Renoir, Jean
RENOIR, Jean
Nationality: French/American. Born: Paris, 15 September 1894, son of painter Auguste Renoir, became citizen of United States (naturalized) in 1946, retained French citizenship. Education: Collége de Sainte-Croix, Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1902; Ecole Sainte-Marie de Monceau, 1903; Ecole Massina, Nice, until 1912; University of Aix-en-Provence, degree in mathematics and philosophy, 1913. Military Service: Served in French cavalry, 1914–15; transferred to French Flying Corps, 1916, demobilized 1918. Family: Married 1) Andrée Madeleine Heuschling ("Dédée," took name Catherine Hessling following 1924 appearance in Catherine), 1920 (divorced 1930); 2) Dido Freire, 1944, one son. Career: Worked as potter and ceramicist, 1920–23; directed first film, La Fille de l'eau, 1924; joined Service Cinématographique de l'Armée, La Règle du jeu banned by French government as demoralizing, 1939; Robert Flaherty arranged Renoir's passage to United States, 1940; signed with 20th Century-Fox, 1941; signed with Universal, then terminated contract, 1942; re-established residence in Paris, retained home in Beverly Hills, 1951; active in theatre through 1950s; Compagnie Jean Renoir formed with Anna de Saint Phalle, 1958; taught theatre at University of California, Berkeley, 1960. Awards: Prix Louis Delluc, for Les Bas-Fonds, 1936; Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur, 1936; International Jury Cup, Venice Biennale, for La Grande Illusion, 1937; New York Critics Award, for Swamp Water, 1941; Best Film, Venice Festival, for The Southerner, 1946; Grand Prix de l'Academie du Ciném for French Cancan, 1956; Prix Charles Blanc, Academie Française, for Renoir, biography of father, 1963; Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts, University of California, Berkeley, 1963; Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1964; Osella d'Oro, Venice Festival, 1968; Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts, Royal College of Art, London, 1971; Special Oscar for Career Accomplishment, 1975. Died: In Beverly Hills, California, 12 February 1979.
Films as Director:
- 1925
La Fille de l'eau (+ pr)
- 1926
Nana (+ pr, adaptation)
- 1927
Catherine (Une vie sans joie; Backbiters) (co-d, co-pr, sc, role as sub-prefect); Sur un air de Charleston (Charleston-Parade) (+ pr, ed); Marquitta (+ pr, adaptation)
- 1928
La Petite Marchande d'allumettes (The Little Match Girl) (co-d, co-pr, sc)
- 1928
Tire au flanc (+ co-sc); Le Tournoi dans la cité (Le Tournoi) (+ adaptation)
- 1929
Le Bled
- 1931
On purge bébé (+ co-sc); La Chienne (+ co-sc)
- 1932
La Nuit du carrefour (Night at the Crossroads) (+ sc); Boudu sauvée des eaux (Boudu Saved from Drowning) (+ co-sc)
- 1933
Chotard et cie (+ co-sc)
- 1934
Madame Bovary (+ sc)
- 1935
Toni (Les Amours de Toni) (+ co-sc)
- 1936
Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (The Crime of MonsieurLange) (+ co-sc); La Vie est à nous (The People of France) (co-d, co-sc); Les Bas-Fonds (Underworld; The LowerDepths) (+ adaptation)
- 1937
La Grande Illusion (Grand Illusion) (+ co-sc)
- 1938
La Marseillaise (+ co-sc); La Bête humaine (The HumanBeast; Judas Was a Woman) (+ co-sc)
- 1939
La Règle du jeu (Rules of the Game) (+ co-sc, role as Octave)
- 1941
La Tosca (The Story of Tosca) (co-d, co-sc); Swamp Water
- 1943
This Land Is Mine (+ co-p, co-sc)
- 1944
Salute to France (Salut à France) (co-d, co-sc)
- 1945
The Southerner (+ sc)
- 1946
Une Partie de campagne (A Day in the Country) (+ sc) (filmed in 1936); The Diary of a Chambermaid (+ co-sc)
- 1947
The Woman on the Beach (+ co-sc)
- 1951
The River (+ co-sc)
- 1953
Le Carrosse d'or (The Golden Coach) (+ co-sc)
- 1955
French Cancan (Only the French Can) (+ sc)
- 1956
Elena et les hommes (Paris Does Strange Things) (+ sc)
- 1959
Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier (The Testament of Dr.Cordelier; Experiment in Evil) (+ sc); Le Déjeuner surl'herbe (Picnic on the Grass) (+ sc)
- 1962
Le Caporal épinglé (The Elusive Corporal; The VanishingCorporal) (co-d, co-sc)
- 1970
Le Petit Théâtre de Jean Renoir (The Little Theatre of JeanRenoir) (+ sc)
Other Films:
- 1927
Le Petit Chaperon rouge (Cavalcanti) (co-sc, role as the Wolf)
- 1930
Die Jagd nach dem Gluck (Gliese) (role as Robert)
- 1937
The Spanish Earth (Ivens) (wrote commentary and narration for French version)
- 1971
The Christian Licorice Store (Frawley) (role as himself)
Publications
By RENOIR: books—
This Land Is Mine, in Twenty Best Film Plays, edited by Gassner and Nichols, New York, 1943.
The Southerner, in Best Film Plays—1945, edited by Gassner and Nichols, New York, 1946.
Renoir: Souvenirs de mon père, Paris, 1948; published as Renoir, MyFather, New York, 1958.
Orvet, Paris, 1955.
The Notebooks of Captain George, Boston, 1966.
La Grande Illusion, London, 1968; Paris, 1974.
Rules of the Game, New York, 1970.
Ecrits 1926–1971, edited by Claude Gauteur, Paris, 1974.
My Life and My Films, New York, 1974.
Jean Renoir: Essays, Conversations, Reviews, edited by Penelope Gilliatt, New York, 1975.
Oeuvres de cinéma inédités, edited by Claude Gauteur, Paris, 1981.
Lettres d'Amérique, edited by Dido Renoir and Alexander Sesonske, Paris, 1984.
Renoir on Renoir: Interviews, Essays and Remarks, Cambridge, 1989.
By RENOIR: articles—
"Jean Renoir à Hollywood," an interview with Paul Gilson, in L'Ecran Française (Paris), 15 August 1945.
Interview with Jacques Rivette and François Truffaut, in Cahiers duCinéma (Paris), April 1954; reprinted in part as "Renoir in America," in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1954.
"Paris-Provence: Inspiration pour un film," in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), May 1954.
"Enquête sur la censure et l'éroticisme: le public a horreur de ça," in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), December 1954.
"French Cancan," in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), May 1955.
"Nouvel entretien avec Jean Renoir," with Jacques Rivette and François Truffaut, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), Christmas 1957; also in La Politique des auteurs, by André Bazin and others, Paris, 1972.
"Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier," in L'Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), July 1961.
"Jean Renoir: propos rompus," an interview with Jean-Louis Noames, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), May 1964.
"La Grande Illusion," in L'Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), January 1965.
"La Règle du jeu," in L'Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), October 1965.
"Renoir at 72," an interview with Axel Madsen, in Cinema (Los Angeles), Spring 1966.
"The Situation of the Serious Filmmaker," in Film Makers on FilmMaking, edited by Harry Geduld, Bloomington, Indiana, 1967.
"My Next Films," an interview with Michel Delahaye and Jean-André Fieschi, in Cahiers du Cinéma in English (New York), March 1967.
Interview with Rui Nogueira and François Truchaud, in Sight andSound (London), Spring 1968.
"C'est la révolution! (Crème de beauté)," in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), May 1968.
"Conversation with Jean Renoir," with Louis Marcorelles, in Interviews with Film Directors, edited by Andrew Sarris, New York, 1969.
Interview with James Silke, in The Essential Cinema, edited by P. Adams Sitney, New York, 1975.
Articles and interview, in special Renoir issue of Positif (Paris), September 1975.
"La Chienne," in L'Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), October 1975.
On RENOIR: books—
Davay, Paul, Jean Renoir, Brussels, 1957.
Cauliez, Armand-Jean, Jean Renoir, Paris, 1962.
Analyses des films de Jean Renoir, Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques, Paris, 1966.
Bennett, Susan, Study Unit 8: Jean Renoir, London, 1967.
Poulle, François, Renoir 1938 ou Jean Renoir pour rien. Enquête surun cinéaste, Paris, 1969.
Leprohon, Pierre, Jean Renoir, New York, 1971.
Braudy, Leo, Jean Renoir: The World of His Films, New York, 1972; 2nd edition, 1989.
Bazin, André, Jean Renoir, edited by François Truffaut, Paris, 1973.
Mast, Gerald, Filmguide to The Rules of the Game, Bloomington, Indiana, 1973.
Durgnat, Raymond, Jean Renoir, Berkeley, California, 1974.
Beylie, Claude, Jean Renoir: le spectacle, la vie, Paris, 1975.
Faulkner, Christopher, Jean Renoir: A Guide to References andResources, Boston, 1979.
Sesonske, Alexander, Jean Renoir: The French Films 1924–1939, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980.
Serceau, Daniel, Jean Renoir, Paris, 1985.
Bertin, Celia, Jean Renoir, Paris, 1986.
Faulkner, Christopher, The Social Cinema of Jean Renoir, Princeton, New Jersey, 1986.
Vincendeau, Ginette, and Keith Reader, La Vie est a Nous: FrenchCinema of the Popular Front 1935–1938, London, 1986.
Viry-Babel, Roger, Jean Renoir: Le Jeu et la Règle, Paris, 1986.
Beylie, Claude, and Maurice Bessy, Jean Renoir, Paris, 1989.
Guislain, Pierre, La règle du jeu, Jean Renoir, Paris, 1990.
Bergan, Ronald, Jean Renoir: Projections of Paradise, Woodstock, 1994.
Cavagnac, Guy, Jean Renoir: Le désir du monde, Paris, 1994.
O'Shaughnessy, Martin, Jean Renoir, New York, 2000.
On RENOIR: articles—
"Renoir Issue" of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), January 1952.
Brunius, Jacques, "Jean Renoir," in En marge du cinéma français, Paris, 1954.
"Renoir Issue" of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), Christmas 1957.
Rohmer, Eric, "Jeunesse de Jean Renoir," in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), December 1959.
Belanger, Jean, "Why Renoir Favors Multiple Camera, Long Sustained Take Technique," in American Cinematographer (Los Angeles), March 1960.
Dyer, Peter, "Renoir and Realism," in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1960.
Callenbach, Ernest, and Roberta Schuldenfrei, "The Presence of Jean Renoir," in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Winter 1960.
Russell, Lee, (Peter Wollen), "Jean Renoir," in New Left Review, May/June 1964.
Millar, Daniel, "The Autumn of Jean Renoir," in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1968.
Godard, Jean-Luc, "Jean Renoir and Television," in Godard onGodard, London, 1972.
Diehl, Digby, "Directors Go to Their Movies: Jean Renoir," in Action (Los Angeles), May/June 1972.
Fofi, Goffredo, "The Cinema of the Popular Front in France (1934–38)," in Screen (London), Winter 1972/73.
Harcourt, Peter, "A Flight from Passion: Images of Uncertainty in the Work of Jean Renoir," in Six European Directors, Harmondsworth, England, 1974.
Gauteur, Claude, editor, "La Règle du jeu et la critique en 1939," in Image et Son (Paris), March 1974.
Greenspun, Roger, "House and Garden: Three Films by Jean Renoir," in Film Comment (New York), July/August 1974.
Thomas, P., "The Sorcerer's Apprentice: Bazin and Truffaut on Renoir," in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1974/75.
"Renoir Issue" of Cinema (Zurich), vol. 21, no. 4, 1975.
Willis, D., "Renoir and the Illusion of Detachment," in Sight andSound (London), Autumn 1977.
Beylie, Claude, "Jean Renoir (1894–1979)," in special Renoir issue of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 1 July 1980.
Strebel, Elizabeth Grottle, "Jean Renoir and the Popular Front," in Feature Films as History, edited by K.R.M. Short, London, 1981.
Sesonske, A., "Discovering America: Jean Renoir 1941," in Sightand Sound (London), Autumn 1981.
Rothman, William, "The Filmmaker within the Film: The Role of Octave in The Rules of the Game," in Quarterly Review of FilmStudies (New York), Summer 1982.
Turvey, G., "1936, the Culture of the Popular Front, and Jean Renoir," in Media, Culture and Society (London), October 1982.
Lourié, Eugene, "Grand Illusions," in American Film (Washington, D.C.), January/February 1985.
Everson, William K., "Deana Durbin and Jean Renoir," in Films inReview (New York), August/September 1986 (see also June/July and October 1987).
Viry-Babel, R., "Jean Renoir à Hollywood ou la recherche américaine d'une image francaise," in Cinémas, vol. 1, Autumn 1990.
Tesson, Charles, "La production de Toni," in Cinémathèque, May 1992.
Tesson, Charles, "La production de Toni," in Cinémathèque, Spring-Summer 1993.
Harrendorf, M., "Soziale Utopie und ästhetische Revolution. Neue Forschungen über Jean Renoir und die 30er Jahre," in Film-Dienst (Köln), vol. 46, 21 December 1993.
Bagh, Peter van, Jean Renoir ja elämän teatteri," in Filmihulu (Helsinki), no. 6, 1994.
Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 479–480, May 1994.
Positif (Paris), special section, July-August 1994.
"Tout Renoir," in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), July-August 1994.
Génin, Bernard, "Renoir et la comédie humaine," in Télérama (Paris), 14 September 1994.
Curchod, Olivier, and others, in Positif (Paris), no. 408, February 1995.
Gallaher, Tag, "The Dancers and the Dance Jean Renoir," in FilmComment (New York), vol. 32, January-February 1996.
Scorsese, Martin, "Ma cinéphile," in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 500, March 1996.
Williams, Alan, in Cineaste (New York), vol. 22, April 1996.
On RENOIR: films—
Gritti, Roland, L'Album de famille de Jean Renoir, Paris, 1956.
Braunberger, Gisèle, La Direction d'acteurs par Jean Renoir, Paris, 1970.
* * *
Jean Renoir's major work dates from between 1924 and 1939. Of his 21 films the first six are silent features that put forward cinematic problems that come to dominate the entire oeuvre. All study a detachment, whether of language and image, humans and nature, or social rules and real conduct. Optical effects are treated as problems coextensive with narrative. He shows people who are told to obey rules and conventions in situations and social frames that confine them. A sensuous world is placed before everyone's eyes, but access to it is confounded by cultural mores. In Renoir's work, nature, like a frame without borders, isolates the impoverished subjects within limits at once too vast and too constricting for them. Inherited since the Cartesian revolution, and the growth of the middle class after 1789, bourgeois codes of conduct do not fit individuals whose desires and passion know no end.
The patterns established in the films appear simple, and they are. Renoir joins optical to social contradictions in the sense that every one of his films stages dramas about those who cannot conform to the frame in which they live. For the same reason his work also studies the dynamics of love in cinematography that marks how the effect is undeniably "scopic"—grounded in an impulse to see and thus to hold. Sight conveys the human wish to contain whatever is viewed, and to will to control what knows no border. As love cannot be contained, it becomes tantamount to nature itself.
The director has often been quoted as saying that he spent his life making one film. Were it fashioned from all of his finished works—including those composed in the 1920s or 1940s or 1960s in France, America, or India—it would tell the story of a collective humanity whose sense of tradition is effectively gratuitous or fake. The social milieu of many of his films is defined by a scapegoat who is killed in order to make that tradition both firm and precarious. All of Renoir's central characters thus define the narratives and visual compositions in which they are found. Boudu (Michel Simon), who escapes the confinement of bourgeois ways in Boudu sauvé des eaux, is the opposite of Lestingois (Charles Granval), ensconced in a double-standard marriage à la Balzac. Boudu, a tramp, a trickster, and a refugee from La Chienne (1931), changes the imagination of his milieu by virtue of his passage through it. The effect he leaves resembles that of Amédée Lange (René Lefevre) in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, who gives life to a collective venture—an emblem of Leon Blum's short-lived Popular Front government launched in 1936—that lives despite his delusions about the American West and the pulp he writes. Lange is the flip side of Jacques Lantier (Jean Gabin) of La Bête humaine (1938), a tragic hero whose suicide prefigures André Jurieux's (Roland Toutain's) passion of La Règle du jeu (1939).
Boudu floats through the frame in ways that the migrant laborers of Toni or the souls of La Vie est à nous cannot. The latter are bound to conventions of capital exploitation that incarcerate humanity. In these and other films the characters all "have their reasons," that is, they have many contradictory drives that cannot be socially reconciled but that are individually well founded and impeccably logical on their own terms. When Renoir casts his characters' plural "reasons" under an erotic aura, he offers superlative studies of love. His protagonists wish to find absolution for their passion at the vanishing points of the landscapes—both imaginary and real—in which they try to move. The latter are impossible constructs, but their allure is nonetheless tendered within the sensuous frame of deep-focus photography, long takes, and lateral reframing. Rosenthal and Maréchal (Marcel Dalio and Gabin) seek an end to war when they tramp into the distance of a snowscape at the end of La Grande Illusion. Lange and Florelle (Valentine) wave goodbye as they walk into the flat horizon of Belgium. But Jurieux can imagine love only as a picture-postcard when he and Christine (Nora Grégor), he hopes in desperation, will rejoin his mother in snowy Alsace. Or Lantier can be imagined jumping from his speeding locomotive into a space where the two tracks of the railroad converge, at infinity, beyond the line between Paris and Le Havre. In Une Partie de campagne, Henri (Georges Darnoux), frustrated beyond end at the sight of melancholy Juliette (Sylvia Bataille) rowing upstream with her husband sitting behind her in their skiff, looks tearfully at the lush Marne riverside. Sitting on the trunk of a weeping willow arched over the current, he flicks his cigarette butt in the water, unable to express otherwise the fate he has been dealt.
These scenes are shot with an economy that underscores the pathos Renoir draws from figures trapped in situations too vast for their ken or their lives. If generalization can seek an emblem, Renoir's films appear to lead to a serre, the transparent closure of the greenhouse that serves as the site of the dénouement of La Règle du jeu. The "serre" is literally what constricts, or what has deceptive depth for its beholder. It is the scene where love is acted out and extinguished by the onlooker. The space typifies what Renoir called "the feeling of a frame too narrow for the content" of the dramas he selected from a literary heritage (Madame Bovary, The Lower Depths) or wrote himself, such as Rules. Renoir's films have an added intensity and force when viewed in the 1990s. They manifest an urgent concern for the natural world and demonstrate that we are the "human beast" destroying it. Clearly opposed to the effects of capitalism, Renoir offers glimpses of sensuous worlds that seem to arch beyond history. A viewer of La Fille de l'eau (1924), Boudu, or Toni surmises that trees have far more elegance than the characters turning about them, or that, echoing Baudelaire's pronouncements in his Salons of 1859, landscapes lacking the human species are of enduring beauty. Renoir puts forth studies of the conflict of language and culture in physical worlds that possess an autonomy of their own. His characters are gauged according to the distance they gain from their environments or the codes that tell them how to act and to live. Inevitably, Renoir's characters are marked by writing. Boudu, a reincarnation of Pan and Nature itself, can only read "big letters." By contrast, Lantier is wedded to his locomotive, a sort of writing machine he calls "la lison." The urbane La Chesnaye (Dalio) in Rules cannot live without his writing, the "dangerous supplements" of mechanical dolls, a calliope, or human toys. These objects reflect in the narrative the filmic apparatus that crafted Renoir's work as a model of film writing, a "caméra-stylo," or ciné-écriture. Use of deep focus and long takes affords diversity and chance. With the narratives, they constitute Renoir's signature, the basis of the concept and practice of the auteur. Renoir's oeuvre stands as a monument and a model of cinematography. By summoning the conditions of illusion and artifice of film, it rises out of the massive production of poetic realism of the 1930s in France. He develops a style that is the very tenor of a vehicle studying social contradiction. The films implicitly theorize the limits that cinema confronts in any narrative or documentary depiction of our world.
—Tom Conley
Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir
French-born Jean Renoir (1894-1979) directed two of the twentieth century's most critically acclaimed films, La Grande Illusion and La Regle du jeu (Rules of the Game), and is credited with inspiring the subsequent film noir and French New Wave cinematic movements.
The son of Impressionist painter Pierre Auguste Renoir, Jean Renoir today seems predestined to become one of film's most visually compelling directors. While mastering such signature visual styles as deep focus for the respective mise-en-scenes of his body of work, Renoir's reputation is for his films that depict "life as a tissue of disappointments," in which the boundaries of human comedy and tragedy seamlessly overlap. Rather than offer subjective moral observations of his characters, however, Renoir held firmly to the dictum that "Everyone has their reasons," which freed him from exploring character motivations and the inevitable long-term results of their actions. Instead, his films force the viewer to witness the actions of his actors—most of whom display both positive and negative qualities—in relation to the situations in which he places them. He underscores this dramatic element by allowing the audience to acknowledge that they are observing the characters' actions from a camera's perspective, framing the action so that the characters may freely walk off camera. The combination of the actions of Renoir's characters freed from motivations and consequences, and his technique of filming them so that the audience is conscious of the camera's presence is acknowledged by critics as a profound method to display the complexities of humanity as being neither completely good nor completely evil, prompting Jay Carr to note: "The films of Jean Renoir never land heavy on the eye or the spirit. There are no conquering heroes in them. Identifying profoundly with uncertainty and frailty, Renoir became the poet of chaos theory. He humanized it long before existentialism and physics got their hands on it." Renoir's career as a filmmaker is commonly divided into several groups: His silent pictures which display the cinematic influences of directors Erich von Stroheim and Charlie Chaplin and featuring Renoir's first wife; his early sound pictures in which he adapted plays and novels; his films of political engagement, communism, and pacifism made just before the outbreak of World War II; his films made during his tenure in Hollywood; and his films made following his return to Europe that celebrate European history.
Born into an Artist's Family
As the son and model of an enormously successful and wealthy painter, Renoir enjoyed a childhood surrounded by art and artists. His father's success and exacting critical standards, however, intimidated Renoir, and he sought to distance himself from his father's artistic milieu. He attended several schools, including the College de Sainte-Croix, Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1902; Ecole Sainte-Marie de Monceau, 1903; and the University of Aix-en-Provence, where he earned a degree in mathematics and philosophy in 1913.
Seeking to distance himself from his father's fame at the onset of World War I, Renoir enlisted in the French cavalry in 1914. He nearly lost a leg in battle, however, and transferred to the French Flying Corps in 1916. His pilot duties included aerial photographing of German troop movements. After aggravating his leg injury during a particularly bad landing of his aircraft, Renoir was sent back to Paris to work behind the lines as a full lieutenant until 1918. While he recuperated, he entertained himself by attending the Parisian movie houses. After the war, he expressed his intent to become a ceramic artist.
An Undistinguished Silent Film Director
Following the war, Renoir married Andree (Dedee) Madeleine Heuchling, who adopted the stage and screen name Catherine Hessling when her husband began making films. Renoir explained his decision to become a filmmaker: "I set foot in the world of the cinema only in order to make my wife a star, intending, once this was done to return to my pottery studio. I did not foresee that once I had been caught in the machinery I should never be able to escape. If anyone had told me that I was to devote all my money and all my energies to the making of films I should have been amazed."
Renoir financed his first films by selling paintings by his father. For these films, he served as producer, screenwriter, financier, and actor. In 1924, Renoir directed La Fille de l'eau, a melodrama starring Hessling. Unable to obtain distribution for the film and nearly bankrupt as a result, Renoir resigned himself to running a ceramic gallery and studio. His retirement from film was premature, however, as evidenced by the inclusion of a surreal dream sequence from La Fille de l'eau in a revue of film excerpts compiled by Jean Tedesco. The overwhelmingly positive audience reaction convinced Renoir to continue his vocation, and he soon adapted Emile Zola's novel Nana and Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Match Girl. He also accepted assignments to direct Marquitta for the Artistes Reunis production company; the slapstick war comedy Tire au flanc; and two films for Henry Dupuy-Mazuel, Le Tournoi and La Bled. The latter film was shot on location in Algeria.
Primarily influenced by the films of D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and Erich von Stroheim, Renoir's first films were "more interesting for their technical innovations and visual inventiveness," according to Martin O'Shaughnessy. In several of these films, he pioneered the use of the camera as a narrative device with a limited frame of reference and objective point of view. By allowing characters to move freely outside of the camera frame, Renoir displayed the limitations of the cinematic narrative, making the audience aware that it is incumbent upon them to engage their intellect while viewing the film. The films are noted also for their use of outdoor-location photography, an element that became an essential component of many of Renoir's subsequent sound films.
First Sound Pictures
Renoir's first sound films are noted for his development of mobile panning and tracking shots in which the camera follows the movements of the characters. In these films, he adapted his screenplays from such sources as popular theater and fiction. In order to secure financing, however, he needed to convince possible monetary backers that he could make films economically by writing and directing On purge bebe, an adaptation of an Ernest Feydeau play concerning a constipated baby and the adults who accidentally ingest the baby's laxative. The film's success afforded Renoir the opportunity to direct La Chienne, a comedy about an adulterous relationship between a married banker and a prostitute that leads to murder. Based on a novel by Georges de la Fouchardiere, the film generally is considered Renoir's first important work.
His next film, Boudo Saved from Drowning, based on a play by Rene Fauchois, is a lampoon of bourgeoisie life, concerning a bum who alters the life of a middle-class family and narrowly escapes marriage. This successful comedy was followed by adaptations of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Georges Simenon's La Nuit du carrefour, the first film appearance of Simenon's most famous character, Inspector Magritte.
Politically Engaged Films
The political climate in Europe during the 1930s inevitably impacted the remainder of Renoir's films of the decade. The Spanish Civil War, the rise of Fascism in Italy, the increasingly vocal Socialist and Communist parties in France, and a firsthand experience of Nazism in Germany— where he witnessed Nazi soldiers force a Jewish woman to lick the ground—caused Renoir to confront contemporary issues in Toni, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, and La Vie est a nous. The latter film was a Socialist collaborative effort between directors Jean-Paul Le Chanois and Jacques Becker that combines drama and documentary. He also attempted to create cinematic representations of his father's paintings in A Day in the Country, which was not edited and released until after World War II because he had to leave the film in order to fulfill a contractual obligation to direct Les Bas-Fonds. Renoir claimed that he never completed A Day in the Country, but critics consider it to subtly convey Renoir's pantheistic tendencies, genius as a visual artist, and political sensibilities.
Critics generally acknowledge Renoir's next film, La Grande Illusion, as a masterpiece of war cinema. Starring Erich von Stroheim as the commandant of a prison-camp, the film presents a powerful pacifist argument. Rules of the Game, however, is considered Renoir's cinematic triumph, a film that displays how the venality of human nature can create situations where violence and war can erupt. Each of the characters is presented in a sympathetic way, prompting Jay Carr to note: "Subtle, prismatic, acute, infinitely embracing, Rules of the Game is one of the century's undisputed masterworks. Renoir thought he was reworking Beaumarchais and de Musset, but Rules of the Game— right down to its figure of the little poacher bringing mischievous nature indoors—seems kin to Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. It is a sublime comedy of the mutability of human feelings that manages, without ever becoming sentimental, to turn into a celebration of humankind."
Hollywood and Later Films
Renoir left France for America in 1940. He arrived in Hollywood, where he made several films that he—and many critics—consider among his weakest due to the restrictive effects of the Hollywood studio system on a director accustomed to working independently. Among the films he made in America are Swamp Water, This Land Is Mine, The Southerner, The Diary of a Chambermaid, and The Woman on the Beach. Of these films, The Southerner, on which he worked with uncredited writer William Faulkner, is considered his best Hollywood film. James Agee, in a June 9, 1945, review, wrote: "When a good man gets a real chance in Hollywood it is not only news; the least one can do is salute those who, aware of the gamble, gave him the money and the chance and protected him in it. So, with pleasure, I salute David Loew and Robert Hakim, thanks to whom Jean Renoir has made The Southerner, his own adaptation of George Sessions Perry's Hold Autumn in Your Hand. … Though its people are exceedingly poor, this is not a political or social 'exposure' of the tenant system, nor does it pay any attention to class or racial friction. It tries simply to be a poetic, realistic chronicle of a farm year's hope, work, need, anxiety, pride, love, disaster, and reward—a chronicle chiefly of soil, seasons, and weather, the only other dramatic conflict being furnished by a pathologically unkind neighbor."
Renoir's next film was an adaptation of Rummer Godden's novel, The River, which he filmed on location in India. The film was beset by illness, bad weather, and cost overruns. While agreeing that his use of color photography is visually compelling, most critics negatively dismissed the film. For the remainder of his career, Renoir made films in France that drew attention largely due to his growing reputation as the director of La Grande Illusion and Rules of the Game. These films never came close to matching the artistic successes of his previous work, but served as tutorials for the French New Wave cinema movement of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as laying the groundwork for the moral ambiguity displayed in American film noir films of the 1940s and 1950s. Although he never worked with a Hollywood studio, Renoir became an American citizen and lived in California for the remainder of his life.
Books
Agee, James, Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Movies, Modern Library: The Movies, Random House, Inc., 2000.
Bergan, Ronald, Jean Renoir: Projections of Paradise, The Overlook Press, 1992.
Huffhines, Kathy Schulz, editor, Foreign Affairs: The National Society of Film Critics' Video Guide to Foreign Films, Mercury House Incorporated, 1991.
O'Shaughnessy, Martin, Jean Renoir, Manchester University Press, 2000.
Sarris, Andrew, editor, The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, Visible Ink Press, 1998.
Video Hound's Golden Movie Retriever, Visible Ink Press, 1994.
Online
"Jean Renoir," Contemporary Authors Online, The Gale Group, 2000.
"Jean Renoir" Film Reference,http:www.filmref.com/directors/dirpages/renoir.html.
"Jean Renoir, Director" French Culture,http://www.frenchculture.org/cinema/festival/renoir. □