The filmmaker known as Éric Rohmer was born Maurice Schérer in 1920. For the first half of his life he seemed destined for a career as a minor literary figure. Rohmer’s younger brother René Schérer (1922-2023) succeeded in this, becoming a well-known (indeed somewhat notorious) academic philosopher, while Rohmer himself failed the entrance exams for the École normale supérieure three times, and settled for a life as an impecunious Classics teacher in Paris. At the age of 37 he married, and spent six years as the editor of the Cahiers du cinéma, which was then the most influential film journal in the world.

Rohmer’s friends and colleagues included all of the major directors who made up the French New Wave, including Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022), François Truffaut (1932-84) and Claude Chabrol (1930-2010). They all became famous; he remained an obscure intellectual, writing and theorising about movies for an absurdly low salary until he was fired from the Cahiers in 1963, the victim of a coup engineered by the director and film theorist Jacques Rivette (1928-2016), who wanted to move the journal in a more orthodox Marxist direction. After being forced out of his job, Rohmer spent a few years directing short films for the French Ministry of Education, on subjects ranging from medieval literature to contemporary architecture. All this would later feed and even inspire his creative work.

Rohmer was notoriously private, and kept a low profile in part because of his overbearing mother, who never seems to have known about her son’s obsession with cinema. When she died in 1970, he was finally able to come out of the closet as a film director. By then he had finally tasted success, first with La Collectionneuse (1967), then with his masterly philosophical comedy My Night at Maud’s (1969). At last he could afford to buy a flat in Paris that had its own bathroom and toilet. If Rohmer sometimes seemed absurdly frugal to some of his peers, it was not merely because he was eccentric.

In the end, Rohmer’s thrift and resourcefulness ensured his artistic independence. Other directors of his calibre suffered the usual fate of film-makers with grand ideas, and never ended up completing very many movies; Rohmer kept his ambitions modest and ended up releasing 23 feature films between 1962 and 2007. He also completed over two dozen television films, and a series of shorts, most from early in his career. Not bad for a failed academic who was regarded as a mere also-ran until he was almost 50. After a few false starts, he managed to create one of the most impressive, original bodies of work in cinema history, beginning his early ‘Moral Tales’ My Night at Maud’s, Claire’s Knee (1970) and Love in the Afternoon (1972), through his adaptations of Heinrich Von Kleist’s novella The Marquise of O (1976) and Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval (1978), to his six-part series Comedies and Proverbs of the 1980s, his four-part Tales of the Four Seasons of the 1990s, and his brilliant (and controversial) drama about the French Revolution, The Lady and the Duke (2001). His last film The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2007) was completed when he was 87; his vision remained undimmed to the end.

Rohmer realised that the usual length of a film (90 minutes to two hours) did not suffice to enable narratives with the scope of a novel, an epic poem or a spectacular theatrical pageant. Instead, he aimed to create work on the scale of a short story, a lyric poem or a one-act play. When you describe the plots of his films, they sound intricately trivial, like 18th-century-style comedies of manners, or 19th-century boulevard farces, replete with slamming doors, scheming lechers and paranoid, hysterical cuckolds. Yet they all unfold at a gentle pace; Rohmer tells his stories in a manner that gives them a natural, almost documentary feel, so that you often cannot tell what has been scripted and what was merely improvised by the actors, or captured by chance on camera. Instead of action, there is a great deal of talk.

For all their wordiness, Rohmer’s films are always lovely to look at, thanks to his insistence on a deliberate but unobtrusive coherence in colour and design. Also, there is an emphasis on youth in almost all of his films. The actress Françoise Fabian is rare among ‘Rohmériennes’ in having been over 30 when she starred in My Night at Maud’s; Rohmer discovered most of his favourite actresses, including Béatrice Romand, Arielle Dombasle and Anne-Laure Meury when they were in their late teens or early twenties. But there was nothing voyeuristic or predatory in his attitudes towards young women; on the contrary, the worst villains in his films are middle-aged men who are jealous of the young, like the bored diplomat Jérôme (played by Jean-Claude Brialy) in Claire’s Knee, and the balding roué Henri (Féodor Atkine) in Pauline at the Beach (1983), an entrancingly sunny comedy about a 15-year-old girl whose beautiful older cousin decides to take her under her wing during the summer holidays and teach her about love, even though (or perhaps because) her own emotional life is a mess.

For Rohmer, youth was simply the period where the most pivotal events in one’s life take place. Unlike Hollywood filmmakers, he avoided wish-fulfilment, didactic moralism, and nostalgia about his own teenage years. This might be why his films have never attracted a mass audience. Then again, Rohmer never sought one: he only wanted to reach those thoughtful, sensitive people to whom poetry, art and serious music play an integral role in life, as a means of mediating, reflecting or illuminating reality. He saw art as a means of engaging with reality, not avoiding or escaping it. Artistic creation, in his eyes, was an active search for beauty, which he identified with what is good, and what is true. This search, he thought, was the best way to approach reality, and the only true form of realism. He was right.