New article in the Guardian remembering Rohmer
Terry Ballard
Linda Dyett
Thanks, Terry.
In one of his filmed interviews with a French critic, Rohmer discussed two technical aspects of his work regarding the talking that goes on in his films. First, said he went out of his way to ensure perfect sound quality—whatever it took. Every syllable had to be crystal-clear. Second, he said the way he created dialogue was to have his actors improvise a conversation about a specific subject that would be in the film—as if the characters they were going to portray were actually like the actors themselves, not the other way around. These conversations got taped. Rohmer then edited them, so the resulting script became a stylized version of the very words spoken by the actors in real life. I think that was Rohmer’s way of achieving verisimilitude and “artlessness,” as if the actors weren’t acting, in the otherwise formal compositions that are his films. What seems informal and freewheeling in Rohmer is in fact carefully pre-arranged.
Before Midnight has some of the same feeling. At times, I suspected Delpy and Hawke were just ad libbing. (Something that interests me in Linklater’s films is their hybrid American-European quality—I wonder if Rohmer would’ve taken that route had he been in a later generation?) I’ve only seen a couple of Baumbach’s films, which I found to be enjoyable but lightweight.
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