French filmmaker Eric Rohmer dies at 89

Eric Rohmer, a respected French filmmaker known for such films asMy Night at Maud's and Pauline at the Beach, has died. He was 89.

His production company announced his death Monday in Paris.

Part of the French New Wave that included filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Franois Truffaut, Rohmer was known for his atmospheric and occasionally enigmatic moviemaking.

His films, including his first big hit, 1969's Ma Nuit Chez Maud (My Night at Maud's) and 1982's Le Beau Mariage (A Good Marriage), feature much witty talk but little plot. Rohmer prided himself on showing the inner life of his characters.

In Chez Maud, which earned two Oscar nominations,a man spends the night with a pretty divorce named Maud discussing life and religion after proposing to his future wife.

Rohmer made 24 movies over a 50-year period, including 1969's Le Genou de Claire (Claire's Knee), 1972's L'Amour L'aprs-midi (Love in the Afternoon) and his final film, 2007's Les Amours d'Astre et Celadon.

Literature teacher

He was born Jean-Marie Maurice Schererin 1920 in the small French cityof Nancy.

In the 1940s, he relocated to Paris and became a literature teacher and newspaper reporter. His only novel, Elisabeth, was published in 1946 under the name Gilbert Cordier.

He became interested in film criticism and founded the Gazette du Cinemas with Godard and Jacques Rivette. He was later editor-in-chief of Cahiers du Cinema, a periodical which advanced the French New Wave film movement emerging in the 1960s.

The New Wave rejected Hollywood tropes and sought to bring a more edgy, improvised style to cinema. Rohmer avoided both closeups and background music and his slow-moving films show characters in mundane situations such as riding a bicycle or waiting for a train.

His pseudonym was taken from actor-director Erich von Stroheim and novelist Sax Rohmer, who wrote the Fu Manchu series.

Rohmer made his first feature film, Le signe du lion (The Sign of Leo), in 1959.

'Moral tales'

He got little recognition for his early films, which including a cycle of "moral tales" about people in the throes of temptation including La boulangre de Monceau (1963) and La carrire de Suzanne. Often the drama of the films lay in the gap between what the protagonists say and what they do.

He called his second cycle of films dealing with the intricacies of relationshipsComedies et Proverbs. This included Femme de l'aviateur(1980) about a student who suspects his girlfriend of infidelity and Pauline la plage, about adolescent coming-of-age.

His last series and his most acclaimed, Tales of the Four Seasons, explored socially isolated and eccentric people. This series includesConte de printemps (A Spring Tale) (1990), an ensemble film acclaimed for its depiction of human interaction,and Conte d'hiver (A Winter's Tale), about a single mother who finds it difficult to commit (1992).

Rohmer liked to work with the same actors repeatedly, among them Beatrice Romand, who played a teenager in Claires Knee and a lonely widow in Autumn Tale, and Barbet Schroeder, who appeared in 15 of his films.

In 2001, he was awarded a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for his body of work.