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Éric Rohmer was notoriously secretive about his personal life, giving alternate birth names, birth cities, and birth dates. But according to biographers Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe, Rohmer was actually born Maurice Joseph Henri Schérer, in Tulle, on March 21, 1920. Whatever the truth, such resolute devotion to privacy reflected the exclusive and rigorous nature of Rohmer’s working life as well. Often going against the grain of his early French New Wave contemporaries, and from there enjoying a similar autonomy and singularity within the sphere of international cinema, Rohmer directed distinctive films most aligned—emphatically and productively—with his own filmography. Maintaining a remarkable dedication to consistent themes, dramatic interests, and, in nearly all cases, a comparable formal approach, Rohmer placed the nuanced behavior of the individual at the fore of all his work. Above: Le Signe du lionSteeped in studies of history, literature, and philosophy, Rohmer arrived at his burgeoning cinephile comparatively late.

This is my seventh TCM Classic Film Festival. At a certain point, some things become routine – one learns to expect the exhaustion at the dawn of day three (of four), the constant negotiation between personal viewing whims and rare presentations, the way plots and aesthetic choices start to run together, and the suspicion that explaining the draw of such an event to those not immediately inclined to attend it may come across a touch insane. Film festivals are innately demanding experiences, but between the pleasure of its programming, the consolidation of the venues, and the brevity of most of its films’ running times, few make it so easy to watch four, five, six movies in a day. You tell your coworkers on Monday what you did all weekend, and it starts to not make a lot of sense. But somehow, in the midst of it all, the point of it couldn’t be clearer.

The oldest member of 1960s France’s Nouvelle Vague, the late Eric Rohmer receives the retrospective treatment starting today, through September 3rd, at New York’s Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center with “The Sign of Rohmer.” Rohmer had a style all his own that was not really picked up on until many years later, and indirectly at that, arguably in the 1990s and now quite prevalently in today’s indie cinema. He started with an idea, and then created a film as an essay about that idea. This is the essence of film as art. Pictures like "The Kids Are All Right" and "Cyrus," likely unconsciously, are more mainstream and significantly less-intellectualized versions of Rohmer constructs. They each start with an idea, or conflict, and then we watch characters discuss that idea—with plot only functioning as a means to bring us different sides of the arguments. Highlights are...

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,...