Jean Renoir was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s. His films La Grande Illusion and The Rules of the Game are often cited by critics as among the greatest films ever made
Jean Renoir (French: [ʁənwaʁ]; 15 September 1894 – 12 February 1979) was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s. His films La Grande Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939) are often cited by critics as among the greatest films ever made. He was ranked by the BFIs Sight & Sound poll of critics in 2002 as the fourth greatest director of all time. Among numerous honours accrued during his lifetime, he received a Lifetime Achievement Academy Award in 1975 for his contribution to the motion picture industry. Renoir was the son of the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. He was one of the first filmmakers to be known as an auteur.[1][2][3]
Contents
1Early life and early career
2International success in the 1930s
3Hollywood years
4Post-Hollywood career
5Last years
6Legacy
7Awards
8Filmography
9Selected writings
10References
11External links
Early life and early career
The young Renoir with Gabrielle Renard in a painting by his father Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1895-96)
Renoir was born in the Montmartre district of Paris, France. He was the second son of Aline (née Charigot) Renoir and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the renowned painter. His elder brother was Pierre Renoir, a French stage and film actor, and his younger brother Claude Renoir (1901–1969) had a brief career in the film industry, mostly assisting on a few of Jeans films.[citation needed] Jean Renoir was also the uncle of Claude Renoir (1913–1993), the son of Pierre, a cinematographer who worked with Jean Renoir on several of his films.
Renoir was largely raised by Gabrielle Renard, his nanny and his mothers cousin, with whom he developed a strong bond. Shortly before his birth, she had come to live with the Renoir family.[4] She introduced the young boy to the Guignol puppet shows in Montmartre, which influenced his later film career. He wrote in his 1974 memoirs My Life and My Films, "She taught me to see the face behind the mask and the fraud behind the flourishes. She taught me to detest the cliché."[5] Gabrielle was also fascinated by the new early motion pictures, and when Renoir was only a few years old she took him to see his first film.
As a child, Renoir moved to the south of France with his family. He and the rest of the Renoir family were the subjects of many of his fathers paintings. His fathers financial success ensured that the young Renoir was educated at fashionable boarding schools, from which, as he later wrote, he frequently ran away.[6]
At the outbreak of World War I, Renoir was serving in the French cavalry. Later, after receiving a bullet in his leg, he served as a reconnaissance pilot.[7] His leg injury left him with a permanent limp, but allowed him to discover the cinema, since he recuperated by watching films with his leg elevated, including the works of Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith and others.[8][9] After the war, Renoir followed his fathers suggestion and tried his hand at making ceramics, but he soon set that aside to create films. He was particularly inspired by Erich von Stroheims work.[10][11]
In 1924, Renoir directed Une Vie Sans Joie or Catherine, the first of his nine silent films, most of which starred his first wife, Catherine Hessling. She was also his fathers last model.[12] At this stage, his films did not produce a return. Renoir gradually sold paintings inherited from his father to finance them.[13]
International success in the 1930s
During the 1930s Renoir enjoyed great success as a filmmaker. In 1931 he directed his first sound films, On purge bébé (Babys Laxative) and La Chienne (The Bitch).[14] The following year he made Boudu Saved from Drowning (Boudu sauvé des eaux), a farcical sendup of the pretensions of a middle-class bookseller and his family, who meet with comic, and ultimately disastrous, results when they attempt to reform a vagrant played by Michel Simon.[15]
By the middle of the decade, Renoir was associated with the Popular Front. Several of his films, such as The Crime of Monsieur Lange (Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, 1935), Life Belongs to Us (1936) and La Marseillaise (1938), reflect the movements politics.[16][17]
In 1937, he made La Grande Illusion, one of his better-known films, starring Erich von Stroheim and Jean Gabin. A film on the theme of brotherhood, relating a series of escape attempts by French POWs during World War I, it was enormously successful. It was banned in Germany, and later in Italy, after having won the Best Artistic Ensemble award at the Venice Film Festival.[18] It was the first foreign language film to receive a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
He followed it with The Human Beast (La Bête Humaine) (1938), a film noir and tragedy based on the novel by Émile Zola and starring Simone Simon and Jean Gabin. This film also was a cinematic success.[19]
In 1939, able to co-finance his own films,[20] Renoir made The Rules of the Game (La Règle du Jeu), a satire on contemporary French society with an ensemble cast.[21] Renoir played the character Octave, who serves to connect characters from different social strata.[22] The film was his greatest commercial failure,[23] met with derision by Parisian audiences at its premiere. He extensively reedited the work, but without success at the time.[24]
A few weeks after the outbreak of World War II, the film was banned by the government. Renoir was a known pacifist and supporter of the French Communist Party, which made him suspect in the tense weeks before the war began.[25] The ban was lifted briefly in 1940, but after the fall of France that June, it was banned again.[26] Subsequently, the original negative of the film was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid.[26] It was not until the 1950s that French film enthusiasts Jean Gaborit and Jacques Durand, with Renoirs cooperation, reconstructed a near-complete print of the film.[27][28] Since that time, The Rules of the Game has been reappraised and has frequently appeared near the top of critics polls of the best films ever made.[29][30]
A week after the disastrous premiere of The Rules of the Game in July 1939, Renoir went to Rome with Karl Koch and Dido Freire, subsequently his second wife, to work on the script for a film version of Tosca.[31][32] At the age of 45, he became a lieutenant in the French Army Film Service. He was sent back to Italy, to teach film at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, and resume work on Tosca.[31][33][34] The French government hoped this cultural exchange would help maintain friendly relations with Italy, which had not yet entered the war.[31][33][35] He abandoned the project to return to France and make himself available for military service in August 1939.[36][37][38]
Hollywood years
After Germany invaded France in May 1940, Renoir fled to the United States with Dido Freire.[39][40] In Hollywood, Renoir had difficulty finding projects that suited him.[41] His first American film, Swamp Water (1941), was a drama starring Dana Andrews and Walter Brennan. He co-produced and directed an anti-Nazi film set in France, This Land Is Mine (1943), starring Maureen OHara and Charles Laughton.[42][43] The Southerner (1945) is a film about Texas sharecroppers that is often regarded as his best American film. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Directing for this work.[44][45][46]
Diary of a Chambermaid (1946) is an adaptation of the Octave Mirbeau novel, Le Journal dune femme de chambre, starring Paulette Goddard and Burgess Meredith.[47][48] His The Woman on the Beach (1947), starring Joan Bennett and Robert Ryan, was heavily reshot and reedited after it fared poorly among preview audiences in California.[49] Both films were poorly received; they were the last films Renoir made in America.[50][51][52] At this time, Renoir became a naturalized citizen of the United States.[53]
Post-Hollywood career
In 1949 Renoir traveled to India to shoot The River (1951), his first color film.[54] Based on the novel of the same name by Rumer Godden, the film is both a meditation on human beings relationship with nature and a coming of age story of three young girls in colonial India.[55] The film won the International Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1951.[56]
After returning to work in Europe, Renoir made a trilogy of color musical comedies on the subjects of theater, politics and commerce: Le Carrosse dor (The Golden Coach, 1953) with Anna Magnani; French Cancan (1954) with Jean Gabin and María Félix; and Eléna et les hommes (Elena and Her Men, 1956) with Ingrid Bergman and Jean Marais.[57] During the same period Renoir produced Clifford Odets play The Big Knife in Paris. He also wrote his own play, Orvet, and produced it in Paris featuring Leslie Caron.[58][59]
Renoir made his next films with techniques adapted from live television.[60] Le Déjeuner sur lherbe (Picnic on the Grass, 1959), starring Paul Meurisse and Catherine Rouvel, was filmed on the grounds of Pierre-Auguste Renoirs home in Cagnes-sur-Mer, and Le Testament du docteur Cordelier (The Testament of Doctor Cordelier, also 1959), starring Jean-Louis Barrault, was made in the streets of Paris and its suburbs.[61][62]
Renoirs penultimate film, Le Caporal épinglé (The Elusive Corporal, 1962), with Jean-Pierre Cassel and Claude Brasseur,[63] is set among French POWs during their internment in labor camps by the Nazis during World War II. The film explores the twin human needs for freedom, on the one hand, and emotional and economic security, on the other.[64][65]
Renoirs loving memoir of his father, Renoir, My Father (1962) describes the profound influence his father had on him and his work.[66] As funds for his film projects were becoming harder to obtain, Renoir continued to write screenplays for income. He published a novel, The Notebooks of Captain Georges, in 1966.[67][68] Captain Georges is the nostalgic account of a wealthy young mans sentimental education and love for a peasant girl, a theme also explored earlier in his films Diary of a Chambermaid and Picnic on the Grass.[69]
Last years
Renoirs last film is Le Petit théâtre de Jean Renoir (The Little Theatre of Jean Renoir, 1969).[70] The film is a series of three short films made in a variety of styles. It is, in many ways, one of his most challenging, avant-garde and unconventional works.[71][72]
Unable to obtain financing for his films and suffering declining health, Renoir spent his last years receiving friends at his home in Beverly Hills, and writing novels and his memoirs.[73]
In 1973 Renoir was preparing a production of his stage play, Carola, with Leslie Caron and Mel Ferrer when he fell ill and was unable to direct. The producer Norman Lloyd, a friend and actor in The Southerner, took over the direction of the play. It was broadcast in the series program Hollywood Television Theater on WNET, Channel 13, New York on February 3, 1973.[74]
Renoirs memoir, My Life and My Films, was published in 1974. He wrote of the influence exercised by Gabrielle Renard, his nanny and his mothers cousin, with whom he developed a mutual lifelong bond. He concluded his memoirs with the words he had often spoken as a child, "Wait for me, Gabrielle."[75]
In 1975 Renoir received a lifetime Academy Award for his contribution to the motion picture industry. That same year a retrospective of his work was shown at the National Film Theatre in London.[76] Also in 1975, the government of France elevated him to the rank of commander in the Légion dhonneur.[77]
Jean Renoir died in Beverly Hills, California on February 12, 1979 of a heart attack.[78] His body was returned to France and buried beside his family in the cemetery at Essoyes, Aube, France.[79]
Legacy
On his death, fellow director and friend Orson Welles wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times, titled "Jean Renoir: The Greatest of All Directors".[80] Renoirs films have also influenced many other directors, including Satyajit Ray,[81] Éric Rohmer,[82] Luchino Visconti,[83] Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet,[84] Peter Bogdanovich,[85] François Truffaut,[86] Robert Altman,[87] Errol Morris[88] Martin Scorsese[89] and Mike Leigh.[90]
Jean Renoir has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6212 Hollywood Blvd.[91] Several of his ceramics were collected by Albert Barnes, who was a major patron and collector of Renoirs father. These can be found on display beneath Pierre-Auguste Renoirs paintings at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.[92]
Renoirs son Alain Renoir (1921-2008) became a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley and a scholar of medieval English literature.[93]
Awards
Chevalier de Légion dhonneur, 1936[94]
Selznick Golden Laurel Award for lifetime work, Brazilian Film Festival, Rio de Janeiro, 1958[95]
Prix Charles Blanc, Académie française, for Renoir, My Father, biography of father, 1963[96]
Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts, University of California, Berkeley, 1963[97]
Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1964[97]
Osella dOro as a master of the cinema, Venice Festival, 1968[98]
Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts, Royal College of Art, London, 1971[74]
Honorary Academy Award for Career Accomplishment, 1974[99]
Special Award, National Society of Film Critics, 1975[100]
Commandeur de la Légion dhonneur, 1975[77]
Prix Goncourt de la Biographie, 2013
Filmography
1924: Backbiters [fr] (Catherine ou Une vie sans Joie, also acted)
1925: The Whirlpool of Fate (La Fille de leau)
1926: Nana
1927: Charleston Parade (Sur un air de charleston)
1927: Une vie sans joie (second version of Backbiters)
1927: Marquitta
1928: The Sad Sack (Tire-au-flanc)
1928: The Tournament (Le Tournoi dans la cité)
1928: The Little Match Girl (La Petite Marchande dallumettes)
1929: Le Bled
1931: On purge bébé (Babys Laxative)
1931: The Bitch (La Chienne)
1932: Night at the Crossroads (La Nuit du carrefour)
1932: Boudu Saved from Drowning (Boudu sauvé des eaux)
1932: Chotard and Company (Chotard et Cie)
1934: Madame Bovary
1935: Toni
1936: A Day in the Country (Partie de campagne, also acted, not released until 1946)
1936: Life Belongs to Us (La vie est à nous, also acted)
1936: The Lower Depths (Les Bas-fonds)
1936: The Crime of Monsieur Lange (Le Crime de Monsieur Lange)
1937: Grand Illusion (La Grande illusion)
1938: La Marseillaise
1938: The Human Beast (La Bête humaine, also acted)
1939: The Rules of the Game (La Règle du jeu, also acted)
1941: Swamp Water (LÉtang tragique)
1943: This Land Is Mine (Vivre libre)
1944: Salute to France (Salut à la France)
1945: The Southerner (LHomme du sud)
1946: The Diary of a Chambermaid (Le Journal dune femme de chambre)
1947: The Woman on the Beach (La Femme sur la plage)
1950: The Ways of Love (anthology segment: "A Day in the Country")
1951: The River (Le Fleuve)
1952: The Golden Coach (Le Carrosse dor)
1955: French Cancan
1956: Elena and Her Men (Elena et les hommes)
1959: The Testament of Doctor Cordelier (Le Testament du docteur Cordelier)
1959: Picnic on the Grass (Le Déjeuner sur lherbe)
1962: The Elusive Corporal (Le Caporal épinglé)
1969: The Little Theatre of Jean Renoir (Le Petit Théâtre de Jean Renoir)
Selected writings
1955: Orvet, Paris: Gallimard, play.
1962: Renoir, Paris: Hachette (Renoir, My Father), biography.
1966: Les Cahiers du Capitaine Georges, Paris: Gallimard (The Notebooks of Captain Georges), novel.
1974: Ma Vie et mes Films, Paris: Flammarion (My Life and My Films), autobiography.
1974: Écrits 1926-1971 (Claude Gauteur, ed.), Paris: Pierre Belfond, writings.
1976: Carola, in "LAvant-Scène du Théâtre" no. 597, November 1, 1976, screenplay.
1978: Le Coeur à laise, Paris: Flammarion, novel.
1978 Julienne et son amour; suivi dEn avant Rosalie!, Paris: Henri Veyrier, screenplays.
1979: Jean Renoir: Entretiens et propos (Jean Narboni, ed.), Paris: Éditions de létoile/Cahiers du Cinéma, interviews and remarks.
1979: Le crime de lAnglais, Paris: Flammarion, novel.
1980: Geneviève, Paris: Flammarion, novel.
1981: Œuvres de cinéma inédités (Claude Gauteur, ed.), Paris: Gallimard, synopses and treatments.
1984: Lettres dAmérique (Dido Renoir & Alexander Sesonske, eds.), Paris: Presses de la Renaissance ISBN 2-85616-287-8, correspondence.
1989: Renoir on Renoir: Interviews, Essays, and Remarks (Carol Volk, tr.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1994: Jean Renoir: Letters (David Thompson and Lorraine LoBianco, eds.), London: Faber & Faber, correspondence.
Long before any director with the right agent could get his name in a special box on the billboard, Jean Renoir was considered to be one of a handful of filmmakers whose artistic stamp could be found everywhere in their work. Renoir himself called such directors auteurs , directors who wrote their own scripts. But the term was later expanded to identify those directors whose personal vision could overcome the fragmentations of a collaborative art.
Whatever the status of the auteur theory as a way of determining cinematic value, the passionate commitment to the work of individual directors argued in the 1950s by Andre Bazin and such critics-into-filmmakers as Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard helped create an argument for the importance of film as a major art form based on the existence of major artists.
In that argument Renoir's films were central. A new postwar film audience was awakening to the work of Truffaut, Goddard, Antonioni, Rossellini, Fellini and Bergman, and it was Renoir's “La Grande Illusion” (1937) and “La Regle de Jeu” (“The Rules of the Game,” 1939) that first stirred a good part of that audience to believe that there was a particularly cinematic complexity of ideas, performances and imagery worth comparing to the established arts.
Time was that anyone living in a big city or college town could get an education in film history by just going to the local film society or repertory theater. Now, only in retrospectives like one that begins at UCLA today do we get a chance to ask those old questions about the shape of a director's career and the value of individual works: What lasts? What do we still watch with pleasure, interest and even illumination?
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Renoir was born in 1894, the second son of Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. His older brother Pierre became an actor and appears in Jean's “La Nuit du Carrefour” (1932) as Simenon's Inspector Maigret, in “Madame Bovary” (1934) as Charles Bovary and in “La Marseillaise” (1938) as Louis XVI. Pierre's son Claude worked as a cinematographer on several of Jean's films from the mid-1930s onward.
UCLA's centenaire focuses on Renoir's career to 1939, when the filmmaker immigrated to the United States, settling in Beverly Hills and making five more films during World War II. A film enthusiast whose childhood interest had been reawakened by an enforced period of recuperation from a war wound, Renoir in the early 1920s produced and wrote the script for “Catherine” (1924), starring his wife, Catherine Hessling, who had been one of his father's models. It was directed by Albert Dieudonne, later the star of Abel Gance's epic “Napoleon” (1927).
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But Renoir was disappointed with what Dieudonne had done. He gave up a career as a ceramicist and sold several of his father's paintings to finance his first feature, “La Fille de l'Eau” (1924), the story of a young girl (again played by Hessling) who lives on a barge with her brutal uncle. (The only painting he kept was a large one depicting himself dressed as a hunter. It now hangs in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.)
Between “La Fille de l'Eau” and “Rules of the Game,” Renoir made 18 features and several shorter films, including the “long shorts” “La Petite Marchande aux Allumettes” (“The Little Match Girl,” 1928), “On Purge Bebe” (1931) and “Partie de Campagne” (“A Day in the Country,” 1936, completed in 1946). With the exception of “Rules of the Game” and “Grande Illusion,” the films of this period are rarely shown, and the UCLA programmers have included virtually everything Renoir made, with the exception of the lost feature “Marguita” and the lost short “Le Petit Chaperon Rouge” (“Little Red Riding Hood”).
“On Purge Bebe” and “Chotard et Cie” (1933) are being shown for the first time in the United States, and many of the other films are being shown in Renoir's own copies, willed to UCLA. These include “Le Tournoi” (1929), a story of romance and politics set in the 16th-Century France of Catherine de Medicis, which was previously thought to exist only in a 10-minute fragment.
The tremendous variety of Renoir's work in the 1920s and 1930s seems amazing today when a director is considered remarkably talented if he or she can work in two genres, and a genius if in three. Throughout his career Renoir was constantly experimenting with genres and styles, often within the same film. Equally fascinated by stylized sets and location shooting, he freely mingled artifice and realism in both his plots and his images.
The general impression of the benevolence of Renoir's films may be due to associating them with the dappled, rosy nudes of his father's paintings. But there is little here of Pierre-Auguste Renoir's frequent blandness and prettification. These films of the 1920s and 1930s, in both subject matter and pictorial style, more resemble the harsh urban interiors of Toulouse-Lautrec or the shimmering uncertainties of Monet's gardens.
“La Fille de l'Eau” marks the beginning of a silent-film career that included adaptations of Zola's “Nana” (also starring Hessling), “Le Tournoi” and “Le Bled,” an innocently imperialist paean to the settlement of Algeria. By the end of the ‘20s, however, these films in the lavish silent style (perhaps in emulation of his early idol Erich von Stroheim) had given Renoir a reputation for being an expensive filmmaker.
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In 1931 with “On Purge Bebe,” an adaptation of a Feydeau farce, Renoir became one of the few French directors to make the silent-to-sound transition by proving he could make a film cheaply and quickly (five weeks from scriptwriting to breaking even), while outrageously exploiting the new technology (the first toilet flushing on a soundtrack).
Despite his commitment to the auteur director, Renoir was equally fascinated with the energy and movement of performers, and his camera itself increasingly plays the role of an observer within the scene rather than a God-like eye above it, even in epic works like “Le Tournoi.”
He also acts, notably in “Rules of the Game,” and his films are filled with memorable faces and presences: Hessling in his early films; Valentine Tessler in “Madame Bovary”; Charles Blavette in “Toni” (1935); Jean Gabin in “Grande Illusion,” “The Lower Depths” and “La Bete Humaine” (1938); Marcel Dalio in “Grande Illusion” and “Rules of the Game” and, perhaps most strikingly, Michel Simon in “Boudu Saved From Drowning” (1932), which Renoir called “a kind of free exercise around an actor,” and on which Paul Mazursky based “Down and Out in Beverly Hills.”
Many of these films deal with people trapped by their own passions. “La Chienne” (1931), starring Simon as a meek clerk who kills his mistress, is a forerunner of the stories of betrayal that would preoccupy film noir 15 years later. “La Nuit du Carrefour” (1932) exploits even more the shadows, mists and water-slick streets of a detective thriller. “Toni's” story of murder and desire, set among Italian laborers in the south of France, presages Italian neorealism and further underlines this strongly fatalistic streak, as does Renoir's adaptation of Zola's “La Bete Humaine.”
Both “La Bete” and “La Chienne” were later remade by Fritz Lang as “Human Desire” (1954) and “Scarlet Street” (1945). Similarly, Renoir's version of Gorki's “The Lower Depths” (1936) might be compared to Akira Kurosawa's (1957)--rare opportunities to see how two great directors treat the same material.
But even in the films shadowed by an encroaching sense of doom, there is a vein of optimism about what the world would be like if other choices were possible. One of the most intriguing of Renoir's films of the 1930s, “The Crime of M. Lange” (1935), bears his name not only as director but also as a member of a radical culture collective, the Groups Octobre. The compatriots behind the camera are mirrored in the story of a publishing house for which Lange writes tales about a hero named Arizona Jim and an American West he has never seen. When the conniving publisher seems to have died in a train wreck, the workers take over and become tremendously successful.
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With the kind of creative prescience that Renoir shows in many other films of the period, Lange is an early version of the kind of the sometimes sardonic, sometimes affectionate view of popular culture that would inspire the directors of the New Wave. As in “La Vie est a Nous” (1936), a “March of Time"-like fiction documentary made as an anti-fascist recruiting film for the French Communist Party, Lange asserted the possibility of a collective moral response that still respected individual eccentricity and difference.
Similarly, in “La Marseillaise” (1938), Renoir views the French Revolution through its most famous song, as it evolves from a popular folk tune to become the national anthem. With comparable revolutionary optimism about film economics, the film was financed by two-franc contributions by members of the CGT, the French trade union.
UCLA's showings conclude with “Rules of the Game,” which opened in 1939 to ferocious attacks by French fascist groups. Re-editing was fruitless, and the film was later banned by the Vichy regime.
Renoir's flight from Europe to America occurred not long after the release of “Rules of the Game,” and his later films have their own appeal. But the work of few directors of any period have the continuity and variety as Renoir's from 1924 to 1939, and fewer still would reward anything like a complete submersion in the sun and shadow, the complex warmth of the world he makes entirely his own.
Jean Renoir, (born September 15, 1894, Paris, France—died February 12, 1979, Los Angeles, California, U.S.), French film director and son of the Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. His films, in both silent and later eras, were noted for their realism and strong narrative and include such classics as Grand Illusion (1937), The Rules of the Game (1939), and The River (1951).
Early Years
Renoir was born in the Montmartre section of Paris. In an environment in which art predominated, among painters and their models, he spent a happy childhood, which was richer in the carefree appreciation of beauty than in formal studies. Nevertheless, he received a degree in 1913 from the University of Aix-en-Provence, where he wrote poetry, and joined the cavalry to begin a military career.
World War I broke out in 1914, and Renoir was wounded in the leg. During his convalescence, he spent his time in Paris movie houses, where he discovered the serials and Charlie Chaplin. After he recovered, he rejoined the service in the air force and finished the war with the rank of lieutenant.
Undecided on a career, he studied ceramics with his brother at Cagnes-sur-mer, near Nice, where his family had settled. Early in 1920 he married one of his father's models, Andrée Heurschling, a few months after the painter's death, and went with her to live in Marlotte, a village near Paris in which his father had once painted.
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Intending to set up a ceramics factory, Jean Renoir was joined by his friend Paul Cézanne, the son of the painter. Having come into contact with theatrical circles through his sister-in-law, the actress Vera Sergine, Renoir was attracted by the evolving art of the film and decided to write a screenplay. It was made into the film Catherine, or Une Vie sans joie (Catherine: A Joyless Life), in 1923, with his wife appearing under the name of Catherine Hessling. The first film Renoir directed was La Fille de l'eau (released 1924; Whirlpool of Fate), which again starred his wife. All of his early films were produced in a makeshift way, with technical clumsiness, a lack of means, and a certain amateurishness. Nevertheless, the instinctive genius of the filmmaker found expression in them. These early films, which reveal a strong pictorial influence, have taken on with time a particular charm. In the late 1920s he found his inspiration in the writings of Émile Zola, Hans Christian Andersen, and others but made them into personal films in the style of the French avant-garde of the period.
These films had no commercial success, and Renoir and his backers were almost ruined. The advent of sound in motion pictures brought new difficulties, but Renoir passed the test with On purge bébé (1931; Baby's Laxative) and proved himself with La Chienne (1931; “The Bitch”), a fierce and bitter film adapted from a comic novel by Georges de la Fouchardière.
During the 1930s Jean Renoir produced many of his most notable works, but their freedom of composition was confusing to critics of the period, and the films achieved only middling success. These films include La Nuit du carrefour (1932; Night at the Crossroads), based on a novel by Georges Simenon; Boudu sauvé des eaux (1932; Boudu Saved from Drowning), an anarchistic and unconstrained comedy; Madame Bovary (1934), based on Gustave Flaubert's classic novel; and Le Crime de M. Lange (1936; The Crime of Monsieur Lange), which, in contrast to the rather stilted manner of the first years of sound films, foretells a reconquest of the true moving-picture style, especially in use of improvisation and of montage—the art of editing, or cutting, to achieve certain associations of ideas.
In 1936, in sympathy with the social movements of the French Popular Front, Renoir codirected the communist propaganda film La Vie est à nous (The People of France). The same year, he recaptured the flavour of his early works with a short film, Une Partie de campagne (released 1946; A Day in the Country), which he finished with great difficulty. A masterpiece of impressionist cinema, this film presents all the poetry and all the charm of the pictorial sense that is, far more than his technique, the basis of his art as a filmmaker. The late 1930s saw such major works as La Grande Illusion (1937; Grand Illusion), a moving story of World War I prisoners of war; La Bête humaine (1938; The Human Beast, or Judas Was a Woman), an admirable free interpretation of Zola; and especially La Règle du jeu (1939; The Rules of the Game), his masterpiece. Cut and fragmented by the distributors, this classic film was also regarded as a failure until it was shown in 1965 in its original form, which revealed its astonishing beauty.
La Grande Illusion
La Grande Illusion
Erich von Stroheim (left) and Pierre Fresnay in La Grande Illusion (1937), directed by Jean Renoir.
© Réalisation dart cinématographique; photograph from a private collection
Pierre Fresnay and Erich von Stroheim in La Grande Illusion
Pierre Fresnay and Erich von Stroheim in La Grande Illusion
Pierre Fresnay (left) and Erich von Stroheim in La Grande Illusion (1937), directed by Jean Renoir.
© 1937 Réalisation dart cinématographique (RAC)
Later Years
During World War II, when the Nazis invaded France in 1940, Renoir, like many of his friends, went to Hollywood and continued his career there. His American period includes films of varying merit, which mark a departure from his previous style: Swamp Water (1941), The Southerner (1945), Diary of a Chambermaid (1946), and The Woman on the Beach (1947). In 1944, after being divorced from Catherine Hessling, he married Dido Freire, a family friend of Brazilian populaire filmmaker Alberto Cavalcanti. He made The River (1951), his first colour film, in India.
Now in full command of a mature style that reflected the qualities of the man himself—sensitivity, fervour, and humanity—he returned to Europe by way of Italy, where he made Le Carrosse d'or (released 1952; The Golden Coach). A sumptuous work, combining the talents of both a painter and a dramatist, this film shows Renoir's love of actors and their profession. He occasionally played roles in his own or other directors' films, and he allowed his actors a great deal of initiative. Subsequently, he made French Cancan (1955), a fabulous evocation of the Montmartre of the 19th century, and Eléna et les hommes (1956; Paris Does Strange Things), a period fantasy swept along in a prodigious movement. His last works, from the 1960s, do not achieve the same beauty, nor does the work he produced for television.
A powerful personality, having been deeply impressed by the artistic environment of his youth, Renoir was also extremely open to later influences both in his art and in his ideas. A naturalized American citizen and settled in Los Angeles, he nevertheless kept his French nationality and maintained connections in Paris. In addition to his films, Renoir also wrote a play, Orvet (first performed 1955), which was presented in Paris; a novel, Les Cahiers du capitaine Georges (1966; The Notebooks of Captain Georges); an invaluable book of memories about his father, Renoir, My Father (1962); and a memoir of his own life, My Life and My Films (1974).
JEAN RENOIR
In 1936, it is often forgotten, Jean Renoir made a propaganda film, La Vie est a nous, for the French Communist Party, starring Maurice Thorez, Jacques Duclos etc; in 1937, he made La Marseillaise for the Trade Union movement (cgt). Then the war and exile in Hollywood. The heady days of the Popular Front never returned. In 1950, he made The River in India (his last American film), explaining that, whereas before the war he had tried to raise ‘a protesting voice', he now thought that both the times and he himself had changed: his new mood was one of ‘love', of the ‘indulgent smile'. Following films seemed to confirm the trend: French-Cancan, Elena et les hommes. Betrayal? Or maturity? The critics split. One camp praised the pre-war Renoir, the Renoir ‘of the left'; the other praised post-war Renoir, the Renoir of ‘pure cinema'. One school, leaning on the authority of Andre Bazin, remembered ‘French' Renoir; another, headed by the emerging critics of Cahiers du Cinema, heralded ‘American' Renoir. As Renoir grew older, the Cahiers critics argued, he grew more personal, hence more of an author, a greater director. Debate turned acrimonious. Renoir, one anti-Cahiers critic wrote, ‘deified by imbeciles, has lost all sense of values'. And so on.
The truth is that Renoir's work is a coherent whole. The mainspring of his thought has always been the question of the natural man: nature and artifice, Pan and Faust, natural harmony. His differing attitudes to society have been the result of the ‘natural' naiveté he has cherished. The Popular Front appealed to him, he has confessed, partly because it seemed to presage an era of harmony between classes, a national idyll; after the war the forces which had made up the Front showed discord rather than concord and Renoir retreated from political life, away from camps and blocs into the countryside, his father's estate, nostalgia and a kind of pantheism. Vet Renoir the pantheist is none other than Renoir the communist, Renoir the ‘red' propagandist. His first allegiance has always been to the ordinary man, asking nothing more than to eat, drink, sleep, make love and live in harmony with all the other millions of ordinary men throughout the world. He dislikes regimentation, systematization—anything which threatens the natural, human qualities to which he is attached. He detests the conditions imposed on man by capital—at its furthest limit his detestation has led him to anarchism and pacifism—but he cannot accept the conflict or the discipline necessary for the overthrow of the capitalist system. His great philosophical ancestor is Rousseau; at one time his preoccupation has been the General will, at another the Noble Savage.
Renoir recognizes the existence of social classes and nationalities—he is fascinated by them, as phenomena—but he insists that these differences need not divide men in their human essence. Thus masters and servants—their lives and escapades—have always humanly interacted and interlocked in Renoir's world, though the two orders remain distinct. (Renoir has always preferred to depict master-servant relations than employer-worker: he is repelled by the anonymity of the factory.) Witness, for instance the conversation about harems between the marquis and the servant in La Regle du Jeu. The divisions which count are ‘spiritual', not social, divisions. ‘My world is divided into miser and spendthrift, careless and cautious, master and slave, sly and sincere creator and copyist.' (Master and slave, to Renoir, are spiritual categories—he uses ‘aristocrat' in the same way.) Renoir is the spokesman for human values which capitalist society will destroy as far as it can—the values which Rousseau thought of as pre-social. He is confident that these values cannot be destroyed entirely, that there are spiritual recesses to which capitalism cannot reach, that human beings cannot be entirely dehumanized. Renoir believes that most people want no more than a simple, uncomplicated life; anything further is vanity, false pomp. This involves a renunciation of public life and a retreat into privacy, a flight from the central realities of an inhuman society to its human margins. It explains Renoir's fascination with women, wandering players, gypsies, vagabonds, poachers and so on—all those who live in this human margin. Yet Renoir's bonhomie—his open optimism—easily slips into buffoonery—a kind of hidden pessimism.
The purest expression of Renoir's attachment to the natural man is his film, Boudu sauve des eaux, made in 1932. Ever since he made it, he has said, he has been looking in vain for another such story. A Parisian book-seller rescues a tramp, Boudu, who has thrown himself into the Seine. He takes him home and starts trying to civilize him, to educate him in the desiderata of bourgeois life: But Boudu is intractable—a natural man, impervious to restraint or nicety—he climbs on to the dinner table, sleeps curled up on the floor, ruins rare books, tears down the curtains, assaults his benefactor's wife, etc. Eventually, a kind of settlement is reached and it is decided that Boudu is to marry the maid. (Marrying the maid is a recurrent feature of Renoir's films.) During the wedding party, Boudu upsets a boat on the Seine, swims ashore, lies down beneath a hedge and returns happily to a life of vagrancy. Boudu's incursion into society is destructive, anarchic: the same bourgeoisie which, in Renoir's words, produced Proust and the railway, cannot cope with Boudu. It is clear which way of life Renoir regards as more authentic. But Boudu is an extreme case: on the whole, Renoir tempers nature with prudence. ‘For me the red traffic light symbolizes exactly that side of our modern civilization which I do not like. A red light comes on and everyone stops: exactly as though they had been ordered to. Everyone becomes like soldiers marching in step. The sergeant-major shouts “Halt!” and everyone halts. There is a red light and everyone stops. To me, that is insulting. All the same you have to accept it, because if you carried on, despite the red light, you would probably get killed.'
Renoir's masterpiece, La Regle du Jeu, explores the same theme on a different level; it is more complex and more nuanced. Andre Jurieux, a popular hero (an ace pilot who is clumsy on the ground: the symbol is familiar), disturbs the aristocratic house-party to which he is invited by his passion for his host's wife. The code of rules by which life is ordered breaks down and guests and host begin to fight ‘like Polish navvies'. Jurieux, the disturbing force, must be expelled; he is shot and a speech of great delicacy by De la Chesnaye—the host, a marquis who adores mechanical music-boxes—restores order and the conventional code. The shooting of Jurieux echoes the shooting of birds and rabbits at the butts—the senseless destruction of natural beings in order to conform with a style of life. Such a schema does not suggest the full scope of the film: the surface is continually fluctuating and it is this fluctuating interaction of the characters, rather than the intrigue (a kind of Beaumarchais plot), which sets the pace and holds the eye. Renoir gives his actors a great deal of room and time—by the use of deep focus and long takes—and encourages them to move about. The film is awash with movement and gesture, so that the first impression is of a continual to-and-fro, combined with sharp psychological accuracy. The camera, in Andre Bazin's phrase, is ‘the invisible guest, with no privilege but invisibility'. The construction of the film reveals itself little by little to the atttentive spectator: Renoir does not belabour his points. Indeed, in La Regle du Jeu tragedy emerges imperceptibly from breakneck farce; the aristocracy are most doomed—an aristocracy who are never cartoons, as they are in Eisenstein—when they are at their best.
After the war, Renoir returned again to the themes of La Regle du Jeu, most obviously in Elena et les hommes, but also in Le Carrosse d'or, made in Italy in 1952. There is space here only to make some suggestive remarks about this film. First, it takes up again the same triad of characters who appeared in La Regle du Jeu: Viceroy=Marquis, Bullfighter=Pilot (the popular hero), Felipe=Octave. But there is a difference: it is the woman, Camilla, who is the disruptive, natural force; the bullfighter is merely the suitor who is clumsy, even ridiculous, when outside the arena. Second, the golden coach itself is used as a symbol of human vanity, of the wish for public acclaim and pomp. It is the coach of Faust (mastery over nature): the viceroy must choose between the coach and Camilla (submission to nature). But, third, Renoir introduces an idea which radically modifies his attitude to nature: that, in some circumstances, it is most natural to play artificial rôles. Thus, Camilla, the natural force, is only really her natural self when playing on the stage in the Commedia dell‘Arte. Real life and theatre become inextricably confused: it would be, in a sense, unnatural for the viceroy to choose Camilla; he cannot. Yet, finally, Felipe, who goes to live with the Indians—Rousseau's savages—can be natural, because he opts out of society altogether. He is, like Octave in La Regle du Jeu, a failure, unable to choose at first between acceptance and refusal of society—between two sets of values—but finally constrained to leave.
Renoir has always been a pioneer. His film Toni (1934) is widely considered a main source of Italian neo-realism: there is a direct link through Visconti, who was Renoir's assistant. La Regle du Jeu used deep focus before Welles. Renoir wanted to be more free to place his actors and let them move. The same kind of consideration led him to tv techniques for Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe and Dr Cordelier, shot with several cameras simultaneously and hidden microphones: this gave much more fluidity and also meant that the actors could not play to the camera. Renoir has never liked quick cutting: an extravagant camera movement, like the 360 degree pan so admired by Bazin in Le crime de Monsieur Lange, is often preferred to a cut. His films use less and less champs-contre-champs, fewer and fewer close-ups. The tempo of his films comes from the actors, not from the montage. When he uses close-ups, for instance, it is not to stress a dramatic climax, but to punctuate with images from outside the main action. Often they are of nature (‘quasi-animist' is Jacques Rivette's phrase): the frogs and twitching rabbits in La Regle du Jeu, the squirrel Kleber in Diary of a Chambermaid, the insects in Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe.
No one should expect me to introduce this book with caution,
detachment, or equanimity. Andre Bazin and Jean Renoir have
meant too much to me for me to be able to speak of them dispassionately. Thus it is quite natural that I should feel that
Jean Renoir by Andre Bazin is the best book on the cinema,
written by the best critic, about the best director.
Andre Bazin died at forty on November 11, 1958. More
than a critic, he was a "writer of the cinema," striving to describe films rather than to judge them. Bazins essays on Bresson, Chaplin, Rossellini, Buiiuel, von Stroheim, and Fellini, as
well as his masterful little book on Welles: have been translated throughout the world. His death interrupted his two most
interesting projects: this book on the work of Jean Renoir and
a short film on Romanesque churches.
A contributor to LEcran Franrais, LEsprit, Le Parisien
Libere, Telerama (then called Radio-Cinema-Television) , and
LObservateur, Bazin profoundly influenced the film makers of
the "New Wave," starting with those whom he brought together
at Cahiers du Cinema and who had just begun to make films
when he passed away after ten years of illness. Thus it was not
fortuitous that the filmography of Renoirs work reprinted at
the end of this book was put together under Bazins direction by
* Orson W cUes. Edition Ie Chavanne, 1957.
7
1- • INTRODUCTION
Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Claude de Givray, Jean-Luc Godard,
Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, and myself in 1957, and completed and updated by Claude Beylie, Jean Douchet, Michel
Delahaye, Jean Kress, and Louis Marcorelles in 1971.
Andre Bazin, whose health deteriorated year after year,
found the strength to look at films and to comment on them
until his last day. The day before his death he wrote one of his
best essays-the long analysis of The Crime of M. Lange*-
having watched the film on television from his bed.
Renoirs work excited Bazin more than any other. He was
working on this study of his favorite director when he died. His
fragmentary manuscript has been reconstructed and completed
by his friends with the assistance of his wife, Janine Bazin.
I am responsible for the final organization of the work, for
its division into ten chapters approximating the chronological
development of Renoirs work. Obviously Bazin would have
done it differently if he had had time. I think he intended to devote a chapter to the themes treated by Renoir, another to his
work with actors, another to the adaptation of novels.
In one of his last letters, Bazin wrote me:
"I am circling around Renoir by reading the life of Augustus, the novels of Zola: La Bete Humaine and Nana, Maupas.
sant ... I will eventually have to approach him more directly, but I am now at a point where I know either too much
or not enough. Too much to be satisfied with approximations,
not yet enough to fill in all the variables of his equations" (July
7,1958) .
I am not far from thinking that the work of Jean Renoir is
the work of an infallible film maker. To be less extravagant. I
will say that Renoirs work has always been guided by a philosophy of life which expresses itself with the aid of something
much like a trade secret: sympathy. It is thanks to this sympathy that Renoir has succeeded in creating the most alive films
• Those of Renoirs films which were commercially distributed in the
United States are referred to herc by their Americar{ titlps. The dates are
those of the original release. American and French titles, as wpll as the
American release dates of the French films, are given in the filmography
at the cnd of thc book. Translators notp.
INTRODUCTION • 9
in the history of the cinema, films which still breathe forty
years after they were made.
Andre Bazin, whom his friends remember as an extraordinary man full of joyous goodwill and intelligence. found himself in complete sympathy with the work of Renoir, with his
thirty films all of which revolve around the famous sentence
from The Rules of the Game (spoken by Renoir himself in the
role of Octave): "You see, in this world, there is one awful
thing, and that is that everyone has his reasons."
If this beautiful book by Andre Bazin is unfinished. consider it unfinished in the manner of A Day in the Country.
which is to say that it is sufficient to itself and, even in its fragmentary state, the finest portrait of Jean Renoir ever written.
Andre Bazins Little Beret
by Jean RenoiT
•
The more I travel through life, the more I am convinced that
masks are proliferating. I have difficulty finding a woman
whose face looks as it really is. Our age is the triumph of makeup. And not only for faces, but, more important, for the mind
as well.
The modern world is founded on the ever increasing production of material goods. One must keep producing or die. But
this process is like the labor of Sisyphus. Forgetting Lavoisiers
dictum, "In nature nothing is created, nothing is lost; everything is transformed," we convince ourselves that our earthly
machines will succeed in catching up with eternity. But to
maintain the level of production on which our daily bread depends, we must ever renew and expand our enterprises.
One prefers that this process be peaceful, but events have a
way of getting out of hand. This is an age of violence, and it is
likely to become even more so. Still, we do everything we can to
conduct our operation peacefully, to conquer by persuasion. And
thus, the cancer of our society: advertising.
Occasionally in such troubled times, men or women come
forth to dedicate themselves to helping us reestablish a sense of
reality. Bazin was such a man.
I loved him because he belonged to the Middle Ages. I have
a passion for the Middle Ages, just as I have a distrust for the
Andre Bazin (1957) 11
12 • JEAN RENOIR
Renaissance. That movement, which laid the foundations of industrial society, is ultimately responsible for the atomic bomb.
The frail figure of Bazin, withered with sickness, was like
Pascals "thinking reed."· For me, he was the incarnation of
one of the saints in the Cathedral of Chartres who project a
luminous and magical vision through their stained-glass representations. I would have liked to visit Chartres with Bazin. I regret that I never had the chance. This enthusiast of the cinema
was as much at home in a medieval chapel as he was in front of
a screen on the Champs-Elysees.
Clothes looked different on Bazin. They were the same
clothes one saw on other people, but on him they lost their contemporary appearance. The anachronism of his outward appearance was neither a protest nor a revolt, nor least of all, an aesthetic declaration. It was involuntary. It identified him as an
aristocrat before he opened his mouth, and he was not even
aware of it.
His little beret perfectly suited the frail figure of the reformer of the French cinema. I will never forget it.
The sickness which gnawed at Bazin vanquished his spirit
before he was able to finish this book. Franc;ois Truffaut and
others of his friends undertook to complete it. Theirs are names
which, to my mind, figure prominently in the history of the
cinema. I would be falsely modest if I did not express my deep
gratitude to them. I do not know if I deserve this honor, but I
hasten to accept it. This moment is a beautiful gift from Bazin.
It is not the first, or the last: great men do not die.
At the thought of Bazin who dedicated this book to me and
of his disciples who completed it, I feel a very gentle pride. My
feeling is that of a man who has just been given a firm handshake by someone he admires greatly.
March 18, 1971
* "Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapor,
a drop of water, suffice to kill him. But if the universe were to crush him,
man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he
knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him;
the univcrse knows nothing of this." Blaise Pascal, Pensecs. Trans
Renoir at Home
Interview with Jean Renoir
Renoir is wearing green khaki pants, the
crotch very low, a long beige cloth coat slung around
him, a whitish shirt buttoned at the neck, powder-blue
socks, and yellowish-brown moccasins. Dido seems
perhaps in her early fifties, lithe and active, brown
complexion, wearing beige ski pants and a white sheer
cotton blouse. She is very solicitous about him, and
gently satiric as well. When he is about to autograph my
copy of Renoir mon pere, for which he puts on dark-
rimmed glasses, she jokes, "Now, Jean, where is your
pen? Do you remember how to spell Mr. Braudys
name?"
Renoir still seems very vital and
quick, although he does forget things, or
so it seems. Its a strange feeling, to meet
someone in whose work youve been
immersed and that you know so well.
When his memory slips, its as if hes
forgotten his lines. But why should he
remember details, all equally immediate
to me, many distant to him?
In terms of ideas and wit, he is fine.
A lot of his pauses seem due to his imper-
fect English, a search for the appropriate
word. He looks somewhat shrunken from
the bear-like presence of his prime (when
Anna Magnani in
Le Carrosse dor
Jean Gabin called him "Le Gros"), as if he now ha wooden hanger inside his coat. His nose is veined, a dark on one side, perhaps from a recently broken bloo vessel. One of his eyes is more closed than the oth the result of a minor stroke? He doesnt talk especially slowly, except in pausing to formulate ideas he wan to get across. I can see how in more robust days h pauses would have been taken as a kind of solidity, no the vagueness one might now-because of his ag assume they were.
