At the time Eric Rohmer was part of a developing group, created for the imminent expansion of our time slot on the first channel starting in October 1963. Georges Rouquier was supposed to take care of a part of these new shows. Teachers, TV professionals, film experts, directors with solid practical experience all had to become an integral part of the system implemented for first guaranteeing the production of the programs we had to arrange together with the discipline of teaching (…). At the same time we forced ourselves, on our own initiative, to use a good deal of our antenna time experimenting with new combinations of cinema and teaching. Aside from Rohmer, other filmmakers and cinéphiles participated like Nestor Almendros, Jean Douchet, Jean Eustache, Bernard Eisenschitz; in fact, in 1969, we piqued the interest of Henri Langlois, who dedicated a series of screenings to “scholastic television filmmakers.”
Right from the start Rohmer’s tenets were the same as the ones I tried to share with the people involved for programming and developing subjects. Being a professor himself and perfectly able to both define content and make the films destined for classroom use, Rohmer, right from the start, was able to experiment with the transition between a teaching unit’s limits and organizing the production or editing implementing it. Moreover, as he himself admitted, Rohmer always viewed the challenge of “visualization” as a commitment and, in the spirit of Jean Renoir, he made it one of his strengths (…). As for the content of Rohmer’s work on our programs, the nature of the subjects and his way of collaborating (…) they determined changes, although I believe two distinctions can be made here: first, there was his contribution to the teaching of literature for students, while after 1967, he used TV as a support for disseminating the “classics” of film history (at the time there were no televised “film clubs”) and shows commenting on these films. (…)
During the early years of this period, which were Rohmer’s most assiduous, he alone produced eight shows that I think should be divided in two groups according to two formats, the visualized lesson and the documentary. (…)
Métamorphoses du paysage illustrates the second format, which takes the shape of a documentary (…). Assigned with working on a theme related to a series about the “industrial age”, Rohmer and cameraman Pierre Lhomme, approaching it with subjective and contingent criteria, put their “curious perspective” to work on landscapes, mostly suburban, that had been marked by environmental transformations and problems during the 19th century. (…) The fulfillment of these intentions takes the form of an imaginary journey, like Man with a Movie Camera, with linear, non repetitive editing and referential or critical remarks (…). Image and commentary reflect a harmony between expressive lucidity and reservation, all part of the aesthetic concept Rohmer described in 1965: “Yes, showing is an act of meaning, but not meaning without making seen. Meaning is only an additional result. Our plan is to show. Meaning must be conceived of on a stylistic and not grammatical level or on a metaphorical level…” Continuing with the same line of interpretation, Rohmer now makes a transition from teacher to “man with a movie camera” and essayist: the dramatic staging of a mill –an ancient industrial device now a dreamy, bucolic cliché – of a factory chimney, landfills or an elevated public transportation system does not conceal his iconographic alchemy, the result of filming that aims to create rhythm out of visual beats, alternated with slow movements, in an effort to develop certain portions of space. (…)
Putting junior high school students in contact with Le Roman de Perceval ou le Conte du Graal required using iconographic documents, something Rohmer avoided in the previous two films. The film takes the form of a commentary in images, introduced by the off camera voice of the director, and transforms into a montage of Chrétien de Troyes quotes read by Antoine Vitez, who collaborated on many of these programs before playing an important role in My Night at Maud’s. (…)
In Les “Caractères” de La Bruyère, the classic author’s writing is the center of attention, more so than in Perceval. The shots of actors in natural settings, composed as they must have been in the 17th century, are not really a staging of La Bruyère “portraits”. (…) This film in fact offers a kind of fluid exchange: in a sense, the physical aspect that begins to form with La Bruyère, the costumes, the scenes transported the director in a reverie reconstructing live the daily atmosphere at Versailles. (…)
In Don Quichotte the comparison of a succession of illustrations of the novel starting with the 17th century allows us to see the development of an iconographic tradition, which was immediately stretched to the dimensions of the courtly world with the twenty-five cartoons created for the Gobelins tapestries by Charles-Antoine Coypel in 1716. (…)
Les Histoires extraordinaires d’Edgar Poe is less spontaneous. All the Extraordinary Stories are built around the same cosmic theme: periodic movement which is both the law explaining the creation and disappearance of the universe and the relationship between man and the world during creation. Four film excerpts edited in an increasingly visually emotional order, skillfully cumulating their haunting qualities. (…)
These excesses of images over the plot that created them stand in contrast with the perfect harmony between the writing of Victor Hugo and Rohmer’s cinematographic exploration, shortly thereafter, of Jersey Island, in the very place where the last two books of Contemplations were dreamed up. “This comparison was facilitated by the visual nature of Victor Hugo’s imagination. For the author of La Bouche d’ombre, each being is determined by its figure or, better still, configuration. Physical qualities presume moral ones and vice versa. (…)”. The introduction consists of views of symbolic places: Marine-Terrace, the dock, the rock of the condemned; then more detailed images materialize like echoes of the filmmaker’s poetic reading: the mesmerizing appeal of Jersey Island, the waves, wildflowers, birds, powerful impressions of the north coast, and more waves, visions and outlines of ruins, strangely shaped rocks and imaginary villages.

Georges Gaudu, Eric Rohmer: pedagogia televisiva e saggismo cinematografico, in Eric Rohmer. Un hommage du Centre Culturel Français de Turin, edited by Sergio Toffetti, Fabbri editori, Turin-Milan 1988

Eric Rohmer believed that seeing “means also to enjoy the pleasure of vision. Works from the past that remain are generally works of art. The barrier that once separated teaching literary and artistic disciplines today no longer exists. And educational television should be the first to proclaim and make tangible the saying: ‘Only beauty is truth’, our motto”.
At a time when French television had an educational purpose, Eric Rohmer worked in the Tv world and created several “masterpieces” (Serge Daney). It was those educational films, both original and often misunderstood works, which thrilled Henri Langlois in 1969. He dedicated a whole series to “cinéastes de la télévision scolaire” (scholastic Tv filmmakers). It’s not hard to see how these scholastic spectacles garnered such a vast audience when they were presented for the first time at Cinémathèque française: “The ‘G.P.O. Film Unit’ in 1930s London, with the pretext of making documentaries for technical training or for public education on postal issues, was a workshop where the avant-garde could live on and from which emerged all the talented people who, as of 1940, would renew the subjects and films of the British industry. I am under the impression that the hard work of scholastic television will produce the same effect. And if Mac Laren began his filmmaker training with a documentary intent on explaining the best way to use the telephone book, it is clear that one day, when tracing the early work of one filmmaker or another, we will hit upon a film: a scholastic Tv commission.
Educational Tv is a kind of hothouse where film theory is left behind and you really learn how to make film (according to the old method of Griffith and Méliès) with your own hands, with practice.”
Eric Rohmer believed there was no difference “between a film shot for the small screen and one made for the big screen”. On further inspection, his documentary work for television and his narrative films are actually deeply interconnected. In a special interview, to be available soon on DVD, Eric Rohmer commented on his educational films. For example, he talks about Métamorphoses du paysage as one of his most original works. Steeped in the love of beauty, Rohmer adds that beauty of form was more important in these educational works. Even in a program like Cabinets de physique, the relationship between art and science is explored, and, just like Roberto Rossellini Rohmer interviewed in July of 1963 for “Cahiers du Cinéma”, he demonstrates an instant sensitivity to the issue of teaching and art.

Laurent Garreau, Manager of Fonds audiovisuel du SCEREN-CNDP

Section curated by Laurent Garreau