Classics 2026: Éric Rohmer
Mary Stephen: Editing Rohmer
This year, Film Fest Gent welcomes director and editor Mary Stephen as the guest of honour of its Classics programme, having collaborated with French filmmaker Éric Rohmer for more than 25 years. During the Talk, Stephen takes us behind the scenes of Rohmer's cinematic world and the small, close-knit team she was a part of for many years.
Éric Rohmer, French filmmaker, film critic, and editor-in-chief of Cahiers du Cinéma, as well as a key figure of the Nouvelle Vague, makes 'small' films about what are generally considered in cinematic terms to be 'small' subjects: love, loyalty, infidelity, seduction, jealousy, passion, and courtship. The mechanisms, rituals, and strategies involved are the driving force in his films. As colleague Claude Chabrol rightly noted: 'Il n'y a pas de grands et de petits sujets, il n'y a que la façon de les traiter.' Rohmer treats these themes with a finesse, an astuteness, and an almost musical sense of variation on the same motifs that make his work unique.
Classics curator Patrick Duynslaegher takes us through Éric Rohmer's filmography, from his three major cycles Six Contes moraux, Comédies et proverbes, and Contes des quatre saisons, to a number of hors série films in which the same themes reappear. While these will not be screened during the Classics programme, they are very much part of his remarkably coherent oeuvre.
Classics: full programme
Classics: hors série
The following longreads are written in Dutch only.
Le Signe du Lion (1959)
Place de l'Étoile (1965)
Die Marquise von O... (1976)
Perceval le Gallois (1978)
Quatre aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle (1987)
L'Arbre, le Maire et la Médiathèque (1993)
Les Rendez-vous de Paris (1995)
L'Anglaise et le Duc (2001)
Triple Agent (2004)
Les Amours d'Astrée et de Céladon (2007)
