Claire’s Knee Film Still

Claire’s Knee

Eric Rohmer

France

1970

106 minutes

Color

1.33:1

French

347

Synopsis

“Why would I tie myself to one woman if I were interested in others?” says Jerôme, even as he plans on marrying a diplomat’s daughter by summer’s end. Before then, Jerôme spends his July at a lakeside boardinghouse nursing crushes on the sixteen-year-old Laura and, more tantalizingly, Laura’s long-legged, blonde stepsister, Claire. Baring her knee on a ladder under a blooming cherry tree, Claire unwittingly instigates Jerôme’s moral crisis and creates both one of French cinema’s most enduring moments and what has become the iconic image of Rohmer’s Moral Tales.

Cast

JerômeJean-Claude Brialy
AuroraAurora Cornu
LauraBéatrice Romand
ClaireLaurence de Monaghan
Madame WalterMichèle Montel
GillesGérard Falconetti
VincentFabrice Luchini

Credits

DirectorEric Rohmer
ProducerBarbet Schroeder and Pierre Cottrell
CinematographyNestor Almendros, Jean-Claude Rivière and Philippe Rousselot
SoundJean-Pierre Ruh and Michel Laurent
EditingCécile Decugis and Martine Kalfon
Associate producerAlfred de Graaff
ContinuityMichel Fleury
GafferJean-Claude Gasché
Still photographyBernard Prim

Disc Features

  • New, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Eric Rohmer
  • Rohmer’s short film The Curve (1999)
  • An excerpt from the French television program Le journal du cinéma, featuring interviews with Jean-Claude Brialy, Béatrice Romand, and Laurence de Monahagan
  • Original theatrical trailer
  • New and improved English subtitle translation

From the Current

A Rohmer Farewell

Jan 19, 2010

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 http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/342897521/the . . .

Eric Rohmer, 1920–2010

Jan 11, 2010

Claire’s Knee: Rohmer’s Women

by Molly Haskell Aug 14, 2006

It’s both hard and not so hard to believe that Eric Rohmer’s “Six Moral Tales” were conceived—indeed, written initially—as a novel. On the one hand, he’s the grand master of dialogue as an instrument of narrative. His characters muse, reflect, analyze, insult, tease, provoke, skirmish, flirt . . .

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6 Discs

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