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Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Eric Rohmer's The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2007) is playing August 12 - September 11, 2017 on Mubi in the United KingdomThe Romance of Astrea and Celadon was the final feature Rohmer completed before his death, and his 5th period piece (following The Marquis of O, Perceval, The Lady and the Duke and Triple Agent). It is constructed around a handful of aesthetic principles: its action is confined to a handful of locations, mostly pastoral exteriors; the camera is either static or moving along a brief lateral pan; dialogues are captured in wide masters, cushioned by a border of negative space; alternate angles and reverse shots are rare; non-diegetic sound is avoided in favor of foregrounding the ambient sounds of the natural environment—the rustling of leaves, water running in a stream, distant birdsong (and this birdsong was the only element of the audio added in post-production,...

A nearly 600-page biography of a French filmmaker would not make every summer reading list, but any discerning cinephile will consider Éric Rohmer: A Biography. It’s one of several stunning recent releases, along with a weighty oral history of Star Trek, an intimate remembrance of Stanley Kubrick, and a fascinating breakdown of the great Suspiria. Now that’s an eclectic roster of beach reads.

The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek: Volume One: The First 25 Years by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman (Thomas Dunne Books)

Even minor Star Trek fans will be spellbound by The Fifty-Year Mission, a stunning oral history from Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman. The first in a two-volume set — Volume Two, covering the last 25 years, will be released in late-August — is impressively comprehensive, and full of unforgettable stories. These include the original series rivalry between William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy,...

Film Movement brings Eric Rohmer’s classic period film The Marquise of O… to Blu-ray, the first time the title is made available in the Us (previously, it was sandwiched into a Region 2 Rohmer collection, the same set which features another rare title, 1982’s A Good Marriage). Awarded the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival (it tied with Carlos Saura’s Cria Cuervos), it would be the only accolade the famed filmmaker would collect from the event and it was his last time in competition.

It’s one of Rohmer’s earliest historical dramas (he would continue in this vein intermittently, with titles like Perceval and The Lady and the Duke), and initially seems like a black comedy on social mores before it seeps into a . A German co-production, the film is based on a short story by Heinrich von Kleist (Jessica Hausner’s 2014 film Amour Fou documents the writer’s curious denouement,...

In conjunction with La Furia Umana, Notebook is very happy to present Ted Fendt's original English translation of Luc Moullet's "Le masque et la part de Dieu," on the films of Eric Rohmer. Moullet's original French can be found at La Furia Umana.

Cecil summed up the difference between him and his brother, William DeMille, like this: “I show a thousand camels and you show one camel and you psychoanalyze it.” Eric Rohmer is a lot more like William than Cecil, minus Freud.

What is fascinating, foremost, in his work is his obstinacy to not go beyond his only or main subject, often summed up, in a somewhat misleading way, by its title: Béatrice Romand wants a good marriage, or, at least, to help her friend have one (A Tale of Autumn), Brialy wants to caress Claire’s Knee (meaning, to be sure that she is practically consenting), Lucchini,...

The Academy may have snubbed him for best director, but Nolan's global reputation is assured. Matthew Tempest recalls the singularly driven young man he met in the Ucl film society

It was pretty obvious to anyone at the University College London film society in the early 1990s (which comprised about half a dozen of us in a windowless, airless basement) that Chris Nolan was going places. I thought his career might even go all the way, and he might shoot a few adverts before eventually (if he got lucky) directing episodes of The Bill and Coronation Street.

That was simply how the UK film industry was back then. The only career path was to worm a way into directing for telly or commercials. It had been generations since John Schlesinger, Ridley and Tony Scott, Adrian Lyne and Alan Parker had managed to make the leap from London, and telly, to Hollywood.

With 2010 only a week over, it already feels like best-of and top-ten lists have been pouring in for months, and we’re already tired of them: the ranking, the exclusions (and inclusions), the rules and the qualifiers. Some people got to see films at festivals, others only catch movies on video; and the ability for us, or any publication, to come up with a system to fairly determine who saw what when and what they thought was the best seems an impossible feat. That doesn’t stop most people from doing it, but we liked the fantasy double features we did last year and for our 3rd Writers Poll we thought we'd do it again.

I asked our contributors to pick a single new film they saw in 2010—in theaters or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they saw in 2010 to create a unique double feature.

One of the key Cahiers du Cinéma critics, and co-author (with Claude Chabrol) of the first important book on his fellow Catholic Hitchcock, Eric Rohmer was nearly 50 and the Nouvelle Vague had hit the shores and retreated by the time My Night with Maud, now re-released to mark his recent death, brought him serious international attention. But he was to go the distance, working well into his 80s to produce one of the largest, most varied but stylistically and thematically coherent oeuvres in the history of cinema.

The third of his cycle of "Six Moral Tales", though the fourth to be made, My Night with Maud divided audiences on the opening night of the 1969 London film festival. Some were delighted by its wit, intelligence and physical beauty, others bored to distraction by its Gallic discussions on religion, philosophy, politics and love between a divorced doctor (the stunning Françoise Fabian), a...

Movies are made up of images, even the bad ones. But the bad movies rarely leave any images lingering in your brain. The great films are the ones making great images. A great image is many things, by nature diffuse, and we might agree that any great image moves even when stopped still, opening its own cinematic world. Thus, The Notebook's decision to celebrate our recent decade not with a list but with this stream. Each contributor was asked to pick 1 film he or she wants to remember from the 2000s, select 1 image from that film to remember it by, and write one sentence to supplement their selection. We've done our best to craft not simply a grab bag but a cogent flow of the indelible, one image speaking to the next on a variety of registers: from film to film, between color and compositional rhymes, and, as you'll read,...

Maurice Schérer, born in either Tulle or Nancy, a former schoolteacher, a gaunt face with an odd lip. A notoriously private man who was in his late 40s before he found any sort of success, and then under a pseudonym. The obituaries say Eric Rohmer has died; that's not really true. Schérer was a real man whom very few people knew well, and yes, he really did die on Monday, aged 89. "Rohmer," who made his first short film in 1950, when Schérer was almost 30, and formally retired from filmmaking 57 years later, can best be described as the product of Schérer's intellect. An Ellery Queen, or maybe an Émile Ajar. Schérer's body is barely cold, and yet it's already necessary, in a certain respect, to defend his Rohmer. The obituaries have a tinge of faint condescension. It's almost as though some other man, who made "sophisticated" and "talky" "low-key" films "about young...

Rimbaud's mantra, 'one must be absolutely modern', guided the father of the New Wave, a director fascinated by France's bourgeoisie

The New Wave has just lost its father, and France a rigorous observer of his time whose films represented better than most what it may mean to be French. Ten to 15 years older than the Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, Louis Malle and François Truffaut, whom he would hire to write alongside him in the soon mythical Les Cahiers du Cinéma, Eric Rohmer, who died yesterday in his 90th year in Paris, had invented a completely distinct art form.

A graduate in classics and German and until the mid-1950s a professor of literature in provincial France, he always followed Rimbaud's mantra: "One must be absolutely modern."

In cinema, as a critic turned director (whose first film was made at the age of 39 in 1959), to him the poet's motto...

Idiosyncratic French film-maker who was a leading figure in the cinema of the postwar new wave

In Arthur Penn's intelligently unconventional private eye thriller Night Moves (1975), Gene Hackman's hero – who finds the mystery he faces as unfathomable as his personal relationships – is asked by his wife whether he wants to go to an Eric Rohmer movie. "I don't think so," he says. "I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry."

Behind that exchange lies a jab at ­Hollywood's mistrust of any film-maker, especially a French one, who neglects plot and action in favour of cerebral exploration, metaphysical conceit and moral nuance. The Dream Factory, after all, had proved through trial and error that cinema is cinema, literature is ­literature, and the twain shall meet only provided the images rule, not the words.

Of the major American film-makers, perhaps only Joseph Mankiewicz allowed his scripts,...

The French director's movies were quintessentially studenty - in the best possible sense

Eric Rohmer's death at the age of 89 is a reminder of the incredible energy, tenacity and longevity of France's great nouvelle vague generation. Rohmer had released his last film only last year, the sublimely unworldly pastoral fantasy Les amours d'Astrée et de Céladon (The Romance of Astrea and Celadon): a gentle, reflective movie, of course, but by no means lacking in energy or wit. And, meanwhile, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol – at the respective ages of 79, 81, 81 and 79 – are all still with us, all nursing projects.

Rohmer came from the New Wave tradition of critic-turned-director; he was a former editor of Cahiers du Cinéma, and became the distinctively romantic philosopher of the New Wave and the great master of what was sometimes called "intimist" cinema: delicate, un-showy movie-making about not especially startling people,...

Paris - Eric Rohmer, a pioneer of the French "New Wave" which transformed cinema in the 1960s, has died, his production house said on Monday. He was 89.Les Films du Losange, a company that produced his movies, said Rohmer died in Paris on Monday. The cause of death was not known.Rohmer directed such films as "My Night at Maud's" (Ma Nuit Chez Maud), "Claire's Knee" ("Le Genou de Claire") and "Chloe in the Afternoon" (L'Amour l'apres-midi")."My Night at Maud's" garnered an Oscar nomination for best foreign-language film and best screenplay.His "Die Marquie von O" won the Special Jury Prize at the 1976 Festival de Cannes.Rohmer also directed "Pauline at the Beach" and "Full Moon in Paris," whose lead actress Pascale Ogier won the best actress prize at the Venice Film Festival. It won a Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival.With a background in journalism,...