Letters from Vienna #69
While working as an English teacher in Vienna I was often confronted with the amorous advances of pretty students, many of whom were married. As it turned out: I invariably erred on the side of prudence but am to this day unsure if I was foolish to do so. On the one hand: I could have had a good time; on the other: I might very easily have lost my job.
The theme of the film “My Night at Maud’s” by Éric Rohmer (aka Maurice Schérer) is the question of whether one should sleep with another person or not. Appropriately enough: it was released in 1969.
Color & Ugliness
“In some films color is indispensable” writes Nestor Almendros, “and at times it can even be out of place. I am convinced this is true of “My Night at Maud’s”.
“…In “My Night at Maud’s” the acting was extremely important, and color would have been distracting. Color can accentuate the ugliness of certain natural settings, which seem much more discreet, even elegant, in black and white, where faces become more important than the background or the sets…in “My Night at Maud’s” the most important exteriors take place in the snow, which is white. Clermont-Ferrand, where the film was shot, is a gray city, especially in winter, a season when colors scarcely exist. Rohmer’s guiding principle was that in a black-and-white film there must be no reference to colors…”
“…The wardrobe was designed so that the suits and dresses were black, white, or gray. Even the main set, Maud’s apartment, constructed in a small studio on the rue Mouffetard in Paris – was painted black and white. The pictures on the walls were black-and-white photographs. Jean-Louis Trintignant wore gray, Francois Fabian black; his shirts were white, the bedspread was white fur, the lamps and roses were white…”
“Some people think Rohmer is in league with the devil. Months before, he had scheduled the exact date for shooting the scene when it snows; that day, right on time, it snowed, and the snow lasted all day long, not just a few minutes. As a result, there is no break in the film’s continuity…but it is not just a question of luck; the key lies in Rohmer’s detailed preparation, which he sometimes completes two years before shooting the film, and which takes into account a number of previsions and probability calculations.”
“As usual with Rohmer, editing took only a week, because the film was already in his head while he was shooting. Unlike other directors, he never loses time selecting takes, and in fact refuses to film the same shot more than once…”[1]
Rue Monge
While we know that Rohmer studied in Clermont-Ferrand in his youth (we even know that he stayed in the rue Rameau)[2] what is of interest is the fact that the film is based on a tale he wrote in the 1940s. In his short story, “Rue Monge”, a forty-two-page manuscript dating from August 1944: “The narrator, a lonely young man wandering around Paris, accidentally meets an unknown woman in the rue Monge, during the summer of 1943 and is certain that she’ll be his wife. He courts her insistently and sees her again. But in the meantime, he spends a night with Maud, an attractive and elegant woman, cultured and libertine. However, he continues to keep the company of the unknown woman, whom he ends up marrying. “Ma Nuit Chez Maud” (“My Night at Maud’s”) is already there, located in Paris in the Latin Quarter and not in Clermont-Ferrand, twenty-five years before its realization…”[3]
At the same time Rohmer was working on “Rue Monge” he was also writing the novel: “Elisabeth”, which he published at the prestigious publishing house: Gallimard in April 1946. It didn’t sell well, got few reviews and vanished from sight.[4] What was worse: Gallimard rejected his follow-up novel on account of the fact that it wasn’t “new” or “young” enough.[5]
This rejection by the literary establishment merely reinforced Rohmer’s passion for cinema, which had been deepening and intensifying: “In February 1945, Maurice Schérer had an important encounter, the first in a series that would redirect his intellectual vocation. At (Café) Flore, the young man sat cheekily at the table of an even younger, but already famous Alexander Astruc.”[6]
Astruc articulated some of the key ideas of the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave): “After having been successively a fairground attraction, an entertainment analogous to the boulevard theater, or a means of preserving the images of time, the cinema became a language. A language, that is to say a form in which and through which an artist can express his thought, however abstract it may be, or translate his obsessions, exactly as it is today with the essay or the novel.”[7]
Another important encounter (in July 1947), was with Paul Gégauff, who would go on to co-write the screenplay for Rohmer’s first feature: “Le Signe du lion” (“The Sign of Leo”) in 1959.
Stromboli
In 1950 Rohmer experienced a revelation, Rossellini’s film: “Stromboli”, which fundamentally changed his view of the world: “For my part, I’ve seen few works which, in our time, have so magnificently, so directly exalted the Christian idea of grace, which, without rhetoric, by the mere evidence of what we see, proclaim more loudly the misery of man without God. Perhaps of all the arts, the cinema is the only one today that knows how, with all the necessary magnificence, to walk without tripping over these high peaks, the only one that can still leave room for this aesthetic category of the sublime…It was Rossellini who turned me away from existentialism. It happened in the middle of “Stromboli”. During the first minutes of the screening, I felt the limits of this realism à la Sartre where I thought the film was going to be confined. I hated the view he invited me to take of the world, before understanding that he was also inviting me to go beyond it. And then there was the conversion. This is what is great in “Stromboli”, it was my road to Damascus: in the middle of the film I was converted, and I changed my perspective”[8]
Although one needs be aware of Rohmer’s essentially “conservative” position and his “metaphysical framework” he was not about to impose his views on others, least of all his audience.
His philosophy was far from that of a preacher: “Like a musician, I vary the initial motif, I slow it down or speed it up, stretch it or shrink it, add to it or purify it. Starting with the idea of showing a man attracted to a woman at the very moment when he is attracted to another, I was able to build my situations, my intrigues, my denouements, right down to my characters. The principle character, for example, is a puritan in one tale (“My Night at Maud’s”/“Ma Nuit Chez Maud”), a libertine in others (“La Collectionneuse”, “Claire’s Knee”), sometimes cold, sometimes exuberant, sometimes cross, sometimes feisty, sometimes younger than his partners, sometimes older, sometimes more naïve, sometimes more cunning. I do not do portraits from nature: Within my self-imposed limits, I present different possibilities for human types, for both women and men…When I began to film my moral tales, I very naively thought that I could show things – sentiments, intentions, ideas – in a new light, things that until then, had received attention only in literature.”[9]
One of the principle functions of art is to marry experience with imagination. It is a means of asking: what if?
Instead of losing one’s job on account of poor judgement one can watch how a character on screen suffers due to his or her indiscretion. “There,” the more conservative, morally minded or religious among us might say “for the Grace of God go I.”
[1] pp.75-79 A Man with a Camera, Nestor Almendros
[2] p.21 Éric Rohmer, Antoine de Baeque, Noël Herpe
[3] p.30 Ibid
[4] p.33 Ibid
[5] p.40 Ibid
[6] p.35 Ibid
[7] p.44 Ibid
[8] p.55 Ibid
[9] p.81 The Taste for Beauty, Eric Rohmer
Rohmer takes these seemingly middle-brow, mundane subjects and turns them into studies of human nature that are exquisite jewels. Your wonderful piece is inspiring me to watch Maud this evening, partly in honor the late great Jean-Louis Trintignant. Thank you.