Rohmer’s Élisabeth & His Six Moral Tales

In the phrasing of the great critic Serge Daney, the films and filmmakers championed by Cahiers du Cinéma were “haunted by writing”… and of none of the Cahiers critics-turned-auteurs was this more true than Éric Rohmer, whose seminal Six Moral Tales series was largely formulated in a series of short stories he’d written as a young man. To mark McNally Editions’ publication of Rohmer’s novel Élisabeth—later referred to as the “matrix” of the Moral Tales by its author—in its first English translation, Metrograph screens the hexalogy that laid the cornerstone for one of the most beloved and idiosyncratic bodies of work in French cinema.

“Legendary director Éric Rohmer was a relatively late convert to film; his first love was literature, and the culmination of his early ambitions was the novel Élisabeth, written as the Allies were battling to retake Paris, and first published in 1946, when Rohmer was 26 years old. Available in English for the first time this July, Élisabeth is a beguiling, strangely timeless, and prematurely wise first draft of what we now recognize as that most quintessentially Rohmeresque of situations: a summer idyll whose placid surface roils with lust, resentment, wit, and even happiness.” —McNally Editions

Special thanks to Janus Films