Éric Rohmer. Early works in 16MM

Éric Rohmer was the first member of the classic nouvelle vague set to make short films at the beginning of the 1950s. But his professional career as a filmmaker did not take off until the 1960s. His first feature film, Le Signe du  lion, shot in 1959, was not released until 1962 and turned out to be a flop at the box office. Nevertheless, he and Barbet Schroeder founded the production company Les Films du Losange in 1962. Rohmer’s debut for the company  was the mid-length feature La Boulangère de Monceau, a charming film that fo lows the life of a young man and his love affairs on the streets of Paris. Two years later, an even smaller film, Nadja à Paris takes a similar path: foreign student Nadja strolls through the city looking for adventure in a very self-confident and engaging way. This young woman knows what she wants. From today’s perspective, both films are fascinating because of their almost documentary style, which captures life on the streets of Paris in a mesmerising way.

Karl Wratschko

For Éric Rohmer, making a film on 16mm was a kind of vindication; he would return several times in his filmmaking career to this mode of shooting, allowing him to assert an aesthetic of efficiency and great artistic freedom. These  two  prints,  dating  from  1965, are of remarkable quality: the original prints were printed without 35mm dupe negative, and are therefore as close to the camera negative as possible. In the 1960s, although it was possible to shoot in 16mm, films had to be blown up to 35mm to be shown in commercial cinemas. 16mm prints were reserved for use in film clubs, which Rohmer regularly attended and ran. In this case, the proximity of the original negative allows us to learn more about how the films were made. For example, on the print of La Boulangère de Monceau, we notice that two different cameras were used, and each left its characteristic traits on the film. Rohmer had borrowed two amateur cameras from friends, a Paillard and a Bell & Howell, which had shooting limitation of 20 seconds, a principle that guided the director in writing both films.

Marion Brouant