The hierarchical status of the auteur, bussed in from a luxury hotel, was anathema to Rohmer’s working methods. As his filmmaking developed, he rejected 35mm for 16mm, with the latter’s visible grain making for a less obviously cinematic image. He also moved away from the wider frames associated with large-scale or epic cinema toward a more televisual, square 1:33 frame, with The Green Ray (1986) even premiering on French television before its cinema run. In the words of his biographers, Rohmer considered this televisual framing, with its defiantly non-cinematic look, as opening the film up to the “epiphany of banality.”

Rohmer’s films are characterized by long, locked-off frames and slow tracking shots of people walking through sunny towns, cities and countryside. The films radiate a quiet beauty. The buildings and clothes come in muted pastels, and the sound design is marked by the ambient noises of distant traffic or the wash of the sea.

In the Bazinian tradition, no attention is drawn to the filmmaking apparatus in the process of telling the story; here, style is an apparent absence of style. We sit with the characters, hear their opinions and watch them work out their problems, all the while remaining, from our omnipotent position, one step ahead of their epiphanies. What we get in Rohmer’s calm, sophisticated mise-en-scene is a sensation, a “feel,” or what today might be called a vibe.