Eric Rohmer: Film as Theology

by Keith Tester

Since the 1950s Eric Rohmer has been one of the major presences in French cinema as critic and director. This book is a sophisticated engagement with his work in which Keith Tester argues that Rohmer is not the naIve realist he is often claimed to be. Instead, his films are revealed as a sustained exercise in Catholic theology.

Genres: Film

181 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Keith Tester has been Professor of Sociology at Hull since 2008, having previously been Professor of Cultural Sociology at the University of Portsmouth. In 2010-2011 he is also Professor of Sociology at Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea; Visiting Professor at the Bauman Institute in the School of Sociology & Social Policy at the University of Leeds; an Honorary Member of the Thesis Eleven Centre for Cultural Sociology at LaTrobe University, Melbourne, Australia (where he has been a Distinguished Visiting Fellow); a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; and a Research Associate of the Institute for the Study of Social Change at University College Dublin. He is also an Executive Committee member of the Histories of Violence web project at the University of Leeds.

Keith studied for his Ph.D at the University of Leeds, and the ‘book of the thesis’ – Animals and Society – was awarded the British Sociological Association Philip Abrams Memorial Prize for Best First Sole-Authored Book in 1992. Keith is on the editorial boards of The Journal of Classical Sociology, Journal of Human Rights and Thesis Eleven.

Keith’s main research interest is in thinking sociologically about the entwinement of culture and morality. For example, thanks to contemporary media we know about suffering in other parts of the world, but what do we do about it? What does this knowledge mean to us? Do the culture industries predetermine what we might know and do? His work raises these kinds of questions through the heritage of critical theory and, especially, the social thought of Zygmunt Bauman. His interest in culture has also resulted in publications on film and art.

Reviews

[Christopher]

This is a peculiar book. The subtitle “Film as Theology” makes it out to be about one central concern, as does the back-cover description “In this new study, Keith Tester argues that Rohmer’s work deals with complex theological questions…” Early on Tester does seize on the fact that Rohmer described himself – and was described by others – as a devout Catholic, and he sets forth the proposal that Rohmer’s faith is tangible in the films. But this theme is rarely present in the book after that, and when it is, it never arises above a sort of pareidolia.

What we instead get for the bulk of this 163-page monograph is simply a meandering walk through Rohmer’s entire output where Tester explores many other aspects of the filmmaker’s work: how he would often take up old scripts but write new dialogue to sound fresh and appropriate for his given actors; how the Paris that figures in his work is not the typical Hausmannian city; how the treatment of characters’ interactions differs markedly between the “Six Moral Tales” and the later “Comedies and Proverbs”, etc.

Tester’s observations, and reference to decades of prior publications, are often entertaining enough. Once in a while they even shed a new light on a film, like his reading of the last shot of Conte d’automne that makes that hit harder for this viewer. In general, however, this book doesn’t feel particularly revelatory or substantial among the large amount of scholarship now available on Rohmer (including the Antoine de Baecque biography which Tester was not yet able to use).