A Rohmer Farewell

Tributes to Eric Rohmer have been springing up all over following his death last week at age eighty-nine. Among our favorites thus far is the one by Geoffrey O’Brien, who has written stirringly and lyrically about the French auteur on the New York Review of Books blog. The Library of America editor in chief (and occasional Criterion Collection contributor) clearly has a deep appreciation and profound understanding of Eric Rohmer’s work—he asserts, “Few filmmakers have been able to develop a body of utterly personal work so deliberately and methodically, and he managed it only with the most extreme budgetary discipline.” It’s a short but rich and deeply felt piece, which goes on to praise the simple pleasures, as well as the mysteries, of Rohmer’s movie universe, and its constant push-pull between realism and artifice. “I think it will become clear that Rohmer was one of a handful of really great filmmakers of the last half century,” O’Brien writes. “I can’t think of a greater.”