This Saturday, March 21st, is a centenary of Éric Rohmer, one of the few filmmakers in the history of the art whose movies are a genre unto themselves. Today, whenever a director makes a movie in which characters talk at length in ways that blend romantic confusion and intellectual pith, it will inevitably be likened to a Rohmer film. The idea of making that kind of movie is now obvious; but it wasn’t in the late forties, when Rohmer articulated his distinctive vision in a series of essays (collected in “The Taste for Beauty that put him on the map of French criticism and made him a leading light for young Parisian movie nuts who believed, as he did, that the art form was thriving (albeit far from France’s commercial mainstream), and who intended to make new kinds of films taking off from what they were seeing.

Those young movie nuts would launch the French New Wave, along with Rohmer, who was its virtual godfather; yet it took him two decades to put his ideas into practice. What made the difference for this group’s movies was a new mode of production—scant budget, small crew, rapid shooting. For Rohmer, these methods helped him fuse his way of filming with his way of living—and he lived a very strange life. (There’s a remarkable biography of him by Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe.) His practices—blending documentary and aestheticism, subjectivity and classicism—also made his characters’ romantic doings seem deceptively frivolous, their intellectual disputations ironically austere. The overarching subject of his films is avoiding the temptations of a false love (often but not always in the form of lust) while pursuing, awaiting, anticipating, or hardly even hoping for a true one. In a handful of films, such as the deeply disturbing “The Marquise of O” and his final film, “The Romance of Astrée and Céladon,” he tips his hand with the abstract extremes of his ideas—including the nearly impossible radicality of Christian love (which, in his view, is also romantic).

In a new and massive volume, “Le Sel du Présent” (“The Salt of the Present”), which was published in France by Capricci, in February, and which collects reviews that Rohmer wrote for a variety of general-readership magazines in the nineteen-fifties, he offers a thrilling vision of cinema as the supreme art of the times—of a future that he himself was planning to make—as well as a crystalline précis (in a brief 1959 review of Kenji Mizoguchi’s “Ugetsu”) of his own artistic philosophy: “For the filmmaker as for the poet, there’s only one great subject: the idea of Unity hidden beneath the diversity of appearances, or, rather, translated into dramatic terms.” For Rohmer, the essence of that Unity is the fury of desire and its forging, under intense pressure, into romance and its social forms. The mighty intellectual energy of his movies arises from this underlying subject—his philosophical view of the centrality of the very concept and possibility of love, to culture, art, and constructive politics.

A generous batch of Rohmer’s films are available to stream on the Criterion Channel, Amazon, and Kanopy. The one I’d start with is also the one I consider Rohmer’s best film, “Le Rayon Vert,” or “The Green Ray,” from 1986, streaming on the Criterion Channel. (It was released here then under the title “Summer.”) It’s a film of wide-ranging curiosity and ardent observation, with a depth of passionate empathy that arises from the collaborative freedom of his lead actress, Marie Rivière, in constructing her thorny and charming character. The story is exquisitely simple: the summer-vacation plans of Delphine (Rivière), a young woman working as a secretary in Paris, are cancelled at the last minute, and she needs to find somewhere to go and something to do for a few weeks. Delphine sees friends, she makes new ones, she travels to the mountains, she travels to the sea, and in each of these sudden new situations, she finds something wrong, she can’t fit in; she’s a genius of negativity, with a Socratically intuitive sense of aversion. Yet this depth of character and vision flows through the lambent light of the French countryside and the social whirl of energized encounters; the movie’s leap between the trivial and the transcendent is wondrous.

Speaking of negativity and aversion, it’s worth recommending a movie of Rohmer’s that’s nearly great and also nearly unwatchable, “Claire’s Knee,” from 1970 (on the Criterion Channel). It, too, is a summer story, set between the end of June and the end of July at a sumptuous community on France’s Lake Annecy; its tale of love and lust is embedded in the context of the inspirations and dangers of art itself. There, Jérôme (Jean-Claude Brialy), a dashing young cultural diplomat in his late thirties who’s engaged to be married, is welcomed into a household that features two half-sisters, Laura (Béatrice Romand), who’s sixteen, and Claire (Laurence de Monaghan), who’s a little older. Laura admits to being in love with him, and, though nothing “happens” beside a kiss—one that he initiates—the possibility is both in the air and in their minds. Claire hardly knows he exists, but he becomes obsessed with her body—in particular, yes, with her knee, and he engages in a complex conspiracy to caress it, nothing more. Yet, he says, none of this would have even begun had it not been for the literary imaginings of his friend Aurora (Aurora Cornu), a Romanian novelist who’s staying with the girls and their mother, and who has spun a tale for him about a man like him and young women like them. Here, Rohmer’s prime idea about the avowal and repression of desire gets a complex elaboration in a distinctively creepy form, as the creation of masturbatory fantasies that nonetheless involve sexual aggression at a level of smarmy impunity. If the history of love is implicated in the history of culture, so is the history of predatory behavior. Rohmer made a movie that shows this, whether or not he knew it.

The nineteen-seventies were a tough time for French filmmaking and for Rohmer, and when his pace of production picked up again, in 1981, France was different and he seemed different, too—in his sixties, he listened more carefully to the young women he worked with, and self-consciously developed movies around their perspectives. One of them, “Full Moon in Paris,” from 1984, is an expansive movie that swings with the brash style of its star, Pascale Ogier—and it’s also a retrospectively tragic movie, because she died two months after it opened, of a drug overdose, on the eve of her twenty-sixth birthday. It’s a story centered on the Parisian rock night life, which Louise (Ogier), a stylish and playful interior designer, loves and her boyfriend, Remi (Tchéky Karyo), an architect, hates. His apartment is in a new prefab suburb; she has a pied-à-terre in Paris which she’s preparing to sell, but, meanwhile, she meets a noodgy and brilliant young Parisian intellectual (Fabrice Luchini, whose lofty diction and intense manner made him one of Rohmer’s fetish actors) whose companionship tempts her even as his advances annoy her. Rohmer’s graceful and ardent curiosity about the habits and styles of a new generation and its avant-garde of flair as embodied by Ogier spins a mood of exuberance that nonetheless shudders with the stifled and conflicting desires that he perceived as the great “Unity” beneath its energies. (Stream “Full Moon in Paris” on Amazon, Google Play, and other services.)