Eric Rohmer (Eric Rohmer, 1920- ), formerly known as Jean-Marie Maurice Scherer, was born in Nancy, southern France in 1920. As a professor of literature, he has profound classical painting and literary accomplishment, which is unique in French New Wave films. His works pursue the idyllic tranquility and unpretentious style. Against a graceful and slightly desolate background, he narrates the everyday life of each of "us", and shows in a subtle way people's inadvertent life. The fragile, confused and restless mental state that may be revealed at any moment, seemingly trivial and trivial, but triggers people's thinking about a series of moral issues such as loyalty, ethics, and social value, but he I don't want to judge.
Filmed in 1959, "Leo Constellation" was Romer's first feature film, telling the story of an American violinist who became a homeless in Paris. From 1962 onwards, Romer began to shoot many series of films, three of which are most famous: Six Moral Tales (1962-1972), Comedy and Proverbs (1981-1987), A Story of Four Seasons (1989-1998).
I remember when I first came into contact with Romer's films, it was hard to develop lasting patience with them, feeling like they were just lazy emotional stories in the languid sunshine of a summer afternoon, with long dialogue, slow action, and sleepiness. Later I watched his "My Girlfriend's Boyfriend" (1987), "Summer" (1996), "Afternoon Love" (1972), "Claire's Knee" (1970), "Welshman Perceval" (1976) Wait, but they don't give me a very clear impression, what exactly is he trying to express? I was skeptical, but beyond the skepticism, there was always the feeling that there was something eternal he wanted to grasp; it wasn't until recently after watching "The Dame and the Duke" (2001) that I began to confirm that speculation: Romer is a A humble humanitarian, he has long been tirelessly exploring the spiritual expression of beauty in the elusive human emotional world.
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"The Lady and the Duke" is based on the French Revolution, and records the emotional story of the Scottish noblewoman Grace Elliott and the Duke of Orléans (Duc dOrléans, the cousin of Louis XVI and the father of Louis Philippe). In Romer's eyes, the French Revolution is an event in which the crowd is rioting and the society is in turmoil. Eliot was a noblewoman who was staunchly loyal to the Emperor, had deep affection for Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, and was staunchly opposed to the radicalism of the Jacobins. The Duke of Orleans is a reformist, and believes that the French Revolution has its own rational side. Because he has witnessed the stupidity of the surrounding royal family, he yearns for the reform of French society, but also opposes the radical revolution. However, in the end he was sent by the Jacobins. guillotine.
Eliot, as a royalist, was in danger of her life at any time in the context of the time, but she did not take it to heart; during a soldier's search, she rescued a strange nobleman who happened to be One of the Duke's most distasteful; at Eliot's request, the Duke gave the asylum seeker an escape pass. Here Romer wants to express a kind of human love that transcends politics; in order to highlight Eliot's humanity, the French Revolution became a testing ground for the extremes of human nature. Later, when Eliot asked the duke to vote against, or at least abstain, in the parliamentary vote to sentence Louis XVI to death, the duke verbally agreed, but in the end he chose to vote in favour. In this case, the vote of the Duke sent Louis XVI to the guillotine. This disappointed Elliot with grief and anger, and she decided to cut off her emotional relationship with the Duke. But the Duke's reformed attitude could not be tolerated by the radical party, and he was imprisoned for it, while Eliot was imprisoned for his royalist stance; Fading, but becoming more and more simple and profound, both of them transcended their original political positions and gradually entered a timeless emotional experience.
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"The Dame and the Duke" is not a political film, Romer put the pursuit of the spirit of beauty first. According to Kant, beauty is a symbol of morality, and behind the spirit of beauty symbolizes a certain morality; what Romer wants to express is a beauty that transcends morality and politics. Romer is nostalgic for the art of the French Middle Ages, Classicism, Baroque and Roquek, all of which flourished before the French Revolution. Since the French Revolution, romantic art has replaced classicism and baroque art, the most representative event of which is Jean-Jacques Rousseau's opposition to Jean-Philippe Rameau. Lamor made outstanding contributions to Baroque harmony theory, and also made great contributions to counterpoint, establishing the "Lamore Law". The structure of Rameau's music is complex, and it fits the formal needs of the French Baroque period. Rousseau, on the other hand, hopes to create a bourgeois spirit in France, oppose the privilege of the aristocracy in the Baroque period, oppose the rigid and outdated concept of the aristocracy, and advocate the new spirit of freedom, equality and fraternity. Rousseau's "The Social Contract" can be said to be the bible of the French Revolution. . Romer's aesthetic sentiment is obviously biased towards Lamour. He is a director who rethinks the relationship between change and eternity in the atmosphere of the French New Wave. The French Revolution, as a specific political event in a great era, is no longer his focus. Instead, it appears in the film as an aesthetic symbol of romanticism; Romer opposes the emotional turmoil of romanticism, preferring the quiet and stable aristocratic emotion. So, how does "The Lady and the Duke" embody this emotion?
The film uses a background image that closely resembles the painting style of Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665). Poussin is known as the founder of French classicism painting. His works are the product of the combination of French Baroque painting style and classicism spirit. They are rigorous in structure and rich in idyllic and tranquil atmosphere. They can be regarded as the Italian Renaissance Venetian paintings. A product of the Frenchization of Pie. Poussin's paintings are full of deep religious emotions. The neo-Platonist sun shines on the tranquil field, which is the light of divinity and the light of illusory rationality; at the same time, Poussin's paintings also reflect his contemporaries. The pure geometric spirit of the mathematician and philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) expresses the mathematical precision, delicacy and sensitivity of the French rational spirit. The pastoral scenery in "The Lady and the Duke" is reminiscent of Poussin's paintings, the same idyllic atmosphere, and the common emotional expression.
This brings me back to another Romer film, Perceval the Welsh, based on the 12th-century literature Chrétien de Troyes, where Perceval lives with his widowed mother , dreamed of becoming a Holy Grail Knight and traveled around, when he came to the Holy Grail Castle, he found that the land had become a wasteland, and the king was in terrible pain. Out of compassion, he was tempted to ask, "What's the matter?" However, he had been trained as a knight to a strict code of conduct and was not allowed to ask questions or speak unless he was called, so he did not speak to the king, Without showing any concern to the king, he went to sleep in silence. When he woke up the next day, he found that the Castle of the Holy Grail had disappeared; in fact, he did not know that as long as a person with a pure heart asked the king "what's the matter", the king's illness would be cured, and the barrenness of the land would be lifted. Obeying the precepts instead of the will, and thus losing the chance to save the king and the country, it is impossible to become a true Holy Grail Knight. This is the story of a medieval knight in search of the Holy Grail. The most impressive thing about the film is its background music, which is in the style of the Italian Renaissance. The music of the Italian Renaissance has an idyllic tranquility, like the laziness and dreaminess of the afternoon sun, but Romer adds some modern loneliness and emptiness to its background.
The Dame and the Duke is a continuation of the thinking in Perceval the Welsh. The aesthetic feelings of the two films are the same. The basic plots of the two films are presented in the form of drama, which is actually an enlarged stage film. Romer's plays are more drawn from Baroque-classical symmetrical structural forms, and everything expresses emotion in rigorous rationality.
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Romer is the 'neoclassic' of modern cinema; for him it is not the forms that are truly novel, but the never-fading ideas that hide behind those forms - the individual of the eternally contradictory situation of mankind Thinking.
Romer is in the era of the French New Wave, and the aesthetic spirit of the past has become the goal he pursues. Romer's films have a strong sense of nihilism, which also constitutes the main force of his work. "My Girlfriend's Boyfriend", "Afternoon Love", "Claire's Knee" and "Summer" all have the characteristics of "outsiders" like Albert Camus (1913-1960). , Romer's works are very modern. Emotion unfolds in the film with a tone of resistance to nothingness, and Romer is trying to overcome the erosion of his sense of nothingness; instead of showing the absurdity and complete self-externalization in Camus' novels, he looks The paradox and uncertainty of emotion are expressed in a seemingly serious and volatile way. But this is not the cynical attitude of the game world, but a deep feeling of nothingness in life. The protagonist tries to get out of nothingness in nothingness, while Romer tries to find an aesthetic spirit in nothingness, which gives him the strength to resist nothingness; in the ever-changing world, he tries to find a kind of eternal beauty-eternity The unchanging human emotion of love.
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So what kind of permanence is Romer looking for? One of the characteristics of modernity, as Nietzsche predicted in Europe at the end of the 19th century: the most terrible of the guests has come, nihilism has stood at the door, and we will be in the symptoms of nihilism for the next two centuries. Romer's films can be said to be his response to Nietzsche's prophecy. He returned to the French Middle Ages and pondered the same problems faced by people in the Middle Ages and modern times: the pursuit of human spirituality; Romer's doubts in nothingness , to reflect on the fundamental limitations of human beings in doubt, so as to achieve reconciliation with fate, and in such an experience, the mind is restored to tranquility.
Romer's films give the impression that his aesthetic strength is gradually increasing, and aesthetics is a process of internalizing the understanding of fate. Romer's success comes from the French classical spirit and the French's mysterious experience of nothingness. The mature French are half like Descartes and half like Pascal. One pays attention to reason and the other pays attention to emotion. Descartes is the representative of French classical spirit. , Pascal is the embodiment of the French nihilistic spirit; Romer wandered between the classical and the modern, always looking for a way to overcome the nihility, and he finally found it in the classical rational spirit.
Romer has a belief that life is ordinary. He recorded the love stories that happened in the summer sunshine. The truth and the lie were intertwined. He didn't want to make a judgment. It didn't matter whether it was true or not. Can you see the sky above the world hidden in the dark mind? That summer, remember we have been here.
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