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

A bombastic, womanizing art dealer and his painter friend go to a seventeenth-century villa on the Riviera for a relaxing summer getaway. But their idyll is disturbed by the presence of the bohemian Haydée, accused of being a “collector” of men. Rohmer’s first color film, La collectionneuse pushes the Moral Tales into new, darker realms. Yet it is also a grand showcase for the clever and delectably ironic battle-of-the-sexes repartee (in a witty script written by Rohmer and the three main actors) and luscious, effortless Néstor Almendros photography that would define the remainder of the series.