Reel Talks: Conversation on Eric Rohmer

Talks on movies, the culture of cinema, and filmmaking.

Enjoy a conversation on film director Eric Rohmer with André Aciman, hosted by film connoisseur Scott Adlerberg.

Legendary director Éric Rohmer has long been praised—and criticized!—for his wordy, literate films, in which conversation and flirtation are the main events. But 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 under a pseudonym in 1946, when Rohmer was 26 years old. 

Available in English for the first time this July, Élisabeth is a remarkable literary portrait of one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century as a young man: a beguiling, strangely timeless, and prematurely wise first draft of what we now recognize as a quintessentially Rohmeresque situation: a summer idyll whose placid surface roils with lust, resentment, wit, and even happiness. It was also the “matrix,” as Rohmer himself later put it, of the images, ideas, and formal concerns of his first sequence of films, Six Moral Tales.

André Aciman is the New York Times bestselling author of Call Me by Your Name, Out of Egypt, Eight White Nights, False Papers, Alibis, Harvard Square, Enigma Variations, Homo Irrealis, Roman Year, and Find Me. His most recent book is Room on the Sea (2025). He’s the editor of The Proust Project and teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He lives with his wife in Manhattan.