A Digital Revolution? Eric Rohmer's L'Anglaise et le duc (2001)

The turn of the twenty-first century marked a resurgence in the careers of many French New Wave filmmakers with several of them making original use of digital technology. Éric Rohmer’s L’Anglaise et le duc (2001) is, arguably, the most conventional of these films, an adaptation of the memoirs of Lucy Elliot, an English aristocrat living in Paris during the French Revolution. Yet Rohmer uses digital composition in order to place several scenes against the backdrop of painted exteriors thereby creating a startlingly artificial effect. This paper seeks to situate and interpret L’Anglaise et le duc in the light of Rohmer’s New Wave background, but also in a context where the veteran Nouvelle Vague directors had taken on a roll akin to what Daniel Morgan has called ‘cultural mandarins’. If Rohmer’s use of painted backdrops in this film sometimes recalls the retrospectively risible back projection of classical cinema, how do we articulate the link between L’Anglaise and the aesthetically timorous cinéma de qualité against which the New Wave revolted? Rohmer may always have been the most conservative or classicist of the New Wave critics and directors, but how does this curious hybrid film fit alongside his theories of cinematic beauty and his occasional (increasing toward the end of his life) engagements with historical drama? Finally, at a time of vigorous struggle over contested historical legacies, how does Rohmer read the inaugural moment of modern French history and how does his self-consciously ersatz elaboration of the period shape our apprehension of it?