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7 The Cahiers du cinéma Cohort: Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Pierre Kast B Y 1 9 6 0 , Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard had made the biggest impressions among the Cahiers du cinéma criticsturned -directors, yet many of their friends and coworkers had also been active in writing and directing shorts and even features. But while Eric Rohmer has now come to be considered a major New Wave force, in the late 1950s and early 1960s he was known more for his editorial work at Cahiers than for his filmmaking. During the New Wave era, he never rivaled “the big three” in significance. Similarly, Jacques Rivette has earned New Wave status, and for English-language film students, his name is often included on even the shortest lists of core New Wave members, though he made no film that received wide distribution before the late 1960s. In contrast to Rohmer and Rivette, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze has generally been excluded by historians from the inner circle of New Wave directors even though he cofounded Cahiers du cinéma along with Bazin and shot a stylish, Renoir-influenced feature, L’eau à la bouche (A Game for Six Lovers, 1959). He even acted in several New Wave films. Finally, Pierre Kast, who had written criticism with Bazin at L’Ecran français and was one of the most leftist of the Cahiers critics in the 1950s, is rarely mentioned in reference to the New Wave even though his Le bel âge (1959) was praised by Cahiers and starred Doniol-Valcroze. Kast and Doniol-Valcroze also joined François Truffaut and Alain Resnais in signing the “Manifesto of 121” encouraging desertion during the Algerian War. This chapter investigates the historical place and narrative strategies of these four important Cahiers directors, for they, too, helped revitalize French cinema with new stories and styles, even if their final products were not as numerous nor as immediately popular as those of their three more successful Cahiers friends and colleagues. 247 Eric Rohmer: The Humble Moralist When I think about it, Bazin had ideas; the rest of us just had opinions. Bazin’s ideas were all good, but opinions are always debatable. —ERIC ROHMER, “Entretien avec Eric Rohmer” Of all the New Wave directors, Rohmer is without a doubt the one to have worked out the most coherent systems and managed to maintain the most finicky sort of rigor. —JEAN-MICHEL FRODON, L’age moderne du cinéma français Eric Rohmer (b. 1920) was a decade older than his more immediately successful filmmaking friends from Cahiers—Chabrol, Truffaut, and Godard—and only two years younger than their mentor, André Bazin. And as Colin Crisp points out, Rohmer, along with Rivette, actually began shooting short films five years before most of their Cahiers colleagues, though both men would end up five years behind the others in gaining any real attention from the public.1 By the late 1960s, when La collectioneuse (The Collector, 1967) and My nuit chez Maude (My Night at Maud’s, 1969) finally brought international attention, Rohmer had become a major figure in French film, but during the New Wave era he was known almost exclusively for his critical work at Cahiers, and even that ended unhappily. By 1964, Eric Rohmer was working in television, watching from the distance as Cahiers du cinéma and the filmmaking careers of his former friends there took off without him. Another difference between Rohmer and his three more famous colleagues is that he has been obsessively private about his personal life, denying any connection between his own life and his films. As Joel Magny writes, “There is a radical separation between his private and professional lives. Rare are the friends who have passed through the door of his home or met his wife and two sons.” Moreover, Rohmer sees a sort of purity of spirit in being an auteur who hides in the shadows, warning that critics “too often awarded auteur status to what are in reality just megalomaniacs.”2 While Chabrol, Truffaut, and Godard often lived as if their whole existence sprang from their film lives, Rohmer offered a refreshing, if almost unsettling, alternative to the stereotype of the brash, outspoken New Wave directors who exposed their private lives for all to witness. But Rohmer’s professional life proves exemplary at revealing the power wielded by this new generation of cinephiles in determining the direction for...

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