The Lamp Newsletter: March 6, 2026
Jaspreet Singh Boparai on Éric Rohmer’s theory of film, Jude Russo on the Church in Doha, and Eve Tushnet on the history of the dandy.
Éric Rohmer’s Classicism
For Rohmer, the role of the filmmaker is to record and conserve the ordered beauty of the world rather than to attempt its transformation.
Jaspreet Singh Boparai
Éric Rohmer is not only one of the finest filmmakers of the twentieth century; he is also one of the most original and influential theorists of cinema. He is perhaps unique among major movie auteurs in having spent his first decade and a half of professional life as a teacher of Greek and Latin language and literature. When Rohmer is described as a classicist, this is not merely a matter of a vaguely classicizing aesthetic program. Classics was his profession. Yet by curious paradox, his classical formation left few visible traces on his oeuvre either as a critic or a cineaste. Overt use of Greek and Latin literature is at a minimum until the last phase of his career as a filmmaker. How are we to understand his classicism?
Rohmer did not begin making feature films in earnest until he was in his late forties, but in the following four decades, he released more than two dozen full-length features, along with a large body of shorter films, most of which were produced for educational television. He was even more prolific as a writer about film.
While Rohmer’s work is perceived as profoundly intellectual and is self-evidently the creation of an erudite man, it is often difficult to trace specific allusions or references in his films unless they are explicitly adaptations of literary works. This is partly because he digested his influences so thoroughly, but mainly because of his philosophical views on the relationship of cinema to reality. His aesthetic and theoretical classicism made it impossible for him to produce the sort of self-consciously artful work that his peers among the French New Wave directors of the 1960s were fond of creating.
Our examination of Rohmer’s classicism will culminate in his 1992 film Conte d’hiver (A Tale of Winter), in which Plato is extensively discussed by one of the characters, alongside Hugo and Pascal. Shakespeare is also a major presence in this film, as a very different kind of classic. Yet Rohmer’s films are rarely this self-conscious, and even here the relationship of the film to high-culture reference points is ambiguous and equivocal. Rohmer’s general distrust of intellectuals is ironic given how many of the main characters in his films could be described thus. Was there really any need for that librarian to recite Hugo or read out a passage from Plato’s Phaedo to the woman he wants to marry?
At the moment there is a great deal of academic writing about Rohmer and his work, but almost none of it is of an adequate standard. Scholars of film studies, even in France, rarely have a deep background in philosophy, Latin, Greek, German, or French literature or a grounding in high culture of the sort that would illuminate Rohmer’s oeuvre. I myself am almost entirely unequipped to deal with the filmmaker’s Kantianism or his lifelong engagement with German Romanticism. But luckily, those who are interested in this subject generally have at least two high-quality starting points for research. The first is a 2014 biography by Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe, which was published in English in 2016 as Éric Rohmer: A Biography. The second is Marco Grosoli’s 2018 monograph Éric Rohmer’s Film Theory (1948–1953): From “École Schérer” to “Politique des Auteurs.”
The biography in particular provides a useful road map to the Rohmer archive, which was deposited in June 2010, five months after Rohmer’s death, at the Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine. Among the twenty thousand items in one hundred forty document boxes are Rohmer’s teaching notes and Latin compositions, as well as the usual letters, documents, notebooks, drafts, sketches, and literary remains to be expected from an artist as restlessly prolific as Rohmer. But for the moment we lack a detailed picture of Rohmer’s classical background. We will only be able to discern this aspect of his formation clearly when some scholar takes the time to sift through these materials systematically to determine the precise depth and extent of Rohmer’s engagement with Latin and Greek.
This investigation is based on the assumption that Rohmer’s reading in classical authors was broad rather than profound, and went no further than the Latin and Greek texts on which he was examined or was compelled to teach during his time as a lycée professor. There is little evidence that he engaged much with ancient literature after 1957, when it ceased to be a professional necessity. Also, the peculiar qualities of his references to Plato in his films suggest that he engaged with these dialogues largely as classroom texts for students of Greek, whether as a student or a teacher himself. Much of Rohmer’s apparent Platonism, such as it was, seems to have been received by osmosis from his deep reading of Kant, Hegel, and Schiller. Plato often seems to him a source of arresting philosophical myths rather than a primary inspiration for his thought. Read the rest here.
In the magazine, Jude Russo surveys the condition of Christians in the Persian Gulf: “We are back in pagan Rome: a young Church made up of strangers, without wealth, power, or even at this point much by way of tradition; a governing order that is, on a good day, cautiously indifferent. Deprived of Her pomps and Her sentimental attachments to landscape and history, the Church must stand on Her own claims—that the imposter Jesus Christ rose from the dead and founded a particular Church that is the guardian of particular truths. She must do this without anything recognizable as aesthetic good taste or institutional power. Waugh’s ‘beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design’ stands against the impossible, luminous geometries of global capital and the ziggurats devoted to the simplest, most hypnotic creed in world history, that there is no god but God and Muhammed is his prophet, recited in glowing edifices whence the heartbreaking call to prayer echoes five times a day.” Read the rest here.
And Eve Tushnet examines the history of the dandy. Read here.
Saint of the Week
Maud was daughter of Theodoric, a powerful Saxon count. Her parents placed her very young in the monastery of Erford, of which her grandmother Maud was then abbess. Her parents married her to Henry, son of Otho, Duke of Saxony, in 913, who was afterwards chosen king of Germany. It was her delight to visit, comfort, and exhort the sick and the afflicted; to serve and instruct the poor, and to afford her charitable succor to prisoners. Her husband, edified by her example, concurred with her in every pious undertaking which she projected. After twenty-three years’ marriage God was pleased to call the king to himself, in 936. Maud, during his sickness, went to the church to pour forth her soul in prayer for him at the foot of the altar. As soon as she understood, by the tears and cries of the people, that he had expired, she called for a priest who was fasting to offer the holy sacrifice for his soul. She had three sons: Otho, afterwards emperor; Henry, Duke of Bavaria; and St. Brunn, Archbishop of Cologne. Otho was crowned king of Germany in 937, and emperor at Rome in 962, after his victories over the Bohemians and Lombards. The two oldest sons conspired to strip Maud of her dowry, on the unjust pretense that she had squandered the revenues of the state on the poor. The unnatural princes at length repented of their injustice, and restored to her all that had been taken from her. She then became more liberal in her alms than ever, and founded many churches, with five monasteries. In her last sickness she made her confession to her grandson William, the Archbishop of Mentz, who yet died twelve days before her, on his road home. She again made a public confession before the priests and monks of the place, received a second time the last sacraments, and, lying on a sack-cloth, with ashes on her head, died on March 14, 968.
Prayer Requests from Readers
Pray for the Secular Franciscans in my district, that they get a good Spiritual Assistant.
Please pray for my sister-in-law, who is possibly on the autistic spectrum (though never diagnosed), who believes everyone hates her despite assurances, and proofs, to the contrary.
Please pray for Bethany and Matthew, who are entering the Church this Easter.
Please pray for baby Mary Grace.
I had some emergency surgery last week. It’s interesting how something like that immediately relatives everything else. Recovery is steady but painful; if so moved, please join the crowd of friends praying for me.
Please pray for my grandmother-in-law, actively dying and not clearly having sought to be close to Jesus.
Please also pray for my father, moving to rehab after an extended stay in the hospital for chemotherapy and lymphoma-/EBV-related issues. Pray for the doctors, nurses, and staff who so ably cared for him and will continue to do so, and for my family who are helping him and sacrificing for it.
Please pray for my sister in law and her husband who are preparing for the birth of their son, who is threatened to have a serious disability.
Please pray for Andrew in utero.
Upcoming Events
Readers of The Lamp in San Francisco will meet to discuss Issue 33 on Saturday, March 21, from 11:00 a.m. to about noon in the Aquinas Room at St. Dominic Church (2390 Bush Street). To R.S.V.P., email Matthew Goudeau at matthew@matthewgoudeau.com.
Readers of The Lamp in the Chicago area will meet on Sunday, March 22 from 3-5 p.m. For details and to R.S.V.P., email thelampreaderschicago@gmail.com.
The Poll
Our readers are a fifty-fifty split on the use of social media.
Sixty percent of our readers throw their old batteries in the trash. Fourteen percent take them to a recycling center. Twenty percent hoard them, knowing that they should not throw them away, but not knowing what to do instead. The rest just throw up their hands in despair.
This week’s poll can be found here.