Lumières Françaises Presents: Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales

July 31–August 6 • The Main Cinema

To celebrate the release of a new translation of French New Wave director Eric Rohmer’s first and only novel, Élisabeth, MSP Film's annual Lumières Françaises showcases Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales at The Main Cinema.

Fifteen years before completing his first feature film—and ten before beginning a transformative editorial stint at Cahiers du cinéma that would usher the journal, and French cinema, into a new era—the man who would become known worldwide as Éric Rohmer published a single novel. Released by Éditions Gallimard alongside the early works of Claude Simon and Marguérite Duras, Élisabeth was part of the first flowering of what would come to be known as the nouveau roman—and was also the “matrix,” as Rohmer himself later put it, of the images, ideas, and formal concerns of his first sequence of films, Six Moral Tales. (courtesy McNally Edition – Six Moral Tales courtesy Janus Films)

A limited number of copies of Élisabeth are available to order here and may be picked up at The Main Cinema after July 24.

ABOUT THE FILM

“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.