Skip to main content

Eric Rohmer

Image: amazon.co.uk

La première fois que j'ai vu un film d'Eric Rohmer au cinéma, c'était L'ami de mon amie. Si je m'en souviens bien, ça se déroulait dans une ville nouvelle d'Ile de France, on parlait beaucoup de choses banales, il se passait peu et j'y trouvais très peu d'intérêt (un peu plus qu'Elspeth, par contre). Franchement c'était barbant. Plus tard j'ai essayé Pauline à la Plage où l'intrigue prenait une place un peu plus importante et où les belles images du caméraman Nestor Almendros font penser à toutes nos plus belles vacances passées au bord de la mer. (Les films de Rohmer sont pleins de dialogues sur des sujets relativement banals.) J'ai même montré ce film à mes élèves des Sixth Form qui l'ont trouvé pas mal (mais pas mieux).

C'est en regardant Conte d'Eté que j'ai vraiment commencé à apprécier l'art de Rohmer. Les acteurs dans ses films sont souvent inconnus, souvent non-professionnels, souvent jeunes. Rohmer aime analyser les relations entre les gens et les subtiles motivations des personnages. Il entre dans le détail du comportement, des sentiments et des mots. Des fois il se moque légèrement de ses personnages (c'est le cas de Pauline à la Plage), mais la plupart du temps c'est au spectateur de goûter les faiblesses, les petits plaisirs et les problèmes quotidiens de ses personnages. Ce sont des films qui vous récompensent de votre patience. On en trouve peu de ce genre.

Bref, j'ai décidé de me relancer dans les films de Rohmer et j'ai commandé deux coffrets DVD: les "Comédies et Proverbes" et les "Contes des Saisons". Mon fils, amateur de films et élève de terminale, pourra les regarder avec moi, tout en révisant son français.


http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_ss_w_h__1_6?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=rohmer+box+set&sprefix=Rohmer

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,

The 2026 GCSE subject content is published!

Two DfE documents were published today. The first was the response to the consultation about the proposed new GCSE (originally due in October 2021) and the second is the subject content document which, ultimately, is of most interest to MFL teachers in England. Here is the link  to the document.  We are talking about an exam to be done from 2026 (current Y7s). There is always a tendency for sceptical teachers to think that consultations are a bit of a sham and that the DfE will just go ahead and do what they want when it comes to exam reform. In this case, the responses to the original proposals were mixed, and most certainly hostile as far as exam boards and professional associations representing the MFL community, universities, head teachers and awarding bodies are concerned. What has emerged does reveal some significant changes which take account of a number of criticisms levelled at the proposals. As I read it, the most important changes relate to vocabulary and the issue of topics