Eric Rohmer, Grand Old Man of French Cinema, Dies at 89

Eric Rohmer, director of more than 50 films for movies and television, died Monday in Paris at the age of 89. He had been hospitalized for several days before his death.

An intensely private man, he took on the pseudonym of Eric Rohmer at an early point in his career. To this day it is not clear whether he was born Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer in Tulle in Limousin, or Jean-Marie Schérer in Nancy. Though he is survived by a wife and two sons, their names were not released to the public upon his death.

One of the feisty young critics-turned-filmmakers who pioneered the New Wave of the 1960s, along with François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol, over the years Rohmer gracefully managed the transition to grand old man of French cinema, directing his last film, the 17th-century love story Astrée et Céladon, in 2007.

Among his best-known works are Ma Nuit Chez Maud, one of a series of six “moral tales” (others in the series were Claire’s Knee and Chloé in the Afternoon), all of them about young men sorely tempted to be unfaithful to wife or sweetheart, but who in the end resist. Other of his well-known productions include La Marquise d’O, Perceval le Gallois, The Lady and the Duke and a second series, the quartet Tales of the Four Seasons. With Chabrol, he was also co-author of an important critical study of Alfred Hitchcock.

In 2001 he was awarded a Golden Lion at the Venice film Festival for his lifetime career achievement.

The world of French cinema remembered one of the masters of the New Wave with tributes and words from both directors and dignitaries. The French Minister of Culture, Frédéric Mitterrand, saluted “one of the greatest auteurs in French film” who “understood how to create cinematic language of such subtlety it rivaled the French language itself.”

What is your favorite Rohmer film?