From the Word of the Hero to Femininity, or from Thought to Desire. A Re-Reading of Éric Rohmer’s “Moral Tales”

Abstract

From the hero of “Six Moral Tales” (1963-1972) to the heroine of “Comedies and Proverbs” (1981-1987) Éric Rohmer establishes the passage of a cinema based on a logic of action to a cinema of clairvoyance. According to this idea, from which Gilles Deleuze thinks the passage of the movementimage to the time-image, the following paper take up the study of the first series of the filmmaker to watch femininity abandoned by the hero (Haydée, Maud, Chloé or Claire) the principles that define subsequent heroines of Rohmer and his new narrative logic. To do this, on the one hand, the article revisits studies addressing the mise en scène of “Moral Tales” from the thought of the hero and his word; on the other hand, it proposes the desire and the idea of otherness as the method that suggests the image and the word as a whole, that is to say, showing and language, elements that, following the ideas of André Bazin, Rohmer defines the ambiguous nature of cinematograph.