French diplomat Jérôme spends a shimmering July on Lake Annecy, on vacation, and meets Claire, the teen-aged daughter of a friend. Though engaged to be married, Jerome falls hopelessly in love - not with Claire, but with Claire's knee. Realizing that to be revealed as a fetishist would be ruinous for him, Jerome does not act upon his obsession.
The fifth of Éric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales, Claire's Knee is a witty, observant and deliciously Rohmeresque story of sexual obsession. Baring her knee on a ladder under a blooming cherry tree, Claire unwittingly incites a moral crisis for Jérôme while creating an image that is both the iconic emblem of Éric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales and one of French cinema’s most enduring moments.
Restored Digital Copy
--
Éric Rohmer 1920-2010
The Haifa Festival celebrates a centennial to the birth of Éric Rohmer and a decade to his passing with a tribute of seven of his films in restored digital copies.
Éric Rohmer was born as Jean-Marie Maurice Schérer in 1920 in Tulle. He assumed the nom de plume - inspired by Erich von Stroheim and pulp novelist Sax Rohmer - for personal reasons, his mother was led to believe that Maurice was a teacher, and she died in 1970 unaware that he did anything else. Rohmer did teach school for a short time and began his writing career in the mid-1940s (he published the 1946 novel Elisabeth under another nom de plume, Gilles Cordier).
After moving to Paris, he started to write film criticism for French periodicals and was a founding editor of La Gazette du cinéma in 1950, along with François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Jacques Rivette, and became editor in chief of the New Wave publication Cahiers du cinéma in 1957. That year he and Claude Chabrol authored the film study Hitchcock. In 1963 he quit Cahiers after becoming involved in a dispute.
Unlike his New Wave contemporaries, Rohmer’s debut film, The Sign of Leo (1959) failed and he would have to wait a decade for his first international and critical success, My Night at Maud.
Rohmer is renowned for the three film series he produced between 1963 and 1998. The stories in Six Moral Tales - Rohmer’s first series - were inspired by Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) and focused on “a man meeting a woman at the very moment when he is about to commit himself to someone else”. The realization that obsession can replace reality underpinned his second series, the Comedies and Proverbs sextet. And then came the quartet Tales of the Four Seasons. All three series are represented in the tribute.
“Éric Rohmer is the romantic philosopher of the French New Wave, the director whose characters make love with words as well as flesh. They are open to sudden flashes of passion, they become infatuated at first sight, but then they descend into doubt and analysis, talking intensely about what it all means” - Roger Ebert.
Éric Rohmer won numerous awards for his films, including the Golden Lion for Best Film and the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Festival, the Louis Delluc Prize, the David di Donatello Luchino Visconti Award and Academy Award nominations.
קבלו עדכונים על סרטים, אירועים, המלצות והטבות. לנרשמים תוענק הטבת הצטרפות!
