The Green Ray

It is the beginning of summer. Delphine, a discontented young woman, has just broken up with her boyfriend. She makes plans to go with a girlfriend to Greece but the girlfriend lets her down at the last moment. Delphine is left to spend her vacation by herself.

The Green Day is the fifth of Éric Rohmer's Comedies and Proverbs movie cycle. Rohmer takes us on a gentle journey of self-discovery and fills this study of solitude with unwavering humanity.

The film borrows its title from a overheard conversation about Jules Verne's novel The Green Ray. According to Verne, at the moment one sees that rare meteorological phenomenon - when there's a burst of green light just as the top of the sun sinks below the horizon into the sea - one's own thoughts and those of others are magically revealed.

Restored Digital Copy

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Éric Rohmer 1920-2010

The Haifa Festival celebrates a centennial to the birth of Éric Rohmer and a decade to his passing with a tribute of seven of his films in restored digital copies.

Éric Rohmer was born as Jean-Marie Maurice Schérer in 1920 in Tulle. He assumed the nom de plume - inspired by Erich von Stroheim and pulp novelist Sax Rohmer - for personal reasons, his mother was led to believe that Maurice was a teacher, and she died in 1970 unaware that he did anything else. Rohmer did teach school for a short time and began his writing career in the mid-1940s (he published the 1946 novel Elisabeth under another nom de plume, Gilles Cordier).

After moving to Paris, he started to write film criticism for French periodicals and was a founding editor of La Gazette du cinéma in 1950, along with François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Jacques Rivette, and became editor in chief of the New Wave publication Cahiers du cinéma in 1957. That year he and Claude Chabrol authored the film study Hitchcock. In 1963 he quit Cahiers after becoming involved in a dispute.

Unlike his New Wave contemporaries, Rohmer’s debut film, The Sign of Leo (1959) failed and he would have to wait a decade for his first international and critical success, My Night at Maud.

Rohmer is renowned for the three film series he produced between 1963 and 1998. The stories in Six Moral Tales - Rohmer’s first series - were inspired by Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) and focused on “a man meeting a woman at the very moment when he is about to commit himself to someone else”. The realization that obsession can replace reality underpinned his second series, the Comedies and Proverbs sextet. And then came the quartet Tales of the Four Seasons. All three series are represented in the tribute.

“Éric Rohmer is the romantic philosopher of the French New Wave, the director whose characters make love with words as well as flesh. They are open to sudden flashes of passion, they become infatuated at first sight, but then they descend into doubt and analysis, talking intensely about what it all means” - Roger Ebert.

Éric Rohmer won numerous awards for his films, including the Golden Lion for Best Film and the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Festival, the Louis Delluc Prize, the David di Donatello Luchino Visconti Award and Academy Award nominations.