He edited the influential film journal Cahiers du cinéma from 1957 to 1963, while most of his colleagues—among them Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut—were making the transition from critics to filmmakers and gaining international attention.

After his death in 2010, his obituary in The Daily Telegraph called him "the most durable filmmaker of the French New Wave", outlasting his peers and "still making movies the public wanted to see" late in his career.

[6] He fashioned his pseudonym from the names of two famous artists: actor and director Erich von Stroheim and writer Sax Rohmer, author of the Fu Manchu series.

[7] Rohmer was educated in Paris and received an advanced degree in history, though he seemed equally interested and learned in literature, philosophy, and theology.

[7][8] While living in Paris, Rohmer first began to attend screenings at Henri Langlois's Cinémathèque Française, where he first met and befriended Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette and other members of the French New Wave.

In 1951 Rohmer joined the staff of André Bazin's newly founded film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, of which he became the editor in 1956.

[9][10] There, Rohmer established himself as a critic with a distinctive voice; fellow Cahiers contributor and French New Wave filmmaker Luc Moullet later remarked that, unlike the more aggressive and personal writings of younger critics like Truffaut and Godard, Rohmer favored a rhetorical style that made extensive use of questions and rarely used the first person singular.

In the article, Rohmer writes that in an age of cultural self-consciousness, film is "the last refuge of poetry" and the only contemporary art form from which metaphor can still spring naturally and spontaneously.

It focuses on Hitchcock's Catholic background and has been called "one of the most influential film books since the Second World War, casting new light on a filmmaker hitherto considered a mere entertainer".

By 1951 Rohmer had a bigger budget provided by friends and shot the short film Présentation ou Charlotte et son steak.

In 1952 Rohmer began collaborating with Pierre Guilbaud on a one-hour short feature, Les Petites Filles modèles, but the film was never finished.

[12] In 1962 Rohmer and Barbet Schroeder co-founded the production company Les Films du Losange (they were later joined by Pierre Coltrell in the late 1960s).

[12] These included episodes of Filmmakers of Our Time on Louis Lumiere and Carl Theodor Dreyer, educational films on Blaise Pascal and Stéphane Mallarmé, and documentaries on the Percival legend, the Industrial Revolution and female students in Paris.

He later said, "When you show a film on TV, the framing goes to pieces, straight lines are warped...the way people stand and walk and move, the whole physical dimension...all this is lost.

If it isn't clear within Maud who actually is making the wager and whether or not they win or lose, that only enlarges the idea of le pari ("the bet") into the encompassing metaphor that Rohmer wants for the entire series.

[8] Overall, Rohmer said he wanted the Six Moral Tales "to portray in film what seemed most alien to the medium, to express feelings buried deep in our consciousness.

"[8] Following the Moral Tales Rohmer wanted to make a less personal film and adapted a novella by Heinrich von Kleist, La Marquise d'O... in 1976.

"[8] In 1978 Rohmer made the Holy Grail legend film Perceval le Gallois, based on a 12th-century manuscript by Chrétien de Troyes.

Tom Milne said that the film was "almost universally greeted as a disappointment, at best a whimsical exercise in the faux-naif in its attempt to capture the poetic simplicity of medieval faith, at worse an anticlimatic blunder" and that it was "rather like watching the animation of a medieval manuscript, with the text gravely read aloud while the images — cramped and crowded, coloured with jewelled brilliance, delighting the eye with bizarre perspectives — magnificently play the role traditionally assigned to marginal illuminations.

"[8] In 1980 Rohmer made a film for television of his stage production of Kleist's play Catherine de Heilbronn, another work with a medieval setting.

A Perfect Marriage is only a variation on the spiritual states of the petty bourgeoise who go on and on forever about the legitimacy of certain institutions or beliefs confronted by problems of the emotions.

The Lady and the Duke caused considerable controversy in France, where its negative portrayal of the French Revolution led some critics to label it monarchist propaganda.

He has on occasion departed from the rule by inserting soundtrack music in places in The Green Ray (1986) (released as Summer in the United States).

These films are immersed in an environment of bright sunlight, blue skies, green grass, sandy beaches, and clear water.

Given Rohmer's professed interest in the anticipation rather than the climax in his tales, the summertime provides his characters with the time and space to show their self-consciousness and anxiety, rather than the solitude and relaxation they desire.

A Summer's Tale (1996) has most of the elements of a typical Rohmer film: no soundtrack music, no close-ups, a seaside resort, long conversations between beautiful young people (who are middle class and educated) and discussions involving the characters' interests from songwriting to ethnology.

Beginning in the late 1970s during the production of Perceval le Gallois Rohmer began to reduce the number of crew members on his films.

Truffaut once said he was one of the greatest directors of the 20th century, Godard was his brother, Chabrol admired him, Wenders couldn't stop taking photos of him.

He had a very unique point of view on the different levels of language and on desire that is at work in the heart of each and every human being, on youth, on seasons, on literature, of course, and one could say on history.

As an outsider he made luminous and candid films in which he deliberately forgot his perfect knowledge of the cinema in a very direct link with the beauty of the world."