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

In the brilliantly accomplished centerpiece of Rohmer’s “Moral Tales” series, Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Jean-Louis, one of the great conflicted figures of sixties cinema. A pious Catholic engineer in his early thirties, he lives by a strict moral code in order to rationalize his world, drowning himself in mathematics and the philosophy of Pascal. After spotting the delicate, blonde Françoise at Mass, he vows to make her his wife, although when he unwittingly spends the night at the apartment of the bold, brunette divorcée Maud, his rigid ethical standards are challenged. A breakout hit in the United States, My Night at Maud’s was one of the most influential and talked-about films of the decade.