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WORK TITLE: Eric Rohmer: A Biography
WORK NOTES: with Antoine de Baecque, trans. by Steven Bendall & Lisa Neal
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 5/22/1965
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: French
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/Eric-rohmer/9780231175586 * https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/No%C3%ABl_Herpe * http://blog.unl.edu/dixon/2016/04/01/eric-rohmer-a-biography-by-antoine-de-baecque-and-noel-herpe/ * http://www.rogerebert.com/balder-and-dash/book-review-eric-rohmer-a-biography * https://www.cineaste.com/winter2016/eric-rohmer-biography/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born May 22, 1965.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Université de Paris VIII, France, senior lecturer.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Noël Herpe is a French writer and educator whose work focuses on French films and filmmakers. He teaches at the Université de Paris VIII. Herpe has written, edited, and cowritten several books in French, including Histoires de Rome, Le film dans le texte: l’œuvre écrite de René Clair, Mémoire en éveil, archives en création: Le point de vue du théâtre et du cinéma, Sacha Guitry: Une vie d’artiste, Journal d’un cinéphile, Journal en ruines, and Mes scènes primitives: Récit.
Herpe collaborated with Antoine de Baecque to write the 2014 book Éric Rohmer: Biographie. Two years later, an English version of the volume, Éric Rohmer: A Biography, was released. The book includes information on Rohmer’s early years, noting that he was born in Tulle, France, in 1920 with the name Jean-Marie Maurice Sherer. Herpe and de Baecque explain that the Rohmer pseudonym was not the only one the secretive man used. He never told his mother that he was a film director. The authors describe and analyze Rohmer’s films in chronological order.
Critics responded favorably to Éric Rohmer. Ray Olson, contributor to Booklist, suggested: “Despite an idiomatically haphazard translation, this is the biography of the year for cineasts.” “Compulsively readable, this volume is a model of scholarship and style,” asserted Wheeler Winston Dixon in Library Journal. A Publishers Weekly writer noted that the book offered “a combination of comprehensive research and engaging storytelling.” The same writer concluded: “The book will foster a renewed appreciation of a complex artist.” Glenn Kenny, a reviewer on the Roger Ebert Web site, described the volume as “a remarkably absorbing life story and a valuable critical tool. The life story is absorbing because it’s so unusual.” Kenny added: “Although rendered in a clear, straightforward style, the book is not undemanding. Rohmer’s thought and work were complex, and it’s this fact in part that determines the book’s form, which follows the chronology of Rohmer’s life but also concentrates, in particular chapters on specific modes of activity or thought, and here the authors will hopscotch around the timeline to serve the larger thematic concerns. The book also, as is only fit, treats Rohmer as a French artist, one working within several French traditions, and the reader conversant with those traditions will have an easier time with the book.” A critic on the Frame by Frame Web site commented: “With many behind-the-scenes photographs, selections from correspondence, detailed financial accountings of production circumstances, and offering a sympathetic yet clear-eyed portrayal of Rohmer as alternatively imperious and yet by turns extraordinarily generous to neophyte filmmakers, Éric Rohmer: A Biography is a feast of a book.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, June 1, 2016, Ray Olson, review of Éric Rohmer: A Biography, p. 30.
Library Journal, May 1, 2016, Wheeler Winston Dixon, review of Éric Rohmer, p. 69.
Publishers Weekly, April 11, 2016, review of Éric Rohmer, p. 51.
ONLINE
Frame by Frame, http://blog.unl.edu/ (April 1, 2016), review of Éric Rohmer: A Biography.
Roger Ebert Web site, http://www.rogerebert.com/ (August 17, 2016), Glenn Kenny, review of Éric Rohmer: A Biography.
Noël Herpe is a senior lecturer at the Université de Paris VIII. He has published works on René Clair and Sacha Guitry, as well as a book of interviews with Éric Rohmer about his text Le Celluloïd et le Marbre.
LC control no.: nr 92002206
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Herpe, Noël
Found in: Author's Mauriac et les grands esprits de son temps, 1990:
t.p. (Noël Herpe)
Journal en ruines, 2011: t.p. (Noël Herpe) cover p. 4 (b.
1965; litterature and movie critic)
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QUOTED: "Despite an idiomatically haphazard translation, this is the biography of the year for cineasts."
Eric Rohmer: A Biography
Ray Olson
Booklist. 112.19-20 (June 1, 2016): p30.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* Eric Rohmer: A Biography. By Antoine De Baecque and Noel Herpe. Tr. by Steven Rendall and Lisa Neal. June 2016.608p. illus. Columbia Univ., $40 (97802311755861; e-book, $39.99 (9780231541572). 791.43.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The senior one of the five critics-turned-directors who created the French New Wave cinema was the group's most dedicatedly personal. He segregated his intimate life as Maurice Scherer, bourgeois Catholic family man, and his working life as Eric Rohmer, so rigorously that his mother never knew that he was not a professional teacher. His biographers closely observe that segregation. In this very big book, there is vanishingly little about Scherer's adult experiences, and his wife and sons are cited exceedingly sparingly. Instead, it is the record of a filmmaking life, penetratingly illuminating Rohmer's distinctive methods of preparing scripts and selecting and rehearsing actors and technicians as well as controlling the release of finished work. Stories long predated development into films, actors were brought to Rohmer by friends as often as they responded to casting calls, location shooting with an absolutely minimal crew was insisted upon, and venues for premieres were carefully chosen. The resulting movies--famously belonging to the series, Six Moral Tales, the Four Seasons, and Comedies and Proverbs, with freestanding tides based on literary classics and French history when they weren't still more witty, philosophical romantic comedies-feature smart, middle-class men and women, near-invariably young and beautiful, especially the women. Despite an idiomatically haphazard translation, this is the biography of the year for cineasts.--Ray Olson
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Olson, Ray. "Eric Rohmer: A Biography." Booklist, 1 June 2016, p. 30. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA456094029&it=r&asid=cf966d24949b5c82e324d797c1ff7927. Accessed 26 Jan. 2017.
QUOTED: "Compulsively readable, this volume is a model of scholarship and style."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A456094029
de Baecque, Antoine & Noel Herpe. Erie Rohmer: A Biography
Wheeler Winston Dixon
Library Journal. 141.8 (May 1, 2016): p69.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* de Baecque, Antoine & Noel Herpe. Erie Rohmer: A Biography. Columbia Univ. Jun. 2016.608p. tr. from French by Steven Rendall & Lisa Neal. illus. notes. index. ISBN 9780231175586. $40; ebk. ISBN 9780231541572. FILM
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
This definitive critical biography of Nouvelle Vague filmmaker Eric Rohmer (1920-2010), born Jean-Marie Maurice Scherer, is written in an accessible style and copiously illustrated throughout with frame grabs, personal photographs, behind-the-scenes shots, and press materials. Rohmer's 25 films (e.g., My Night at Maud's; Claire's Knee; Beau Marriage) are covered in chronological order, offering detailed insights into not only the films but also the director's method, his relationship with his actors, and the development of his cinematographic technique. Scrupulously researched, with an exhaustive bibliography and a thorough index, this obvious labor of love by de Baecque (cinema, Univ. of Nanterre) and Herpe (senior lecturer, Universite de Paris VIII) demonstrates an understanding and appreciation for Rohmer's unique vision, giving readers a clear and comprehensive overview of his output. VERDICT Compulsively readable, this volume is a model of scholarship and style that no serious cinephile's library should be without.--Wheeler Winston Dixon, Univ. of Nebraska
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Dixon, Wheeler Winston. "de Baecque, Antoine & Noel Herpe. Erie Rohmer: A Biography." Library Journal, 1 May 2016, p. 69+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA450998886&it=r&asid=2a248fa2452153ad4c01fbf288b5d418. Accessed 26 Jan. 2017.
QUOTED: "a combination of comprehensive research and engaging storytelling. The book will foster a renewed appreciation of a complex artist."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A450998886
Eric Rohmer: A Biography
Publishers Weekly. 263.15 (Apr. 11, 2016): p51.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Eric Rohmer: A Biography Antoine de Baecque and Noel Herpe, trans. from the French by Steven Rendall and Lisa Neal. Columbia Univ., $40 (608p) ISBN 978-0-231-17558-6
Eric Rohmer (1920-2010) was one of the most distinguished filmmakers of the French new wave, but as a person, he has remained an enigma. In this remarkably dense and absorbing biography, de Baecque (Truffaut: A Biography) and Herpe (Rene Clair) attempt the difficult task of unmasking Rohmer, and they succeed with aplomb. Drawing on Rohmer's personal archives, they reveal an intensely private man, born Maurice Sherer in the central French town of Tulle, who lied about his past, assumed multiple pseudonyms, and completely concealed his career from his mother, who died without ever knowing her son was an Academy Award--nominated director. While illuminating Rohmer's personal life, the authors also explore the intellectual pursuits and artistic methods that informed acclaimed films such as My Night at Maud's (1969) and Claire's Knee (1970). In less capable hands, this could be a dry read, but the authors pull off the high-wire act of appealing to both film scholars and lay readers with a combination of comprehensive research and engaging storytelling. The book will foster a renewed appreciation of a complex artist and the remarkable body of work he left behind. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Eric Rohmer: A Biography." Publishers Weekly, 11 Apr. 2016, p. 51. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449663007&it=r&asid=8b3e120b202e69d60a6bbc74ae0b9fc5. Accessed 26 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449663007
QUOTED: "a remarkably absorbing life story and a valuable critical tool. The life story is absorbing because it’s so unusual."
"Although rendered in a clear, straightforward style, the book is not undemanding. Rohmer’s thought and work were complex, and it’s this fact in part that determines the book’s form, which follows the chronology of Rohmer’s life but also concentrates, in particular chapters on specific modes of activity or thought, and here the authors will hopscotch around the timeline to serve the larger thematic concerns. The book also, as is only fit, treats Rohmer as a French artist, one working within several French traditions, and the reader conversant with those traditions will have an easier time with the book."
Book Review: "Éric Rohmer: A Biography"
by Glenn Kenny
August 17, 2016 |
Print Page
Despite the fact that his work has garnered spectacular hosannas from American and British film critics since the 1970s, Éric Rohmer remains, I believe, a largely misunderstood filmmaker in the English-speaking world. In his 1995 book “Flickers,” the astute Gilbert Adair cocked a snoot at a “typical chorus of satisfied [Rohmer] customers: ‘Such a civilized director…’ and ‘Such intelligent characters…’ and, especially, ‘What a pleasure to hear such good talk in the cinema…’” “Aside from the fact that equating a film’s intelligence with the intelligence of its spoken dialogue is to beg a number of crucial questions,” Adair continues, “I would suggest, finally, that Rohmer’s characters are not only among the most foolish, ineffectual, and pathetic milquetoasts ever to have graced a cinema screen, but that, on a generous estimate, ninety percent of the talk is sheer, unadulterated twaddle.”
This is maybe going a little too far but that was Adair for you. A key point in that passage is the implication that Rohmer’s films are better listened too—or, in the case of the non-French speaking viewer, read in the subtitles—than actually watched. That his films, which he largely grouped—“Six Moral Tales, “Comedies and Proverbs,” and “Tales of the Four Seasons”—are talky and perhaps even pedagogical narratives in which mise-en-scene plays only a secondary, or even peripheral role.
“Éric Rohmer: A Biography” by French critics and film historians Antoine de Baecque and Nöel Herpe, now available in an English translation in a doorstop-thick edition from Columbia University Press is both a remarkably absorbing life story and a valuable critical tool. The life story is absorbing because it’s so unusual. Rohmer did not live the way other filmmakers lived. Not just other filmmakers of the French New Wave, of which he was both a kind of father figure and crucial component. I mean pretty much all other filmmakers. Born Maurice Scherer in 1920, the tall, shy, erudite man, who was shamed by his failure to shine as a potential academic in his early manhood, adopted several pseudonyms under which he began a career as a fiction writer and later a film critic. The final pseudonym, which stuck (although he’d work under at least one more later in his career) was a sly nod to pulp writer Sax Rohmer, although the authors of this book can’t verify that Rohmer was an actual fan and given his tastes it doesn’t seem likely. The salient point here is that for all of his life Rohmer never let on to his own mother that he was a film critic and then a filmmaker, even after the international sensation of 1969’s “My Night At Maud’s.” Similarly, it was only on Rohmer’s deathbed that one of his closest assistants actually met Rohmer’s wife and two sons. The man had a genius for many things, and compartmentalization was one.
The book also explores, in a deep and slightly disturbing way, Rohmer’s methods of building a scenario, which involved building characters from the actual lives and words of the performers he picked for a specific film. In the heated time after the making of Jacques Rivette’s “Out: 1,” the actor Jean-Pierre Leaud called Rivette “vampiric;” a less charitable critic of Rohmer could, citing evidence from this book, use the same word against Rohmer. (Although the fact that, with one crucial exception, pretty much all of Rohmer’s performers revered him might make the argument a hard sell.)
Some have expressed surprise to learn, via this work, that Rohmer was in many respects politically conservative (“I don’t know if I am the Right,” he said in a 1968 interview—1968!—“but in any case, one thing is certain: I’m not on the Left”) and the book does chronicle the criticism his films faced in the later portion of his career for focusing on white middle-class French folk of the provinces. It cites, from Rohmer’s own early critical writing, an account of Murnau and Flaherty’s “Tabu” that praises its making, by Rohmer’s lights, Europeans out of its South Seas characters. And it chronicles Rohmer’s lifelong friendship with notorious French reactionary Jean Parvulesco. The authors retain their equanimity all the while.
Although rendered in a clear, straightforward style, the book is not undemanding. Rohmer’s thought and work were complex, and it’s this fact in part that determines the book’s form, which follows the chronology of Rohmer’s life but also concentrates, in particular chapters on specific modes of activity or thought, and here the authors will hopscotch around the timeline to serve the larger thematic concerns. The book also, as is only fit, treats Rohmer as a French artist, one working within several French traditions, and the reader conversant with those traditions will have an easier time with the book, specifically when a passage like this one comes up: “In the end, ‘Loup, y es-tu?’ started looking like a play by Feydeau, with its cuckolding and mistaken identities, with its sexcapades that people try to minimize by lying. But it is a Feydeau that dreams of Marivaux or Racine.”
Where the book really shines is in constructing a through-line of Rohmer’s aesthetic and its consistency from theory to practice. The authors quote generously from Rohmer’s critical work and locate key tenets from the very beginning. “In contrast to graphic, purely visual expression, cinema makes use of the means that are specific to it and creates meaning when it moves about objects or bodies within the space of the frame and a flat surface, in accord with an organization inspired by nature,” de Baecque and Herpe comment when citing Rohmer’s very first published critical essay, “Le cinema, art de la espace.” from 1948. Cut to twenty years later, and the making of “My Night At Maud’s.” Preparing the room of the title character, Rohmer “spent hours placing this or that object” on the set. “One fine day, [lead actor Jean-Louis] Trintignant openly criticized Rohmer for paying less attention to him than to the ashtrays. To which the filmmaker replied ‘I’m less worried about you than about the ashtrays.’” The recounting of the shoots and the examination of the results eventually demolishes the idea of Rohmer as a paragon of talky semi-humanist cinema and assists in an appreciation of him as a sublime aesthete whose works are exquisitely crafted critiques of human vanity. Their moral value lies not in the lessons they may or may not impart, but in their perfection of form. This is more immediately evident in a literary adaptation such as his sublime 1976 “The Marquise of O…” but it holds for every one of his films. The pursuit of this ideal resulted in a body of work that makes him as crucial a figure of cinema as his ideal, F.W. Murnau. This book is, among other things, a provocative and reliable companion piece to the work.
"Éric Rohmer: A Biography" is now available. Click here to get your copy.
QUOTED: "With many behind the scenes photographs, selections from correspondence, detailed financial accountings of production circumstances, and offering a sympathetic yet clear-eyed portrayal of Rohmer as alternatively imperious and yet by turns extraordinarily generous to neophyte filmmakers, Éric Rohmer: A Biography is a feast of a book."
Éric Rohmer: A Biography by Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe
I’ve been reading an advance copy of Éric Rohmer: A Biography, and it’s an absolutely brilliant book.
As the Columbia University Press website notes, “the director of twenty-five films, including My Night at Maud’s (1969), which was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, and the editor in chief of Cahiers du cinéma from 1957 to 1963, Éric Rohmer set the terms by which people watched, made, and thought about cinema for decades. Such brilliance does not develop in a vacuum, and Rohmer cultivated a fascinating network of friends, colleagues, and industry contacts that kept his outlook sharp and propelled his work forward. Despite his privacy, he cared deeply about politics, religion, culture, and fostering a public appreciation of the medium he loved.
This exhaustive biography uses personal archives and interviews to enrich our knowledge of Rohmer’s public achievements and lesser known interests and relations. The filmmaker kept in close communication with his contemporaries and competitors: François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette. He held a paradoxical fascination with royalist politics, the fate of the environment, Catholicism, classical music, and the French nightclub scene, and his films were regularly featured at New York and Los Angeles film festivals. Despite an austere approach to life, Rohmer had a voracious appetite for art, culture, and intellectual debate captured vividly in this definitive volume.”
To that, I can only add that this is the book on Rohmer’s life and work, superbly translated by Steven Rendall and Lisa Neal. Both of the volume’s authors are eminently qualified for the project: Antoine de Baecque is a professor of the history of cinema at the University of Nanterre, and has published biographies of François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, in addition to serving for a number of years as editor in chief of Cahiers du cinema, while Noël Herpe is a senior lecturer at the Université de Paris VIII, and has published works on René Clair and Sacha Guitry, as well as a book of interviews with Éric Rohmer about his text Le Celluloïd et le Marbre.
With many behind the scenes photographs, selections from correspondence, detailed financial accountings of production circumstances, and offering a sympathetic yet clear-eyed portrayal of Rohmer as alternatively imperious and yet by turns extraordinarily generous to neophyte filmmakers, Éric Rohmer: A Biography is a feast of a book. I have been returning repeatedly to the volume in the past few days, marveling at the detail and precision of the text, which in many ways mirrors the precise yet romantic tone of Rohmer’s films themselves. Now, if only all of Rohmer’s works would come out in a complete DVD box set, we’d have a much fuller sense of this extraordinary artist’s legacy.
Éric Rohmer: A Biography will be released in June 2016 – you should order an advance copy now.