A seminal film of the nouvelle vague, now rarely revived, The Sign of the Lion (Rohmer's first feature) is a powerful study of contemporary isolation. The story concerns a musician living in Paris who learns that he will soon inherit a sum of money from an aunt who has died. To make ends meet in the meantime, he borrows from friends. But the news turns out to be false; there will be no money, and now it is summer, and all his friends have left Paris. Alone and penniless, he spends his summer as a tramp, sleeping on the banks of the Seine; we see a Paris transformed by summer heat, American tourists, and his own marginal position. Louis Marcorelles, writing in Sight and Sound in 1960, notes, "Eric Rohmer is, in my opinion, the first genuine exponent of what might be called 'the cinema of pure behavior'.... (This film) shows its originality in portraying the friction set up between a human being and society, his wearing down, his slow degradation. This is not a descriptive but a rigorously visual art."