fifty-eight songs amount to seven more than those on all of Welch’s previous five studio records. One of the four new albums comprises covers; the other three are collections of demos she wrote with her partner Dave Rawlings many years ago, most of them hitherto unreleased. 'They are returning to what they know’, said the NYT; ‘songs about the slow, challenging, beautiful heat of living, about people having to make hard decisions on a path to goodness’. Welch, like Bresson, is drawn to the lives and stories of outsiders and outcasts, many of whom are similarly caught up in impossible situations. Some of them appeal for the help of God because they’re searching for personal transformation or redemption. Welch’s telling of these tales is always reduced and tenderly austere, couched in the idioms of folk, bluegrass, and country music, but because she was not born into the social conditions that gave rise to this music, she has occasionally drawn criticism for ‘inauthenticity’. This is to overlook, however, the truth that Welch’s art is fundamentally an act of imagination, of projected identification with the lives and plights of people in different times and places. In one of her more beautiful and poignant new recordings, Rambling Blade, Welch sings about a man who reflects on the ominous prospect of being hanged for his misdeeds; all he asks for is ‘a prayer and a resting place’. Not many traditional folk or blues songs are more compelling and emotionally persuasive.



For further exploration:

 Éric Rohmer

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/438-claire-s-knee-rohmer-s-women 

https://www.anothergaze.com/a-womans-art-sophie-maintigneux-eric-rohmer-and-female-friendship/ 

Robert Bresson

https://www.anothergaze.com/woman-escaped-female-automaton-robert-bressons-mouchette/

Gillian Welch

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/03/magazine/gillian-welch-david-rawlings.html 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3xeXS2pnnE&list=OLAK5uy_nZws8QUezopBYxnY1Tzt27q489jSLDArU&index=5