First Movement: Polemic
Renoir's films were underestimated when they first came
out. They were unconventional, complex, and so energetic and technically
daring that few noticed their intricate structure. They were often dismissed
as rough, not fully achieved artistically. The generation that came to the
cinema in the '60s and '70s (perhaps the richest and most diverse era in
European cinema) recognised Renoir as an ancestor who had already made the
kind of films they admired or were setting out to make themselves, and justly
hailed them as masterpieces. Critic David Thomson recalls: "The Renoir
retrospective at London's National Film Theatre in 1962 amounted to the
clearest revelation of the nature of cinema that I have ever had."
(1) For Alain Resnais La Règle du jeu (1939)
"remains, I think, the single most overwhelming experience I have ever
had in the cinema.” He continues:
When I first came out of the theatre, I remember, I just had
to sit on the edge of the pavement; I sat there for a good five minutes,
and then I walked the streets of Paris for a couple of hours. For
me, everything had been turned upside down. All my ideas about the
cinema had been changed. Whilst I was actually watching the film,
my impressions were so strong physically that I thought that if this
or that sequence were to go on for one shot more, I would either burst
into tears, or scream, or something. Since then, of course, I've seen
it at least fifteen times—like most filmmakers of my generation.
(2)
An unfortunate future result of this adulation, coming
during the days when film was starting to become academically and intellectually
respectable, was that Renoir's films would ultimately become enshrined as
"classics," worthy objects for academic study, rather than sources
of vital emotional and intellectual experience. Now, in an era when producers,
financiers and commissioning editors exhibit the most abject conformity,
and exciting work is locked up in a ghetto far away from the mainstream
lest it should spread infection, the wheel has come full circle. Lip service
is paid to Renoir as a master, but few encountering his work for the first
time seem able to recognise or appreciate its humour, passion or significance.
We are all the poorer. Great art is alive. It informs and generates passions:
witness the response to the recent New York production of Arturo Ui,
a play by Renoir's friend Bertolt Brecht. La Règle du jeu,
made on the eve of war to illustrate the notion "We are dancing on
a volcano," (3) has, sadly, as much or more to say
about the modern world as it said about the world of 1939, when it aroused
such passions as to lead to its being effectively booed off the screen,
then banned by the censorship as "demoralizing". This was clear
even before 9/11, though before then the threat seemed more distant, and
probably ecological. Renoir's vision of the modern world, with its intrusive
media reporters, in which "Everyone lies..., drug company prospectuses,
governments, the radio, the cinema, newspapers..." (4)
and of a society absorbed in its own conventions, hypocrisies and cover-ups,
peopled by individuals who, though often charming and likeable, have been
made complacent by affluence, is as up-to-date, radical and potentially
disturbing as ever. It is, still, an "exact description of the bourgeois
of our time." (5) In 1939 audiences were outraged.
Now, they don't seem to notice, or care.
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Octave
(Renoir) and Marceau (Carette) going into "exile" at the
end of
La Règle du jeu
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These days, people are likely to encounter Renoir's work for the first time
on television or video rather than in the cinema. In these low information,
small screen formats, the energetic ensemble acting characteristic of his
films often seems merely busy. The humour and much of the richness of characterisation
derive from interplay between dialogue and the visual image (which communicates
gesture and movement). For an anglophone audience, even when the subtitles
communicate the dialogue accurately, the pace of the interaction and the
impeccable timing of the delivery of the lines are lost. Thus the wit that
is a key component of the hypnotic power of Jules Berry as Batala (in Le
Crime de Monsieur Lange [1936]), one of the greatest performances
in all cinema, is largely dissipated. Inadequate subtitling has contributed
to the misunderstandings that have devitalised Une Partle de campagne
(1936). A crucial early exchange is not translated. It establishes Henri
(Georges Darnoux) and Rodolphe (Jacques Brunius dit Borel) as regular
visitors to the country inn around which the action occurs, who can pack
their bags and go elsewhere on their trips out of town. Without this knowledge,
modern viewers fail to recognise them as affluent men about town, despite
other relevant snatches of dialogue, and the fact that they are wearing
the 19th-century equivalent of Lacoste T-shirts and designer jeans, in contrast
to Anatole (Paul Temps) and Monsieur Dufour (Gabriello), even more uncomfortable
in their Sunday best than those aspirants to gentility on whom they are
modelled, Laurel and Hardy. In Renoir's art, every line of dialogue, every
action, every detail of dress, gesture, posture and setting needs to be
taken into account if story, theme and characterisation are not to be misunderstood.
This is particularly so as characters may joke about themselves—Henri
telling Henriette (Sylvia Bataille) he's in business with Rodolphe—or
lie—Christine (Nora Grégor) in La Règle du jeu
convincing Geneviève (Mila Parély) she's known all along about
the latter's affair with her husband. Some viewers believe her, despite
the fact that her voice is shrill with strain, and other sequences clearly
establish she has not been aware of the relationship until that afternoon.
One might hope that academics and film students would take
a lead in appreciating, communicating and attempting to emulate the richness
of Renoir's art. But all too often they suffer from the constraints indicated
above, and bear the added burden of having to engage with certain films
as an academic duty. Moreover, there's the nature of the engagement the
academy seems to require, with films all too often stifled by the clammy
embrace of a verbal discourse that has no place for the discussion of beauty,
poetry, passion or humour. Renoir has created many of the most memorable
and moving moments in the history of cinema, and these should be the first
object of study, rather than arguments about how “auteurists”
have turned "a discontinuous body of work" into an oeuvre. (6)
Frankly, who gives a damn? Renoir's own vision of his authorial role, as
reported by his long-time collaborator, his "accomplice" and "companion
on the road," the production designer Eugène Lourié,
reveals the irrelevance of such concerns: "Often Renoir compared the
functions of a film director with those of a chef in a restaurant. A chef
can create great meals, but they are also the result of his collaboration
with his helpers, the meat chefs, the wine stewards, the saucemakers, and
the rest." (7) Great meals also require great ingredients,
and these Renoir typically had little difficulty in locating,
drawing on classics of literature, theatre and painting. Sometimes these
were explicitly acknowledged, sometimes summoned from a storehouse of memories
and observations from life and friends, in a process of recall quite possibly
outside the artist's conscious awareness. Moreover, his successive partners
provided him with a succession of concerns and themes. First there was the
non-naturalistic acting of his first wife, Catherine Hessling, contributing
to the stylization of his silent films, and his flirtation with avant garde
aesthetics. Then came the red-blooded socialism of his brilliant collaborator,
editor Marguerite Houlé, often known as Marguerite Renoir. Finally
the religious feelings of his second wife Dido Freire. One source of the
meaningfully structured emotional confusions of La Règle du jeu
may have been Renoir's movement away from Marguerite and towards Dido. Others
include drama, stretching at least from Beaumarchais to Pirandello; French
baroque music: "I wanted to film people whose movements were in tune
with that music," (8) material absorbed during the
making of his previous film, an adaptation of Zola's La Bête humaine
(1938); the historical conjuncture, his responses to it, and those of
his collaborators including the emotional condition of his leading actress,
Nora Grégor, a political refugee whose life had fallen apart, and
who was thus under great stress.
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La
Grande illusion:
Maréchal (Jean Gabin) has abandoned Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio)
after indulging in an anti-semitic tirade, leaving him, and human
solidarity, temporarily alone on the edge of an abyss
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What makes Renoir's work unusual among filmmakers, if not unique, is the
diversity of the materials he draws upon during the realization of an individual
project, and his ability to blend these elements together so that each works
on the viewer but none obtrudes. Partly this is a result of the pleasure
his art generates: with so much to perceive and enjoy there's little time
and space for the analysis of sources! However a serious analysis of his
art needs to draw attention to the emotional impact and intensity of such
moments as that when the German patrol looms into frame at the end of La
Grande illusion (1937). One experiences a numbing moment of shock as
the patrol starts to fire at the tiny figures of Maréchal (Jean Gabin)
and Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio) plodding through the snow towards freedom;
have all their ingenuity, struggles and hardships been in vain? Then a gasp
of relief at the order to ceasefire. Yet this in turn is tempered by a visual
reminder of the smallness of the escapers' achievement, diminished by the
vastness of the landscape around them, and of the futility of Maréchal's
stated ambition (to make 1914-18 the war to end wars), to say nothing of
the arbitrary cause of their survival, an invisible man-made frontier. So
little screen time, so many meaningful emotional and thematic resonances!
Just describing the action makes my eyes fill with tears, first of anguish,
then of relief.
And there are so many comparable moments, different but equally affecting.
In La Règle du jeu, for example, another instance of the strain
communicated by Christine's voice, this time as she utters the name "André
Jurieu" in response to an enquiry about the identity of a new arrival
at La Colinière. She and the man who wants to be her lover hesitate
rather than move to greet each other, separated by the length of the hall.
Then Octave (Jean Renoir), friend to both, arrives and breaks the space
between them as he and Christine move to embrace each other in greeting.
A spatial and social barrier is overcome, and Christine freed to move on
to greet her potentially embarrassing guest. And another moment, later,
with Octave on the steps outside the chateau, carried away by his impersonation
of Christine's father, the great conductor Stiller; suddenly a cut slightly
closer and to a new angle as he freezes at the climax of his impersonation,
then slumps in despair, remembering his failure to fulfil his dreams, realizing
he will never experience contact with an audience. Later still, Octave again,
when, harangued by the self-serving arguments of the maid Lisette (Paulette
Dubost), the sight of his face in the mirror convinces him he should give
Christine up to his younger friend, the heroic aviator André (Roland
Toutain).
Then, in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, the memorable passage, one of
the most beautiful in all cinema, poetic in its narrative and thematic condensation,
which moves from Batala's abandonment of his devoted secretary and lover
Edith (Sylvia Bataille) to the seduction of Lange (René Lefèvre)
by Valentine (Florelle). Edith stands trying to smother her sobs with her
handkerchief as the train pulls out. A man, a sleazy parody of the wealthy
businessman (Jacques Brunius) she has already said disgusts her, spots her.
The camera moves closer as he approaches. He's almost obscene: his words
are designed to console her but there's no comfort in his voice, whilst
his face and movements show he is gloating as he examines his prize. Precisely
the kind of pimp Batala has suggested she find for her future. Cut to a
new angle, but still a close two-shot. The camera tracks before them as
they leave the station, Edith composing herself as she walks with grim determination
towards her future. It holds as the couple leave the frame, picking up a
passing priest as music starts over. This leads into a song about life on
the streets whilst a push-off (an optical effect very similar to a wipe;
both newly made possible by the development of the optical printer) carries
us from the station to the exteriors of the courtyard which is the setting
for most of the film's action. The camera pans to a window, then moves inside
to reveal Valentine as the singer, serenading Lange. Her song concludes,
and there's a cut closer and to a new angle as she moves closer to quiz
him about his relationships. Lange turns away from her, initially frozen
in fear and isolation, a moment of
impotence, but he is quickly thawed by her attentions.
Memorable though such moments are, Renoir's cinema is not merely one of
memorable moments. Each is a contributing part of an elegant and intricate
structure of representation. Ophuls' image of the master of ceremonies and
the stalled roundabout in La Ronde (1950) seems a simplistic metaphor
when juxtaposed with La Règle du jeu's use of mechanical imagery
and a consideration of Octave/Renoir's role in the mechanisms of the film.
Who arranges Andre's invitation to La Colinière? Octave. Whose playful
jostling after the shoot changes the direction of Christine's gaze through
the spy-glass, causing her to witness the farewell kiss between her husband
and Geneviève? Octave's. We, who have heard the dialogue preceding
the kiss, know its significance, but Christine, with only visual evidence
to judge by, understandably misinterprets what she sees. A moment of intense
narrative and dramatic import can also be read as a meditation upon the
relation in the cinema between narrative context, verbal information and
the meaning conveyed by the visual image. This is great art at its most
forceful and complex.
Second Movement: Life
and Films
Jean was the second son of Pierre-Auguste and Aline Renoir. His elder brother,
Pierre, became a distinguished theatre and cinema actor, the screen's first
Maigret in Jean's adaptation of La Nuit du carrefour (1932). He also
appeared for his brother as Charles Bovary, and as Louis XVI in La Marseillaise
(1938). Their younger brother, Claude Renoir Senior ("Coco")
was born in 1901 and quickly relieved Jean of the often uncongenial duties
of acting as one of his father's principal models. In the '30s he was an
assistant director or producer on several of Jean's films. Pierre's son,
Claude Renoir Junior, became a distinguished cinematographer, also working
on many of Jean's '30s films, sometimes (on the lower budget projects) as
director of photography, sometimes as an assistant who, nevertheless, often
had the important task of orchestrating his uncle's complex camera-movements.
Their collaboration recommenced when Jean returned to work in the old world
in the '50s.
RENOIR
by RENOIR
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"My father loved to paint my hair, and
his fondness for the golden ringlets which came down to my shoulders
filled me with despair. At the age of six, and in spite of my
trousers, many people mistook me for a girl. Street urchins ran
jeering after me, calling me 'Mademoiselle' and asking me what
I had done with my skirt. I impatiently awaited the day when I
was to enter the College de Sainte-Croix, where regulations required
a hairstyle more suited to middle-class ideals. To my great disappointment
my father constantly postponed the date of my entry, which for
me signified the blissful shedding of those locks...”
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Before:
Jean in 1900
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and
After...
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| "...On a morning like many another
my father announced that he was going to paint
my portrait. I protested, pretending that I had a sore leg, and
to prove it I limped ostentatiously. But my father was determined
to paint me, and the whole household, not wishing him to be put
off, tried to persuade me. Suddenly Gabrielle had an idea. I had
a camel which I adored... a toy no bigger than my hand ... Gabrielle
said between two of my sobs: 'You ought to make a coat for your
camel. The weather's getting cold and it will soon be winter. Your
camel simply must have a coat.' The idea delighted me. I sat down
in front of my father's easel and began sewing." (9) |
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Jean
in 1901
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Paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Gabrielle was Jean's beloved nurse, a distant relative of his mother. She
was sixteen when she joined the household shortly before Jean's birth. It
was she who took him to Guignol (the French equivalent of Punch and Judy);
years later she reminded him he was sometimes so excited when the curtain
went up that he wet his pants. She also introduced him to melodrama, which
he adored, and tried earlier to introduce him to the cinema, but at the
age of two he found the experience terrifying, and only started to enjoy
films (particularly slapstick) at the age of nine, during screenings at
school. Gabrielle he associated with games, walks, piggy-back rides, his
mother with discipline. He played with lead soldiers, and read adventure
stories.
In 1913, attracted by his love of uniforms and horses, he enlisted in the
dragoons, and passed his exams to become an officer the next year, just
in time for World War I. He was severely wounded by a sniper in 1915, and
believes it was only a visit to the hospital by his mother that saved his
life. She was so vehement in her opposition to the amputation of his gangrenous
leg that the authorities changed his doctor and his treatment. He was to
limp for the rest of his life. Aline, who had been diagnosed as diabetic,
fell into her last illness when she returned home, and Renoir believes it
was her exhausting trip to save him that killed her. Pierre also suffered
a crippling wound (in the arm) about the same time.
Renoir convalesced in Paris, mainly in an apartment rented by his father,
who, though he was now in a wheelchair as a result of his arthritis, had
come to the capital to be near his two sons. Jean spent much of his time
watching his father paint, and, after the light had gone, talking, exchanging
stories and experiences. Then Jean signed on again, to return to action
in the air force, first as an observer, then, having fasted for a week to
meet the requirements on weight, as a pilot. On leave in Paris before being
sent to train as a pilot, he, accompanied by Pierre, discovered the genius
of "Charlot," Charlie Chaplin. Later, after a crash-landing had
aggravated his wounds, he was withdrawn from active service, and stationed
in Paris, where he was able to catch up on all of Chaplin's films, and became
a passionate film fan.
Earlier, on leave at Les Collettes, near Cagnes-Sur-Mer
on the Côte d'Azur, where his father had spent his winters since purchasing
the property in 1907, he met Andrée Heuchling, known affectionately
as Dedée, a teenage refugee from Alsace and the war. She had started
modelling at Nice, and called on Matisse, who was looking for a young model.
He immediately recognised her as the right physical type for Auguste Renoir,
and suggested she visit him. Sources dispute whether she modelled for the
painter. Jean was sure she did, and mentions Les Grandes baigneuses
(1918); his biographer, Ronald Bergan, following the testimony of Dedée's
best friend Alice Burpin, later Figheira, is extremely dubious. What is
certain is that she quickly became a member of the household, and very close
to Auguste Renoir, bandaging his arthritic hands (in his last years, his
brushes had to be strapped to his hands), carrying him from his bed to the
chair where he painted, and arguably inspiring his last "radiant"
paintings, as well as the rest of the household, with her gaiety and beauty.
(10)
After the Armistice, Jean returned to Les Collettes, where he, Dedée
and Claude started to work as potters, Auguste having had a studio and an
oven installed in an outhouse. Though he continued painting till hours before
his death, Auguste Renoir was in continual pain and declining health. He
died in December 1919. Dedée and Jean were married a few weeks later.
They continued their work in ceramics, even after moving closer to Paris,
near the forest of Fontainebleau, following the birth of their son Alain
in October 1921. Gabrielle and her husband (the American painter Conrad
Slade) were living nearby, and soon Paul Cézanne Junior and his family
joined them, buying a property nearby.
Jean and Dedée went to the cinema nearly every day, and were particularly
absorbed by American films. However in 1923 Jean found a French film he
admired, and which made him decide to abandon pottery for the cinema. This
was Le Brasier ardent (1923), co-directed by Russian émigrés
Ivan Mosjoukine—he of the experiments conducted by Kuleshov and Pudovkin
and described by the latter (11)—and Alexander Volkov.
It combined respect for the actor with the technical effects some directors
were experimenting with in the desire to develop film language, including
superimposition and non-naturalistic sets.
He had already started documenting his wife's beauty in stills and home
movies, so the idea she should become a star like the American beauties
whose work obsessed them seemed the logical next step. Initially he planned
only to provide finance for vehicles which would achieve this, but, unable
to find an appropriate screenplay, he wrote one himself—for Catherine—then
another—for La Fille de l'eau. This he again financed, and decided
to direct himself (1925), having repeatedly interfered with the work of
the director of the first, Albert Dieudonné (1924).
Dedée had taken the name Catherine Hessling, as they thought it sounded
American. In his memoirs, Renoir pays tribute to her abilities as an actress,
and describes how they worked together:
Catherine's acting was a form of mime. She
had taken a great many dancing lessons and her body possessed a professional
suppleness. With her we had conceived a mode of expressing the emotions
which had more to do with dancing than with cinema... I wanted films
based photographically on sharp contrasts. I went so far as to restrict
Catherine's make-up to an extremely thick white base, with all other
tints rendered in black, including the pinks and reds... She became
a kind of puppet—a puppet of genius, be it said—entirely
black and white. I thought: 'Since the cinema is black and white,
why photograph other colours?' (12)
In 1924, inspired by repeated viewings of Foolish Wives (Erich von
Stroheim, 1921), he started to draw on the traditions of French realism,
and set up Nana (1926), a big-budget adaptation of the novel by Emile
Zola. This was shot in Germany at a time when German capital was becoming
increasingly important for French production. Some critics now regard this
film as one of his greatest, and certainly one of his most radical formally.
Nevertheless, it was a commercial failure which left him with debts that
could only be paid by selling some of his father's paintings. Subsequently
Renoir found it necessary to earn a living from filmmaking. Although he
was able to direct some shorter, experimental projects (Charleston [1927],
La Petite marchande d'allummettes [1928]) he also found it necessary
to take on several projects not much to his liking—Marquitta (1927),
a vehicle for his brother Pierre's second wife; Le Tournoi (1928),
a medieval epic, which does reveal an early interest in setting the action
in depth and shooting action in front of a doorway revealing an adjoining
room; and most depressingly, Le Bled (1929), a hymn to France's colonial
penetration of Algeria. The latter was edited by Margaret Houlé,
his future partner. His friend, the independent producer Pierre Braunberger,
also gave him the chance to direct a farce about military conscripts. Tire
au flanc (1928), based on a long-running stage success. On this, he
worked with Michel Simon for the first time.
Renoir's preference for combining friendship with collaboration
was to serve him well throughout his career. The fact that the large conglomerates
had failed to establish dominance over production, distribution and exhibition
left a space for the contribution of independent producers and financiers.
Though the industry was often over-dependent on foreign capital, and new
companies were often set up which were small and under-capitalised, filmmakers
nevertheless had a chance of finding a one-off investor or group of investors
willing to support an adventurous project. This allowed Renoir to make several
of his major films. After an extended period of inaction (apart from acting,
and a trip to Berlin, where he met Brecht) he was eventually given his first
chance to direct sound films by Braunberger, who had established a company
through a merger with a regional distributor, Richebé.
Unlike many directors who had worked during the silent
era, Renoir welcomed the coming of sound. In his memoirs he suggests the
voice is "the most direct expression of a human being's personality"
(13) and stresses the virtues of direct sound over dubbing
and re-voicing, crediting here the influence of Joseph de Bretagne, who
was an assistant on the sound team on his first sound film On purge bébé
(1931; a free translation of the title would be Time for Baby's Laxative;
he describes the film as a kind of “examination” set on him before
he could go on to more personal projects like La Chienne the same
year). De Bretagne "was to have a share in nearly all my future French
productions and played a large part in my film education." (14)
Renoir had planned Catherine Hessling and Michel Simon for the leading roles
in La Chienne. His decision not to abandon the project when the studio
insisted on casting not his wife but an actress they had under contract
caused the final breakdown of his marriage.
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Boudu
sauvé des eaux:
Boudu
(Michel
Simon) and Lestingois (Charles Granval)
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In La Chienne, Renoir experimented with the use
of direct sound recorded on location. Facilities for re-recording and sound-mixing
were not available, so, like many directors in the early days of sound,
when within a scene he wanted to cut between different camera-angles and
distances, he had to shoot with multiple cameras, all synchronised to a
single soundtrack. (15) The film's use of location sound
ensured that the individual drama was played out within a social context
that was clearly articulated both aurally and visually (a vibrantly alive
Montmartre). In subsequent films, Renoir had sections of the sets for the
interiors of his protagonists' homes built on location, and shot through
doors or windows to link the interior visually with the exterior. Lourié
has written about this aspect of their collaboration, (16)
but examples of the practice can be seen in several films he did not design:
Boudu sauvé des eaux (1932), Madame Bovary (1933),
Une Partie de campagne, La Marseillaise.
La Chienne was so controversial dramatically and technically that
Renoir was only able to save it from Richebé, who had arranged for
it to be re-edited, by appealing, at Braunberger's suggestion, to the company's
principal investor, a shoe manufacturer. His description of the situation
led to the decisive support of the latter's mistress. Once saved, however,
the film still only found commercial success as a result of the actions
of a friendly cinema-owner, who devised an unorthodox publicity campaign
featuring descriptions of the film as "so horrifying... it was not
suited to sensitive viewers." (17)
Renoir then obtained private finance for the first-ever adaptation of one
of Simenon's Maigret novels, La Nuit du carrefour. Michel Simon and
a friend financed Boudu sauvé des eaux. Simon had played Boudu
on the stage, and wanted to play him on screen. Like so many Renoir films,
it took three decades to find its audience; now it is one of the best loved
films of its era.
Financial pressures led Renoir to take on Madame Bovary (he was suggested
by his brother Pierre, who was playing Charles Bovary). The final cut ran
three hours; the producers wanted to release it at that length, but the
distributors insisted that it be cut down by about an hour. Renoir commented:
"Once cut the film seemed much longer than before." One who saw
and admired Renoir's original cut was Brecht, by then an exile from Nazism.
(18)
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Le
Crime de Monsieur Lange:
publisher Batala
(Jules Berry) demands more blood from
his illustrator (Jean Dasté)
|
From the middle of the 1930s, as democracy became threatened by the rise
of fascism, Renoir's concern with the spatial and social context of his
dramas acquired an explicitly political dimension. Le Crime de Monsieur
Lange was made in collaboration with the Groupe Octobre, a left-wing
theatre group including the poet-dramatist Jacques Prévert, who co-scripted
from a story by set-designer Jean Castanier. The film is built around a
group of characters living and/or working around a central courtyard (Castanier's
story was called "Sur le cour"). They represent a microcosm
of society, and their lives and consciousness are transformed when a co-operative
(involving both workers and capitalists) replaces an exploitative and corrupt
employer, Batala. Fascist rhetoric is deflated by being placed in the mouth
of this swindler. Lange himself changes from a depressed employee and unworldly
dreamer into a successful writer of pulp westerns in which his hero, Arizona
Jim, is consistently on the side of the down-trodden and exploited. His
transformation evokes the 1930s politicization of artists and intellectuals
in opposition to fascism, including that of Renoir himself, responding as
he did to the influence of his new partner, Marguerite Houlé. She
was from a working class background, and a campaigner for female suffrage.
The latter was only achieved in France following the Liberation.
Le Crime de M. Lange is now admired for its technical and aesthetic
ambitions: improvisation; ensemble acting; staging in depth (though no true
deep-focus); sweeping tracks and pans (though none of these is the 360°
pan described by Bazin, writing from memory in his sick bed a couple of
days before he died). In fact, it is Renoir's most Brechtian film, an extended
lehrstück (teaching play) disguised as a humanist comic melodrama.
It exalts people's justice over the letter of the law, and justifies murder
in the defence of revolution. Aspects of this issue had already been explored
by Brecht in his lehrstücke; shortly after, W.H. Auden labelled
such action "necessary murder."
Ironically, when released, Le Crime de M. Lange received more attention
from the fascist periodical L'Action française than from the
Communist L'Humanité. The latter was more interested in the
forthcoming 1936 elections, and promoting screenings of Renoir's next project,
the Party's campaign film for these elections, La Vie est à nous,
whose message was more in tune with the party line, less radical.
Renoir supervised the shooting of La Vie est à nous, then
wrote and recorded the French-language commentary for Ciné-Liberté's
release of The Spanish Earth (Terre d'Espagne, 1937), Joris
Ivens' documentary about life in the government-held areas during the Spanish
Civil War. During this period he, like many other filmmakers, was active
in the campaigns for legislation to reform the film industry organised by
Ciné-Liberté. These intensified after the Popular Front government
took power in 1936. Policies proposed included ending the quota on imported
films, and taxing them instead, to support French production.
There was also a call for an immediate end to the film censorship, which
had been responsible for denying licenses authorizing public screenings
of films such as Zéro de conduite (1933), Jean Vigo's anarchist
account of his schooldays, La Vie est à nous, which was shown
widely, but only to restricted audiences, and the Soviet classics. (The
surrealist masterpiece L'Age d'or [1930], directed by Luis Buñuel,
had been banned by the Paris police under a different law, following riots
in the cinema where it was being screened).
Ironically, though the Popular Front never enacted any relevant legislation,
ideas developed then were adopted by the Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain,
which came to power during the fall of France and collapse of the Third
Republic in 1940, and gave a model to systems of financial support for independent
filmmakers still in place today. These played an important role in the development
of the nouvelle vague.
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La
Règle du jeu:
La Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio) and Octave (Renoir) in the Hôtel
de la
Chesnaye, during the scene when the fatal
invitation to Jurieu is agreed upon
|
1936 saw the start of Renoir's collaboration with Jean Gabin, in France
an increasingly important star. This eventually made possible La Grande
illusion (1937), a production which, unlike most of Renoir's films,
was a success from its first release. Gabin loved both the role he was to
play and the story, which grew out of the experiences of Renoir's old World
War I flying buddy, Colonel Pinsard, and his many escapes from Prisoner
of War camps. Nevertheless it took three years to find finance. Renoir asserts
that it was only because the financier, Rollmer, and his assistant, Albert
Pinkévitch, were not in the industry, and therefore lacked its prejudices
about what might be successful, that they backed the film. Pinkévitch
often visited the set during shooting, and his wit and anecdotes played
a major role in the development of the character of the wealthy Jewish officer
Rosenthal, and thus, one can suggest, in that of Christine's husband La
Chesnaye in La Règle du jeu as well.
La Grande illusion went on to have a special prize
created for it at the Venice Festival (Mussolini apparently liked it; however,
the authorities at Venice did not wish to offend the Nazis by giving a major
prize to an anti-war, internationalist film). It was voted best foreign
film at the New York World's Fair, and caused President Roosevelt, after
a private screening at the White House, to declare: "All the democracies
of the world must see this film." (19) It remains
Renoir's best-known and most popular film. It is a plea, as much to the
reactionary forces inside France as to those outside, on behalf of the egalitarian
ideals of the French Revolution, and against anti-semitism, the religion
of the Nazis. These ideals, Renoir suggests in La Marseillaise, a
film initially financed by trade union subscriptions, are heroically embodied
in the ordinary people, not the powerful and charismatic national leader
glorified by another great French director, Abel Gance, in his 1927 silent
masterpiece Napoléon, which had been re-released in 1935 in
a sound version which underlined its political message. (20)
At first glance it seems surprising that, particularly in the '30s, when
many politically conservative films were commercially successful, Gance
was so much less able than Renoir to protect the artistic independence both
craved. Certainly Renoir's projects and ambitions usually matched his financial
resources. The space he grants actors for their own creative input gives
his films a lighter, more human and amusing surface; their seriousness tends
not to be immediately apparent, being embedded in their structure rather
than foregrounded, as is the case in Gance' s work. Only very occasionally,
as in La Marseillaise, does he show interest in the spectacle that
was so important to Gance. Fewer than half-a-dozen shots are fired in La
Grande illusion, one of the greatest of war films, and there are no
combat sequences; in some sequences here, as well as in other films, he
is able to economise financially by using sound to suggest the presence
of a crowd of extras. Moreover, his most artistically ambitious films, unlike
those of Gance, typically run to a standard commercial length: an hour and
a half to two hours.
The commercial success of another film starring Gabin, an adaptation of
Zola's La Bête humaine, encouraged Renoir, his younger brother
Claude, and three friends to invest in the creation of a new production
company, Nouvelle Edition Française. The plan was to involve
other directors, and actors such as Gabin, and make two independent films
a year. There were plans to negotiate exclusive use of a large Paris cinema
owned by Marcel Pagnol's independent, Marseilles-based company, with which
Renoir had worked earlier when making Toni (1934), a compelling forerunner
of Italian neo-realism. Founded on the runaway success of the filmic adaptation
of Pagnol's stage-play Marius (1931), this company had, throughout
the '30s, enjoyed a consistent run of commercial successes, perhaps because
its films, though full of life and personality, were not too ambitious or
demanding artistically.
The first production of the new company was La Règle
du jeu. Initially it was conceived as an adaptation of de Musset's stage
comedy Les Caprices de Marianne. Renoir has written that during
the shooting he was torn between two conflicting desires, to make a comedy
and to tell a tragic story. This tension resulted in probably his most complex
work: "It's a war film; nevertheless there's not a mention of war in
it. Beneath its benign appearance, this story strikes at the very structure
of our society." (21) Even the smallest elements
of plot and characterization work together, as if in a marvellous mechanical
construction, to precipitate the murder of a national hero. This image of
a society running as out of control as a runaway train
eerily anticipates the national disaster to befall France a year later.
It also echoes the passage with which Zola ended La Bête humaine,
a train full of drunken soldiers on the way to what was to be the debacle
at Sedan, pulled by an engine with no one in control because the driver
and fireman have killed each other in a drunken, jealous brawl. Renoir replaced
this with a conclusion more in keeping with the dignity of labour, one based
on an incident he witnessed when starting on the preparation of the film.
(22) He has the fireman (Julien Carette) succeed in bringing
the train safely to a halt following the suicide of the driver, his friend
Lantier (Jean Gabin). Even here, with deterministic subject matter and after
the collapse of the Popular Front, the changes Renoir made from Zola's novel
distanced him from the fatalism of the prevailing school of French filmmaking,
poetic realism. Only with La Règle du jeu, on the eve of war,
did his vision incorporate the poetic realists' fatalism, but in a structure
more complex and with characters more controversial than any of theirs.
Renoir's protagonists are no group on the margins of society, but high society
itself; his doomed hero no army deserter—as in Carné's Quai
des brumes (1938), which he had furiously denounced (23)—or
factory-worker destroyed by sexual jealousy, but a national hero.
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La
Règle du jeu:
Christine (Nora Grégor)
deceives Geneviève (Mila Parély), pretending she has
known about the latter's affair with Robert
La Chesnaye all along
|
La Règle du jeu is all the more disturbing because so many
of the characters are so likeable, their repeated inability to make a correct
or decisive choice (echoing the political indecisiveness of the nation itself)
resulting from generosity and understanding. Not surprisingly, audiences
found the film's vision, and its changes of pace and tone, from drawing-room
comedy through farce to tragedy and cover-up, intolerable. In despair, Renoir
told Marguerite to recut the film, omitting the passages most offensive
to the audience. Unfortunately a series of delays, caused by bad weather
on location, then by Renoir's development of new scenes,
had caused the production to secure additional funding from Jean Jay at
Gaumont, as an advance against proceeds from exhibition. Whilst this had
not undermined Renoir's independence during the shooting, it had already
led to cuts from Renoir's preferred edit before the film opened. After six
weeks the government banned the film, arguing the need: "to avoid representations
of our country, our traditions, and our race that change its character,
lie about it, and deform it through the prism of an artistic individual
who is often original but not always sound." (24)
At the time this happened Renoir was in Italy, responding to a personal
appeal from a government official! A few days later, despite his self-declared
pacifism, he was back in uniform, a reservist mobilized for the war. Thus
La Règle du jeu became the only production of Nouvelle
Edition Française.
For many years, the only prints available were more than half-an-hour shorter
than Renoir's initial cut. Fortunately in 1956 the discovery of 224 boxes
of out-takes which had survived an Allied bombing raid led to the creation
of a version which was lacking only one minor scene that Renoir had wished
to include. Thus La Règle du jeu, possibly the greatest film
of the first century of cinema, was restored to life.
After a brief recall to the colours, Renoir returned to
Italy to shoot Tosca (1940), with Michel Simon as Scarpia. The government
hoped, wrongly, that such cultural collaborations would help keep Italy
out of the war. Following the Fall of France, the American father of documentary,
Robert Flaherty, helped Renoir flee to Hollywood. He was accompanied by
his new partner, Dido Freire, whom he subsequently married, and with whom
he spent the rest of his life. They made their home in California, and Renoir
became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1946, though retaining
his French citizenship. He found Hollywood's working methods uncongenial,
and he made a mere six films in the U.S.A. Of these, only two were for major
studios, and in each case a two-picture deal ended after a single film.
A third was an instructional film for the Office of War Information, aimed
to inform U.S. servicemen about France. The other three
were independent productions. Darryl Zanuck, head of Twentieth Century-Fox,
Renoir's first studio, summed up his Hollywood career thus: "Renoir
has plenty of talent, but he's not one of us." (25)
Nevertheless, several of these films are of great interest, particularly
This Land is Mine (1943), an attempt to evoke for an American audience
conditions in occupied Europe and Vichy France, The Southerner (1945),
and The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946), based on a stage adaptation
of an important French novel by Octave Mirbeau.
When Hollywood seemed to have lost interest in his work, private finance
once again led to the realization of one of Renoir's projects. Unable to
sell his idea for an adaptation of Rumer Godden's novel The River,
based on her childhood in Bengal, to any Hollywood producer—he comments
that: "in every case the response was the same—India without elephants
and tiger-hunts was just not India" (26)—he
was about to give up on it when a businessman called Kenneth McEldowney
contacted him. McEldowney, who owned a chain of florist shops, wanted to
make a film about India, where he had served during the war, but had discovered
Renoir had already taken out an option on Godden's novel. He financed a
research trip Renoir made to India, and agreed the novelist should collaborate
on the screenplay, decisions which eased Renoir's task when it came to persuading
Godden to allow the project to go ahead. She had hated the previous adaptations
of her work: Enchantment (Irving Reis, 1940, produced by Samuel Goldwyn)
and Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus (1947). McEldowney
also agreed that Renoir should have last word on the editing of the film.
It was Renoir's first colour film, and reunited him with his cameraman nephew,
Claude Renoir Junior. This meditative account of childhood, shot on location
in Bengal, suggests a new spiritual or religious (though pantheistic) dimension
in Renoir's work. Released in 1951, it was the first of several colour films
of great beauty, with Renoir becoming one of the pioneers of the use of
Technicolor in French feature production.
The second of these was The Golden Coach, shot
in 1952 in Italy, and released in France in 1953 as Le Carrosse d'or.
Renoir, however, preferred the undubbed English-language version, with the
actors' own voices. This, arguably the greatest and most complex of films
about the theatre, pushes the notion of the back-stage musical way beyond
the boundaries of the genre. Its stylistic discontinuities offer a special
and unusual beauty, and it was an important influence on Jean-Luc Godard,
who, correctly linking it to Pirandello and Six Characters in Search
of an Author, expressed his admiration for its interweaving of public
display and private feelings, the theatre and real life. (27)
The resolution of this exercise in artifice confirmed Renoir's new, albeit
highly personal and unconventional, engagement with religious ideas, as
did at least one of the films he made after his return to work in France:
Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1959), a hymn to Pan, and a warning
against the worship of technology. During this decade, he further explored
Pirandellian themes of theatre and identity in two stage plays. Orvet
was written for Leslie Caron after he had failed to persuade the producers
to cast her in French Cancan (1955), a second, and to some extent
more conventional, back-stage musical. This once again made spectacular
use of colour, and reunited Renoir with his '30s star Jean Gabin. Aspects
of the character written for Caron anticipate Nénette (Catherine
Rouvel) in Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe. A second play, Carola
et les cabotins, links Renoir's interest in an exploration of the interaction
between theatre and life with themes from war-time: occupation, collaboration
and resistance.
Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier (a 1959 adaptation of Stevenson's
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) showed Renoir still willing to experiment,
this time by reverting to black and white, and to multiple-camera techniques,
which had been widely revived for the shooting of live television drama.
In Le Caporal épinglé (1962) Renoir revisited the world
of the prison camps and the themes of La Grande illusion, though
this time his characters were conscripts and other ranks, not officers.
It ends with a tolerant but explicit rejection of inaction. His two successful
escapers reveal, once they have succeeded in reaching Paris, that each has
plans to join the resistance.
Renoir remained active through the 1960s, with a highly acclaimed biography
of his father and an equally effective novel The Notebooks of Captain
Georges. He also made a short and highly revealing film, La Direction
d'acteur par Jean Renoir (1968), in which he demonstrates his
methods of working with actors by guiding Gisèle Braunberger through
the rehearsal of a speech he had adapted from a book by Rumer Godden. Nevertheless,
it took him around eight years to set up his final feature, Le Petit
théâre de Jean Renoir (1969). I was disappointed when I
saw it, in a season at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in the summer
of 1970. I had read his plans for C'est la revolution, and hoped
that the spirit of that unrealized project would animate this new film.
However Nick Ray, who came to the screening with us, was charmed by it,
describing it as "An old man's film." Now it is one of the films
I most wish to see again. Two others are Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe
and Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier.
Though Renoir's health was deteriorating, he dictated his memoirs, which
were published in 1974, followed by three more novels. Early the next year,
he made his final trip to Europe, to attend the most complete retrospective
of his films yet mounted, at the National Film Theatre, London. A few weeks
later, however, he was only able to watch from home, on television, as Ingrid
Bergman accepted an Academy Award (Oscar) for Lifetime Achievement on his
behalf.
Renoir was also honoured by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which
made him a Fellow, and by the French government, who created him a Chevalier
de la Legion d'Honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honour). A few days
after his death, an obituary appeared in the Los Angeles Times under
the heading: "The Greatest of All Directors." It was written by
one of his greatest admirers: Orson Welles.
EPILOGUE: Story into
Film.
Une Partie de campagne
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Rodolphe stretches out as if from the audience
and to articulate its desires, and opens the shutters, revealing
the deep space and connection of interior with exterior so important
to Renoir. His action brings together the two groups of characters,
thus allowing narrative development. The image juxtaposes two ostensibly
different kinds of cinema: popular cinema—structured to fulfill
the audience's desire for visual pleasure, the satisfactions of
narrative, identification and emotional gratification; and "art"
cinema—structured for an audience desiring "serious"
themes and the revelation of carefully constructed characters and
their motivations from details of their dialogue and behaviour.
Renoir's art is unusual in that it energetically combines both kinds
of discourse. Henri is still in the space of the art film. It needs
close, analytical observation to notice his rejection of the ritual
of mixing a pastis, and to read this action as indulgent
and self-absorbed. (28) Ultimately, and despite
his earlier rejection of the adventure Rodolphe has proposed, Henri
will take his place in the film's entertainment discourse, whilst
in an instant Henriette (centre, on the swing) will become the source
of visual and kinetic pleasure for both spectators and characters. |
Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Balançoire (The Swing, 1876)
is usually suggested as the model for this passage, but for several reasons
a different swing, from over a century earlier, seems far closer. This is
the painting by Fragonard also known as Hasards heureux de l'escarpolette
(Some Happy Accidents of the Swing, 1767).
The later painting projects an image of calm and tranquility,
the earlier an energy and exuberance closer to that in Renoir's film. Moreover
its title suggests a theme the film develops in detail, but which is only
hinted at in the short story on which the film is based, and absent entirely
from the painting by Renoir's father. This is voyeurism. For de Maupassant,
the draughts from Henriette's skirts seem more intoxicating than the sight
of "her pretty legs up to her knees" (29; the
passage seems an early acknowledgement of the potency of pheromones!). It
was precisely to demonstrate his ownership of what only he should see, and
the swing would reveal, that led to the Baron de Saint-Julien commissioning
the Fragonard. It is recorded that he described his idea to the first artist
he hoped to employ to realise it in these terms: "I should like to
have you paint Madame (pointing to his mistress) on a swing that a bishop
would set going. You will place me in such a way that I would be able to
see the legs of this lovely young girl..." (30)
The film sequence returns to Rodolphe and Henri for a time, allowing a discussion
of casual sex and emotional responsibilities. This re-empasizes their status
as men of the world, and reveals Henri's patronising acceptance of women
as sex objects. Of a dumb ex-mistress he says: "What I wanted from
her had nothing to do with intelligence!" For Rodolphe, the revelations
furnished by the swing are likely to become much more interesting if Henriette
sits down, which she does. The cutting rate is about twice as fast as in
the rest of the film, perhaps because the sequence moves frequently from
one group of characters to another. There are no shots which offer an objective
point of view, but several seem to present the subjective or imaginary point
of view of one or other of the protagonists.
Renoir introduces Henri and Rodolphe much earlier than de Maupassant, after
a couple of minutes, in Shot 6, where they are watching and commenting on
the newcomers, the Dufour family, just after they've arrived. This inaugurates
the movement between groups of characters so important in the film's narrative
organisation. They talk with contempt about such lower class day-trippers,
an inscription in the fiction of the politics of 1936: the film was shot
in July, just after the newly elected Popular Front government and the employers
had negotiated the Matignon agreement, which provided for wage increases,
trade union rights, a 40-hour week, paid holidays for workers, and improved
social services. Nimbyism was in the air.
In the story, Henri and Rodolphe have no role in the swing
sequence. Nor does the group of seminarians. Through the latter Renoir inscribes
in his text two distinct echoes from elsewhere, whose meanings range wider
than, perhaps, he was consciously aware. First there's the suggestion of
clerical hypocrisy, echoing Fragonard's bishop, pushing the swing in answer
to Saint-Julien's whim. Second, there's a motif from actress Sylvia Bataille's
personal life: the seminarians appear after her fictional father and fiancé,
her "privileged males", have wandered off (as they do also in
de Maupassant). At the right of the front row of the seminarians is Sylvia's
husband, erotic avant garde novelist Georges Bataille; next to him (centre)
is an international master of the photographic gaze, Henri Cartier-Bresson,
who has commented thus on the sequence: "Jean always wanted his assistants
to feel what it was like on the other side of the camera, and I was given
the role of a seminarist... I walked along with Georges Bataille, the husband...
of Sylvia..., and as she was on the swing I had to look with amazement at
her petticoats!" (31) The Batailles were already
partially estranged; when the marriage finally broke down, Sylvia Bataille
married psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.
In de Maupassant, Henri and Rodolphe first appear as lunch is about to be
served, sprawled in deck-chairs placed in the shade of the tree under which
the Dufours plan to eat. Any discussions they may have had about the possibilities
of an afternoon adventure, so important an aspect of the way in which Renoir
transforms de Maupassant's laconic narration into concrete actions and dialogue,
are left to the imagination. The result of these transformations is to make
Henri a far more manipulative and controlling character than in the story,
though his doleful, wistful countenance and mournful objections to the adventure
before he's noticed how charming Henriette is, have seduced many viewers
into regarding him as a victim of fate.
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Une
Partie de campagne
|
In both story and film, he refers (with a touch of amusement) to the secluded
spot on the river bank where he and Henriette end by making love, as his
"cabinet particulier." Subtitles translate this
as "study", whilst a fairly recent translation of de Maupassant
renders it “private hideaway." (32) However
the term in fact suggests something considerably more sordid. A cabinet
particulier was a private dining room in a restaurant, and these were
notorious as locations for sexual encounters. In Flaubert's L'Education
sentimentale Madame Arnoux "took offence at being treated like
a woman of easy virtue" when her husband wants to dine in one alone
with her, " when in fact, coming from Arnoux, such treatment was a
proof of affection." (33) In Zola's La Curée,
the guilty passion of Renée Saccard and her stepson Maxime is consummated
in one, the same room that, the previous Wednesday, Maxime had entertained
a woman he'd picked up on the boulevards. Renoir's Les
Bas fonds, shot later in 1936, has a scene in which Pepel the thief
(Jean Gabin) rescues Natacha (Junie Astor) from the clutches of the inspector
(Gabriello). The tragedy of Une Partie de campagne is that, though
in both story and film Henri feels momentary pangs of regret over the affair,
he treats Henriette as he would any casual pick-up, and her grace, innocence,
energy and spontaneity are sacrificed to the prejudices and conventions
of a patriarchal, class society. When I fell in love with the film nearly
40 years ago (I was taking a language course in France in the hope of being
able to read Cahiers du cinéma more easily, and thus was watching
an unsubtitled print), these emotions and meanings were communicated clearly
and directly without need of explanatory commentary (though a term like
"patriarchal" was yet to enter our discourse). Now, in our ostensibly
more democratic society, the past, of the 1880s, when the film was set,
or the 1930s, when it was shot, has, indeed, become "a foreign country."
(34)
Fragonard's painting is currently once again the object of artistic attention.
When Renoir made use of it he may have been drawing on material beyond his
conscious awareness (though his father had been an admirer of Fragonard's
work). However the prize-winning choreographer Susan Stroman clearly set
out to liberate Saint-Julien's young mistress from his ownership, and his
controlling gaze, when she made the painting the basis of the first segment
of the dance musical Contact, a major box-office success originally
in New York and now in London. She has replaced the elderly lackey, or bishop
(or both: the Baron held a hereditary position of authority in relation
to the French clergy!), guiding the swing by a lusty young servant who,
when the Baron swans off for some more champagne, delights the mistress
by initiating her into the erotic potential of the swing.
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French
Cancan
|
For many critics the extraordinary energy of the dance
which is the climax of Renoir's French Cancan represents a comparable
liberation from male control. Ray Durgnat makes the point with passion and
enthusiasm: "Renoir makes sense of the cancan and its social significance.
The dancers unleash the insolence not only of proletarian energy, but of
the aggressive female, and storm the 19th-century bourgeois male
patriarchy like the light brigade of sexual suffragettes which they are.
As they sport the sweet dynamism of thighs long smothered under petticoats
and startle the exhilarated male in a massed scissors-splits which is, of
course, a kinaesthetic equivalent of crutch photography, the suggestion
is that the erstwhile weaker sex won't henceforth find the erstwhile lord
of creation too hard a nut to crack. A river of feminine energy flows devastatingly,
but not destructively, through society." (35)
…the final cancan sequence... It's extraordinary:
it wraps up the whole story, but has practically no dialogue; it keeps
cutting backstage and to the audience. There's no sequence I can think
of that has such joie de vivre.
Colour, music and the pride of life take the screen by storm,
and the vitality of it all leaves the audience... as exhausted as
if they had themselves been taking part.
By the time the can-can dancers mount their final invasion of
decor and decorum both, French Cancan erupts as the most joyous
hymn to the glory of art in the history of the cinema.
Such words describe how the sequence works for me. But are we all, as contemporary
students have often suggested, just using notions of art and its liberating
energies to disguise the fact that this spectacle, through the very nature
of its content, reasserts the power of the voyeuristic gaze of the male
audience? Yet, if that is so, why do so many female viewers find the sequence
equally liberating?
Postscript 2006
There was a major Renoir retrospective at the National Film Theatre in London early this year. Whilst the publicity exhorted us to “Fall in Love with the Films of Jean Renoir”, there was nowhere a hint that to do so would be to engage with the work of one of the greatest artists of the 20th. century. It felt as if, in British film culture, love of art is now the love that dare not speak its name! Moreover, the retrospective received no coverage from arts programmes on B.B.C. radio, although they found plenty of time to interview the likes of Woody Allen at length! Imagine a major exhibition of the paintings of Renoir's father being greeted with similar indifference! Mercifully, at least no one referred to Renoir's masterpieces as “cult films”, that patronising description that acts as the discursive gatekeeper allowing our intellectuals to avoid engagement with the beauties and complexities of cinematic art.
© James Leahy, 2006
Endnotes:
- David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary
of Film, U.S.A. and U.K., Alfred A. Knopf and Little Brown, 2002,
where he adds: "He is the greatest of directors; he justifies cinema.
But he shrugs off the weight of 'masterpieces' or 'definitive statements.'”
- This was in 1944, when the only versions available
had been radically cut. See interview with Richard Roud, “Memories
of Resnais” in Sight and Sound, Vol. 38, No. 3, Summer 1969.
- Interview filmed by ORTF 1961, cited in Alexander
Sesonske, Jean Renoir: the French Films, 1924-1939, Cambridge
Mass. and London, Harvard University Press, 1980
- Octave (Jean Renoir) in La Règle du jeu
- Interview with Marguerite Bussot, Pour Vous,
25 January 1939, reprinted in Bernard Chardère, Jean Renoir,
Lyon, Premier Plan nos. 22, 23, 24, May 1962
- Martin O'Shaughnessy, Jean Renoir, Manchester
and New York, Manchester University Press, 2000
- Eugène Lourié, My Work in Films,
San Diego, New York and London, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985
- Jean Renoir, Ma Vie et mes films, Paris, Flammarion,
1974 (my translation)
- Jean Renoir, My Life and My Films, London,
Collins 1974
- Ronald Bergan, Jean Renoir, Projections of Paradise:
a Biography, London, Bloomsbury, 1992. This has been an invaluable
source of biographical information for this article, although his informant
Alice Figheira seems uneccessarily and perhaps misleadingly catty about
Renoir's relationship with Marguerite. The relationship between Lange
and Valentine in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange suggests the possibility
of something richer.
- V. I. Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting,
New York, Grove Press, 1960
- Renoir, My Life and My Films, 1974
- Renoir, Ma Vie et mes films, (my translation)
- Renoir, My Life and My Films, 1974
- Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History
and Analysis, London, Starword, 2nd edition, 1992
- Lourié, 1985
- Renoir, My Life and My Films, 1974
- Bergan, 1992, who also cites the quotation, which
is from Jean Renoir, Entretiens et propos, Cahiers du cinéma,
1979
- Cited in Christopher Faulkner, Jean Renoir: A
Guide to References and Resources, Boston, G.K. Hall, 1979.
- Norman King, Abel Gance: a Politics of Spectacle,
London, BFI, 1984. The received wisdom is that Gance cut into his original
negative because he needed the money a re-release might earn him. However
King comments: “it was a new film, and one which had a specific
impact in the political circumstances of 1935.”
- Renoir, My Life and My Films, 1974
- Renoir's description of this incident, which he does
not connect with the content of his film, is in Claud Gauteur (ed.),
Ecrits 1926-1971, Paris, Pierre Belfond, 1974.
- Bergan, 1992
- Bergan, 1992, quoting La Cinématographie
française (France's pre-war trade paper).
- Renoir, Ma Vie et mes films, (my translation)
- Renoir, My Life and My Films, 1974
- Jean-Luc Godard interviewed by Cahiers du cinéma,
December 1962, translated for Jean-Luc Godard, Godard on Godard,
eds. Jean Narboni and Tom Milne, Da Capo Press, 1972
- Sesonske, 1980
- Guy De Maupassant, Une Partie de campagne,
Paris in La Vie moderne, April 1881, reprinted (1881)
in the collection La Maison Tellier
- Donald Posner, "The Swinging Women of Watteau
and Fragonard", Art Bulletin, LXIV, March 1982
- “A Memoir by Henri Cartier-Bresson” in
Jean Renoir, Letters, (eds.) David Thompson and Lorraine Lo Bianco,
translated by Craig Carison, Natasha Arnoldi, Michael Wells and Anneliese
Varaldviev, London and Boston, Faber and Faber, 1994
- Guy De Maupassant, A Day in the Country and Other
Stories, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1990, translation
by David Coward
- Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education, Baltimore,
Maryland and Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin Books, 1964, a translation
by Robert Baldick of L'Education sentimentale, Paris 1869
- L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between, London, Penguin
Books, 1997 (first published 1953)
- Raymond Durgnat, Jean Renoir, London, Studio
Vista, 1975
- Peter Bogdanovich, “Director's Cut”, The
Independent (London), 21 December 1990
- 29 August 1955, when the film was first released
in the U.K.; at that time, reviews in The Times were unsigned.
- Village Voice, 2 April 1985, on the occasion
of the American première of a complete version of the film.
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Jean
Renoir (right) and cameraman Curt Courant shooting La Bête
humaine. They are in the fragment of the set of the Roubauds'
apartment which Lourié had built overlooking
the marshalling yards at Le Havre
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Filmography
Directed
by Renoir:
La Fille de
l'eau
(1924) France
Production Company: Films Jean Renoir/Maurice Touzé/Studio Films
Distribution: Maurice Rouhier, later Pierre Braunberger
Screenplay: Pierre Lestringuez and Jean Renoir
Photography: Jean Bachelet, Alphonse Gibory
Production Design: Jean Renoir
Cast: Catherine Hessling (Virginia), Pierre Lestringuez dit Philippe
(Uncle Jeff), Pierre Champagne (Justin Crépoix), Harold Lewingston
(Georges Raynal), Maurice Touzé (Ferret), Pierre Renoir (peasant
with pitchfork)
Nana (1926) France/Germany
Production Company: Films Jean Renoir
Distribution: Aubert-Pierre Braunberger
Screenplay: Pierre Lestringuez from the novel by Emile Zola
Intertitles: Denise Leblond-Zola, Jean Renoir
Assistant Director: André Cerf
Photography: Edmund Corwin, Jean Bachelet
Production Design: Claude Autant-Lara
Cast: Catherine Hessling (Nana), Werner Krauss (Count Muffat), Jean Angelo
(Count de Vandeuvres), Valeska Gert (Zoé), Pierre Lestringuez dit
Philippe (Bordenave), Pierre Champagne (La Faloise), Raymond Guérin-Catelain
(Georges Hugon), Claude Autant-Lara dit Moore (Fauchery), André
Cerf ('Le Tigre'), Pierre Braunberger (spectator at the theatre)
Charleston (Sur un air de Charleston) (1927)
France
Production Company: Films Jean Renoir
Distribution: Néo-Film (Pierre Braunberger)
Producer: Jean Renoir
Assistant Directors: André Cerf, Claude Heymann
Screenplay: Pierre Lestringuez, from an idea by André Cerf
Photography: Jean Bachelet
Cast: Catherine Hessling (The Dancer), Johnny Huggins (The Explorer),
André Cerf (The Monkey), Pierre Braunberger, Jean Renoir, Pierre
Lestringuez, André Cerf (Four Angels)
Marquitta (1927) France
Production Company: La Société des Artistes Réunis
Production Manager: M. Gargour
Distribution: Jean de Merly
Screenplay: Pierre Lestringuez and Jean Renoir
Photography: Jean Bachelet, Raymond Agnel
Production Design: Robert-Jules Garnier
Cast: Marie-Louise Iribe (Marquitta), Jean Angelo (Prince Vlasco), Henri
Debain (Count Dimitrieff, the Chamberlain), Lucien Mancini (Step-Father),
Pierre Lestringuez dit Philippe (Casino Owner), Pierre Champagne
(Taxi Driver)
La Petite marchande d'allumettes (The Little Match Girl)
(1928) France
Producers: Jean Renoir, Jean Tedesco
Distribution: Films SOFAR
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, from stories by Hans Christian Andersen
Photography: Jean Bachelet
Production Design: Erik Aaes
Assistant Directors: Claude Heymann, Simone Hamiguet
Cast: Catherine Hessling (Karen), Jean Storm (Young Man/Wooden Soldier),
Manuel Raaby (Policeman/Death), Aimée Tedesco dit Amy Wells
(Mechanical Doll)
With synchronized music arranged by Manuel Rosenthal and Michael Grant.
Tire au flanc (1928) France
Production Company: Néo-Film
Producer: Pierre Braunberger
Distribution: Armor-Film, Editions Pierre Braunberger
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, André Cerf, Claude Heymann, from the play
by André Mouézy-Eon, A. Sylvane
Intertitles: André Rigaud
Photography: Jean Bachelet
Production Design: Erik Aaes
Assistant Directors: André Cerf, Lola Markovitch
Cast: Georges Pomiès (Jean Dubois d'Ombelles), Michel Simon (Joseph),
Fridette Faton (Georgette), Félix Oudart (Colonel Brochard), Jean
Storm (Lieutenant Daumel), Manuel Rabinovitch dit Raaby (adjutant),
Kinny Dorlay (Lily), Maryanne (Madame Blandin), Zellas (Muflot), Jeanne
Helbing (Solange), Catherine Hessling (girl), André Cerf (soldier),
Max Dalban (soldier)
Le Tournoi (Le Tournoi dans la cité) (1928)
Production Company: Société des Films Historiques
Producer: Henry Dupuy-Mazuel
Assistant Director: André Cerf
Distribution: Jean de Merly, Fernand Weil
Screenplay: Henry Dupuy-Mazuel, André Jaeger-Schmidt after the
novel by Henry Dupuy-Mazuel
Photography: Marcel Lucien, Maurice Desfassiaux
Production Design: Robert Mallet-Stevens
Editor: André Cerf
Cast: Aldo Nadi (François de Baynes), Jackie Monnier (Isabelle
Ginori), Enrique Rivero (Henri de Rogier), Blanche Bernis (Catherine de
Médicis), Suzanne Desprès (Countess de Baynes), Manuel Rabinovitch
dit Raaby (Count Ginori), Max Dalban (captain of the watch)
Le Bled (1929) France
Production Company: Société des Films Historiques
Producer: Henry Dupuy-Mazuel
Assistant Directors: André Cerf and René Arcy-Hennery
Distribution: Mappemonde Films
Screenplay: Henry Dupuy-Mazuel, André Jaeger-Schmidt
Intertitles: André Rigaud
Photography: Marcel Lucien, Léon Morizet
Production Design: William Aguet
Editor: Marguerite Houlé
Cast: Jackie Monnier (Claude Duvernet), Enrique Rivero (Pierre Hoffer),
Diana Hart (Diane Duvernet), Manuel Rabinovitch dit Raaby (Manuel
Duvernet), Alexandre Arquillière (Christian Hoffer), Jacques Becker
(a Hoffer farmhand)
On purge bébé (1931) France
Production Company/Distribution: Braunberger-Richebé
Production Manager: Charles David
Assistant Directors: Claude Heymann, Pierre Schwab
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Pierre Prévert, from the play by Georges
Feydeau
Photography: Théodore Sparkhul, Roger Hubert
Production Design: Gabriel Scognamillo
Music: Paul Misraki
Sound: D. F. Scanlon, Bugnon
Editor: Jean Mamy
Cast: Jacques Louvigny (Bastien Follavoine), Marguerite Pierry (Julie
Follavoine), Sacha Tarride (Toto), Michel Simon (Chouilloux), Olga Valéry
(Madame Chouilloux), Fernandel (Horace Truchet)
La Chienne (1931) France
Production Company: Braunberger-Richebé
Distribution: Braunberger-Richebé, Europa-Films (C.S.C.)
Production Manager: Charles David
Assistant Directors: Pierre Prévert, Claude Heymann, Pierre Schwab
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, André Girard, from the novel by Georges
de la Fouchardière and the play adapted from it by André
Mouézy-Eon
Photography: Théodore Sparkhul
Continuity: Suzanne de Troye
Production Design: Gabriel Scognamillo
Sound: Joseph de Bretagne, Marcel Courme
Songs: Eugénie Buffet (“La Sérénade du pavé”),
Toselli (“Sérénade”), “Malbruk s'en va-t'en
guerre”
Editors: Denise Batcheff, Paul Féjos; then Marguerite Houlé
dit Renoir, Jean Renoir
Cast: Michel Simon (Maurice Legrand), Janie Marèze (Lulu),
Georges Flammand (Dédé), Magdeleine Berubet (Adèle
Legrand), Gaillard (Alexis Godard), Jean Gehret (M. Dagodet), Alexandre
Rignault (Langelard, the Art Critic), Lucien Mancini (Walstein, the Art
Dealer), Max Dalban (Bonnard), Marcel Courme (Colonel), Sylvain Itkine
(lawyer), Jane Pierson (concierge)
La Nuit du carrefour (Night at the Crossroads)
(1932) France
Production Company: Europa Films
Distribution: Comptoir Française Cinémathèque
Production Manager: Gaillard
Assistant Directors: Jacques Becker, Maurice Blondeau
Screenplay: Jean Renoir and Georges Simenon, from the latter's novel
Photography: Marcel Lucien, Georges Asselin, assistants Paul Fabian, Claude
Renoir Jr.
Production Design: William Aguet, assistant Jean Castanier
Sound: Joseph de Bretagne, Bugnon
Editor: Marguerite Renoir, assisted by Suzanne de Troyes, with the participation
of Walter Ruttmann
Cast: Pierre Renoir (Inspector Maigret), Georges Térof (Lucas),
Winna Winfried (Else Andersen), Georges Koudria (Carl Andersen), Jean
Gehret (Emile Michonnet), Jane Pierson (Madame Michonnet), Michel Duran
(Jojo), Jean Mitry (Arsène), Max Dalban (doctor), Gaillard (the
butcher), Manuel Rabinovitch dit Raaby (Guido)
Boudu sauvé des eaux (Boudu Saved from Drowning)
(1932) France
Production Company: Société Sirius
Distribution: Etablissements Jacques Haik
Producers: Michel Simon, Jean Gehret, Marc le Pelletier
Assistant Directors: Jacques Becker, Georges Darnoux
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Albert Valentin from the play by René
Fauchois
Photography: Marcel Lucien, assistants Jean-Paul Alphen, Asselin
Production Design: Jean Castanier, Hugues Laurent
Sound: Igor B. Kalinowski
Music: Raphael, Johann Strauss
Song: “Sur les bords de la Rivièra”
Flautist: Jean Boulze
Orpheon: Edouard Dumoulin
Editor: Marguerite Renoir, assistant Suzanne de Troye
Continuity: Suzanne de Troye
Cast: Michel Simon (Boudu), Charles Granval (Edouard Lestingois), Marcelle
Hainia (Madame Lestingois), Séverine Lerczinska (Anne-Marie), Max
Dalban (Gadin), Jean Gehret (Vigour), Jean Dasté (Student), Jacques
Becker (poet in park), Jane Pierson (Rose), Georges Darnoux (oarsman)
Chotard et Cie (Chotard & Co.) (1933) France
Production Company: Société des Films Roger Ferdinand
Producer: Roger Ferdinand
Assistant Director: Jacques Becker
Distribution: Universal
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, from the play by Roger Ferdinand
Photography: Joseph-Louis Mundwiller, assistants Claude Renoir Jr., René
Ribault
Production Design: Jean Castanier
Sound: Igor B. Kalinowski
Continuity: Suzanne de Troye
Editors: Marguerite Renoir, Suzanne de Troye
Cast: Fernand Charpin (Français Chotard), Jeanne Lory (Madame Chotard),
Georges Pomiès (Julien Collinet), Jeanne Boitel (Reine Chotard
Collinet), Max Dalban (Emile)
Madame Bovary (1933) France
Production Company: La Nouvelle Société de Film
Producer: Gaston Gallimard, Robert Aron
Distribution: Compagnie Independente de Distribution
Production Manager: René Jaspard
Assistant Directors: Pierre Desouches, Jacques Becker
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, from the novel by Gustave Flaubert
Photography: Jean Bachelet, assistants Alphonse Gibory, Claude Renoir
Jr.
Production Design: Robert Gys, Eugène Lourié, Georges Wakhevitch
Sound: Marcel Courme, Joseph de Bretagne
Music: Darius Milhaud.(“Le Printemps dans la plaine”), Donizetti
(“Lucia de Lammermoor”)
Editor: Marguerite Renoir
Cast: Valentine Tessier (Emma Bovary), Pierre Renoir (Charles Bovary),
Alice Tissot (Old Madame Bovary), Max Dearly (M. Homais), Daniel Lecourtois
(Léon Dupuis), Fernand Fabre (Rudolphe Boulanger), Pierre Laquey
(Hippolyte Tautin), Robert le Vigan (Lheureux), Romain Bouquet, (Maître
Guillaumin), André Fouche (Justin)
Toni (1934) France
Production Company: Films d'Aujourd'hui
Distribution: Films Marcel Pagnol
Production Manager: Pierre Gaut
Assistant Directors: Georges Darnoux, Antonio Canor
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Carl Einstein, from a true story found by Jacques
Mortier
Photography: Claude Renoir Jr.
Production Design: Marius Braquier, Léon Bourrely
Sound: Barbishanian
Music: Paul Bozzi, Joseph Kosma
Editors: Marguerite Renoir, Suzanne de Troye
Cast: Charles Blavette (Toni), Jenny Hélia (Marie), Celia Montalvan
(Josefa), Max Dalban (Albert), Edouard Delmont (Fernand), Andrex (Gabi),
André Kovachevitch (Sebastien), Paul Bozzi (Jacques, the guitarist)
Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936) France
Production Company: Obéron
Distribution: Minerva
Producer: André Halley des Fontaines
Production Manager: Geneviève Blondeau
Assistant Directors: Georges Darnoux, Jean Castanier
Screenplay: Jacques Prévert, Jean Renoir, from a story by Jean
Castanier
Photography: Jean Bachelet
Production Design: Jean Castanier, Robent Gys
Sound: Guy Moreau, Louis Bogé, Roger Loisel, Robert Teisseire
Music: Jean Wiener
Song “Au jour le jour, à la nuit la nuit”: Joseph Kosma
Orchestra: Roger Desormière
Editor: Marguerite Renoir, Marthe Huguet
Continuity: Marguerite Renoir
Cast: Jules Berry (Batala), René Lefèvre (Amédée
Lange), Florelle (Valentine), Nadia Sibirskaïa (Estelle), Sylvia
Bataille (Edith), Marcel Levesque (le concierge), Maurice Baquet (Charles),
Jacques Brunius (Baigneur), Henri Guisol (Meunier fils), Marcel Duhamel
(Louis), Paul Grimault (Typesetter), Jean Dasté (Illustrator),
Sylvain Itkine (Inspector Juliani), Odette Talazac (la concierge)
La Vie est à nous (Life Belongs to Us/ People of France)
(1936) France
Production Company: Parti Communiste Français
Distribution: 1936 (non-commercial: the film had not been passed by the
censorship, and screenings were not open to the public) Ciné-Liberté;
from 1969 Cinémas Associés, prints owned by L 'Avant-Scène
du Cinéma.
Directors: Jean Renoir, Jacques Becker, André Zwoboda,
Jean-Paul le Chanois, dit Dreyfus, Jacques Brunius, André
Swoboda, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Pierre Unik, Maurice Lime
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Paul Vaillant-Couturier, Jean-Paul Dreyfus, Pierre
Unik; (the content of one scene suggests that Ilya Ehrenburg, the Izvetsia
correspondent in Paris throughout the 1930s, may have had an input)
Photography: Louis Page, Jean-Serge Bourgoin, Jean Isnard, Alain Douarinou,
Claude Renoir Jr., Nicholas Hayer (and, according to various sources,
Marcel Carné and Henri Cartier-Bresson)
Music: “Internationale”, “Song of the Komsomols” by
Shostakovitch, “Auprès de ma blonde”, “La Cucaracha”
sung by Chorale Populaire de Paris, directed by Suzanna Conte
Sound: Robert Teisseire
Editor: Marguerite Renoir
Cast: Jean Dasté (teacher), Jacques Brunius (President of the Administrative
Council), Pierre Unik (Marcel Cachin' s secretary), Julien Bertheau (René,
a young worker), Nadia Sibirskaia (Ninette), Emile Drain (Gustave), Gaston
Modot (Philippe), Charles Blavette (Tonin), Max Dalban (Foreman), Madeleine
Solange (factory worker), Jacques Becker (unemployed worker), Jean Renoir,
Sylvain Itkine, Jean-Paul Dreyfus, Léon Larive, Roger Blin, Vladimir
Sokoloff, and (as themselves) Marcel Cachin, André Marty, Maurice
Thorez, Jacques Duclos, Paul Vaillant-Couturier. Stock footage of Léon
Blum, Colonel de la Roque, Adolf Hitler, et al.
Une Partie de campagne (A Day in the Country) (1936;
final cut 1946) France
Production Company: Films du Panthéon
Distribution: Films de la Pléiade
Producer: Pierre Braunberger
Production Manager: Roger Woog
Production Administrator: Jacques Brunius
Assistant Directors: Jacques Becker, Henri Cartier-Bresson dit Cartier
(some sources also list Yves Allégret, Claude Heymann and Jacques
Brunius)
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, from the story by Guy de Maupassant
Photography: Claude Renoir Jr., Bourgoin
Stills: Eli Lotar
Production Design: Robert Gys
Sound: Marcel Courme, Joseph de Bretagne
Music: Joseph Kosma, song sung by Germaine Montero
Orchestra: Roger Desormière
Assistant Director: Jacques Becker
Editor: Marguerite Renoir, Marinette Cadix
Cast: Sylvia Bataille (Henriette Dufour), Georges Darnoux dit Saint-Saëns
(Henri), Gabriello (M. Dufour), Jane Marken (Madame Dufour), Paul Temps
(Anatole), Jacques Brunius dit Borel (Rodolphe), Jean Renoir (Père
Poulain), Marguerite Renoir (Servant), Gabrielle Fontan (Grandmother),
Pierre Lestringuez (priest), Henri Cartier-Bresson and Georges Bataille
(seminarians), Alain Renoir (boy fishing)
Les Bas-fonds (The Lower Depths) (1936) France
Production Company: Albatross (Alexandre Kamenka)
Distribution: Les Distributeurs Français, S.A.
Production Manager: Vladimin Zederbaum
Assistant Directors: Jacques Becker, Joseph Soiffer
Screenplay: Eugene Zamiatine, Jacques Companéez, from the play
by Maxim Gorky
Adapted by Jean Renoir, Charles Spaak
Photography: Jean Bachelet, Fedote Bourgassof
Production Design: Eugène Lourié, Hugues Laurent
Sound: Robert Ivonnet
Music: Jean Wiener, Charles Desormière
Song: lyrics Charles Spaak, voice Irène Joachim
Editor: Marguerite Renoir
Cast: Louis Jouvet (Baron), Jean Gabin (Pepel), Suzy Prim (Vassilissa),
Vladimir Sokoloff (Kostileff), Junie Astor (Natacha), Robert le Vigan
(Actor), Gabriello (Inspector), René Genin (Luka), Jany Holt (Nastya),
Maurice Baquet (Aliocha), Léon Larive (Félix), Paul Temps,
Sylvain Itkine, Jacques Becker
La Grande illusion (1937) France
Production Company: RAC (Frank Rollmer, Alexandre and Albert Pinkéwitch)
Distribution: Réalisation d'Art Cinématographique
Production Manager: Raymond Blondy
Assistant Director: Jacques Becker
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Charles Spaak
Technical Consultant: Carl Koch
Photography: Christian Matras, assistants: Claude Renoir Jr., Jean Bourgoin,
Bourreaud
Stills: Sam Lévin
Production Design: Eugène Lourié
Sound: Joseph de Bretagne
Music: Joseph Kosma
Editor: Marguerite Renoir, assistant Marthe Huguet; 1958, restoration
for re-release, Renée Lichtig
Cast: Jean Gabin (Lt. Maréchal), Pierre Fresnay (Captain de Boeldieu),
Erich von Stroheim (Captain von Rauffenstein), Marcel Dalio (Rosenthal),
Julien Carette (Traquet), Dita Parlo (Elsa), Gaston Modot (Engineer),
Jean Dasté (Teacher), Sylvain Itkine (Demolder), Jacques Becker
(English officer)
La Marseillaise (1938) France
Production Company: Conféderation General de Travail (confederation
of trade unions), then Société de Production et d'Exploitation
du Film La Marseillaise
Distribution: RAC, World Pictures
Production Managers: André Zwoboda, A. Seigneur
Assistant Directors: Jacques Becker, Carl Koch, Claude Renoir Sr., Jean-Paul
Dreyfus, Louis Demazure, Marc Maurette, Tony Corteggiani
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Carl Koch, M. and Mme. N. Martel Dreyfus
Photography: Jean-Serge Bourgoin, Alain Douarinou, Jean-Marie Maillols,
assistants Jean-Paul Alphen, Jean Louis
Stills: Sam Lévin
Production Design: Léon Barsacq, Georges Wakhevitch, Jean Périer
Editor: Marguerite Renoir, assistant Marthe Huguet
Shadow Theatre: Lotte Reiniger
Sound: Joseph de Bretagne, Jean-Roger Bertrand, J. Demede
Music: Lalande, Rameau, Grétny, Mozart, J.S. Bach, Joseph Kosma,
Rouget de l'Isle, Sauveplane
Orchestra: Roger Desormière
Cast: Pierre Renoir (Louis XVI), Lisa Delamere (Marie Antoinette), Louis
Jouvet (Roederer), William Aguet ((La Rochefoucauld), Georges Spanelly
(La Chesnaye), Andrex (Honoré Arnaud), Ardisson (Bomier), Nadia
Sibirskaïa (Louison), Jenny Hélia (orator in the Assembly),
Léon Larive (Picard), Gaston Modot and Julien Carette (volunteer
soldiers), Marthe Marty (Bomier' s mother)
La Bête humaine (The Human Beast, but better The
Beast in Man) (1938) France
Production Company/Distribution: Paris Film Production (Robert and Raymond
Hakim)
Production Manager: Roland Tual
Assistant Directors: Claude Renoir Sr., Suzanne de Troye
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, from the novel by Emile Zola
Dialogue: Jean Renoir, Denise Leblond-Zola
Photography: Curt Courant, Claude Renoir Jr
Stills: Sam Lévin
Production Design: Eugène Lourié
Sound: Robert Tesseire
Music: Joseph Kosma
Continuity: Suzanne de Troye
Editor: Marguerite Renoir, railway sequences Suzanne de Troye
Cast: Jean Gabin (Jacques Lantier), Simone Simon (Séverine Roubaud),
Fernand Ledoux (Roubaud), Julien Carette (Pecqueux), Jenny Hélia
(Pecqueux's girlfriend), Colette Régis (Madame Victoire), Jacques
Berlioz (Grandmorin), Jean Renoir (Cabuche), Balanchette Brunoy (Flore)
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La
Règle du jeu: The ambiguous
image: we know
that Robert and Genevieve are parting, but Christine (watching through
a spy-glass) does not
|
La Règle
du jeu (The Rules of the Game) (1939; restored 1959) France
Production Company/Distribution: Nouvelle Edition Française
Production Administrator: Camille François
Production Manager: Claude Renoir Sr
Assistant Directors: André Zwobada, Henri Cartier-Bresson
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Carl Koch, André Zwobada
Photography: Jean Bachelet, assistants: Jean-Paul Alphen, Alain Renoir
Technical Advisor: Tony Corteggiani
Continuity: Dido Freire
Stills: Sam Lévin
Production Design: Eugène Lourié, Max Douy
Costumes: Coco Chanel
Sound: Joseph de Bretagne
Music (arranged by Roger Désormière and Joseph Kosma): Mozart,
Monsigny, Saint-Saëns, Johann Strauss, Chopin, Sallabert, Vincent
Scotto
Orchestra: Roger Desormière
Editor: Marguerite Renoir, assistant Marthe Huguet
Cast: Marcel Dalio (Robert de la Chesnaye), Nora Grégor (Christine),
Roland Toutain (André Jurieu), Jean Renoir (Octave), Paulette Dubost
(Lisette), Mila Parély (Geneviève), Julien Carette (Marceau),
Gaston Modot (Edouard Schumacher), Odette Talazac (Charlotte de la Plante),
Pierre Magnier (the General), Pierre Nay (Saint-Aubin), Richard Francoeur
(M. la Bruyère), Claire Gérard (Mme. la Bruyère),
Eddy Debray (Corneille, the butler), Léon Larive (Chef), Anne Mayen
(Jackie), Lise Elina (Radio Reporter), André Zwoboda (Caudron engineer),
Henri Cartier-Bresson (English servant), Tony Corteggiani (Berthelin),
Jenny Hélia (servant), Camille François (voice of radio
announcer)
Swamp Water (1941) U.S.A.
Production Company: Twentieth Century-Fox
Producer and dialogue director: Irving Pichel
Screenplay: Dudley Nichols, from the story by Vereen Bell
Photography: Peverell Marley, Lucien Ballard
Production Design: Thomas Little, Richard Day
Music: David Buttolph
Editor: Walter Thompson
Cast: Dana Andrews (Ben Ragan), Walter Huston (Thursday Ragan), Walter
Brennan (Tom Keefer), Anne Baxter (Julie), John Carradine (Jesse Wick),
Mary Howard (Hannah), Ward Bond (Jim Donson), Guinn Williams (Bud Donson),
Virginia Gilmore (Mabel), Eugene Pallette (Sheriff), Russell Simpson (Marty
McCord)
This Land is Mine (1943) U.S.A.
Production Company/Distribution: R.K.O.
Producers/Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Dudley Nichols
Photography: Frank Redman
Production Design: Eugène Lourié, Albert d'Agostino, Walter
F. Keeler
Sound: Terry Kellum, James Stewart
Music: Lothar Perl
Editor: Frederic Knudtson
Cast: Charles Laughton (Albert Lory), Maureen O'Hara (Louise Martin),
Kent Smith (Paul Martin), George Sanders (George Lambert), Walter Slezak
(Major von Keller), Una O'Connor (Mrs. Lory), Nancy Gates (Julie Grant),
George Coulouris (prosecutor)
Salute to France (1944) U.S.A.
Production Company: Office of War Information
Project Officer: Burgess Meredith
Distribution: United Artists
Screenplay: Philip Dunne, Jean Renoir, Burgess Meredith
Photography: George Webber (Army Pictorial Service)
Music: Kurt Weill
Supervising Editor: Helen van Dongen
Editors: Marcel Cohen, Maria Reyto, Jean Oser
Technical Advisor: Office of Strategic Services
Cast: Burgess Meredith (Tommy), Garson Kanin (Joe and Commentary Voice),
Claude Dauphin (Narrator and French soldier)
The Southerner (1945) U.S.A.
Production Company: Producing Artists Inc.
Distribution: United Artists
Producers: Robert Hakim, David L. Loew
Assistant Director: Robert Aldrich
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Hugo Butler, from the novel Hold Autumn in
Your Hand by George Sessions Perry
Photography: Lucien Andriot
Production Design: Eugène Lourié
Sound: Frank Webster
Music: Werner Janssen
Editor: Gregg Tallas
Cast: Zachary Scott (Sam Tucker), Betty Field (Nora Tucker), Beulah Bondi
(Grandma), J. Carrol Naish (Devers), Percy Kilbride (Harmie Jenkins),
Norman Lloyd (Finlay), Charles Kemper (Tim)
The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946) U.S.A.
Production Company: Camden productions Inc.
Producers: Benedict Bogeaus, Burgess Meredith
Distribution: United Artists
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Burgess Meredith, from the play by André
Heuzé, André de Lorde and Thielly Norès, based on
the novel by Octave Mirbeau
Photography: Lucien Andriot
Production Design: Eugène Lourié
Costumes: Barbara Karinska
Music: Michel Michelet
Editor: James Smith
Cast: Paulette Goddard (Célestine), Burgess Meredith (Captain Mauger),
Hurd Hatfield (Georges Lanlaire), Reginald Owen (M. Lanlaire), Judith
Anderson (Mme. Lanlaire), Francis Lederer (Joseph), Florence Bates (Rose)
The Woman on the Beach (1947) U.S.A.
Production Company/Distribution: R.K.O.
Producer: Jack J. Gross
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Frank Davis, J. R. Michael Hogan, from the novel
None So Blind by Mitchell Wilson
Photography: Harry Wild, Leo Trover
Production Design: Albert d'Agostino, Walter E. Keller
Sound: Jean L. Speak, Clem Portman
Music: Hanns Eisler
Editors: Roland Gross, Lyle Boyer
Cast: Joan Bennett (Peggy Butler), Robert Ryan (Scott Burnett), Charles
Bickford (Tod Butler), Nan Leslie (Eve), Walter Sande (Vernecke)
| |
 |
| |
The
River:
Lourié built this platform on the
river bank, away from the main set of the house, to allow the final
shot to be done without any cuts
|
The River
(1951) U.S.A.
Production Company: Oriental International Film Inc. Theater Guild
Producers: Kenneth McEldowney, Jean Renoir
Production Manager: Kalyan Gupta
Distribution: United Artists
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Rumer Godden, from the latter's novel
Photography (Technicolor): Claude Renoir Jr., operator Ramananda Sen Gupta
Production Design: Eugène Lourié, Bansi Chandra Gupta
Sound: Charles Paulton, Charles Knott
Music: classical Indian, Schumann, Mozart, Weber (“Invitation to
the Dance”)
Musical Director: M. A. Partha Sarathy
Editor: George Gale
Cast: Nora Swinburne (Mother), Esmond Knight (Father), Arthur Shields
(Mr. John), Thomas E. Breen (Captain John), Radha Sri Ram (Melanie), Adrienne
Corri (Valerie), Patricia Walters (Harriet), Suprova Mukerjee (Nan), Richard
Foster (Bogey), June Hillman (narrator)
The Golden Coach (Le Carrosse d'or, La Carrozzo d'Oro)
(1953) France/Italy
Production Company: Panaria Films, Delphinus & Hoche Productions
Distribution: Corona
Producer: Francesco Alliata
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Renzo Avenzo, Giulio Macchi, Jack Kirkland, Ginette
Doynel, from the play Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement by Prosper
Merimée
Photography (Technicolor): Claude Renoir Jr.
Technicolor Consultant: Joan Bridge
Production Design: Mario Chiari
Costume design: Maria de Matteïs
Sound: Joseph de Bretagne, Ovidio del Grande
Music: Vivaldi, Corelli, Olivier Mettra
Editors: Mario Serandrei, David Hawkins
Cast: Anna Magnani (Camilla), Duncan Lamont (Viceroy), Odouardo Spadaro
(Don Antonio), Riccando Rioli (Ramon), Paul Campbell (Felipe), Nadia Fiorelli
(Isabelle), Dante (Harlequin), Ralph Truman (the Duke), Jean Debucourt
(the Bishop), George Higgins (Martinez), Gisella Mathews (Marquisa Altamirano),
Raf de la Torre (Chief Justice), Medini Brothers (child acrobats)
(All 35 mm. English-language prints I have seen have suffered three brief
but significant trims; these are not found in 16mm English language or
the dubbed 35mm French language prints).
French Cancan (1955) France
Production Company: Franco London Films, Jolly Films
Distribution: Gaumont
Producer: Louis Wipf
Assistant Directors: Serge Vallin, Pierre Kast, Jacques Rivette
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, from an idea by André-Paul Antoine
Photography (Technicolor): Michel Kelber
Production Design: Max Douy
Costume Design: Rosine Delamare
Sound: Antoine Petitjean
Music: Georges van Parys
Songs: “Complainte de la Butte,” lyrics by Jean Renoir; airs
from Caf'Conc' of 1900, sung by Cora Vaucaire, Mario Juillard
Choreography: Georges Grandjean
Editor: Borys Lewin
Cast: Jean Gabin (Danglard), Maria Félix (La Belle Abbesse), Françoise
Arnoul (Nini), Jean-Roger Caussimon (Baron Walter), Gianni Esposito (Prince
Alexandre), Philippe Clay (Casimir), Michel Piccoli (Valorgueil), Jean
Panédès (Coudrier), Lydia Johnson (Guibole), Max Dalban
(Owner of La Reine Blanche), Jacques Jouanneau (Bidon), Valentine Tessier
(Mme. Olympe), Franco Pastorino (Paulo), Pierre Olaf (Pierrot the whistler),
Patachou (Yvette Guilbert), Edith Piaf (Eugénie Buffet), Gaston
Modot (Danglard's Servant), Lia Amenda (Esther Georges), Paquerette (Prunelle),
Michel Piccoli (Valorgueil), Patachou (Yvette Guilbert)
Eléna et les hommes (1956) France
Production Company: Franco London Films, Les Films Gibé, Electra
Compagnia Cinematografica
Distribution: Cinédis
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Jean Serge, Cy Howard
Photography (Eastmancolor): Claude Renoir Jr.
Production Design: Jean André
Costume Design: Rosine Delamare, Monique Plotin
Sound: William Sivel
Music: Joseph Kosma
Songs: “Méfiez-vous de Paris”, “O Nuit”
Singers: Léo Marjane, Juliette Greco
Arrangements: Georges van Parys
Editor: Borys Lewin
Cast: Ingrid Bergman (Princess Eléna Sorokovska), Jean Marais (General
François Rollan), Mel Ferrer (Henri de Chevincount), Pierre Bertin
(Martin-Michaud), Jean Richard (Hector), Magali Noel (Lolotte), Elina
Labourdette (Paulette Escoffier), Juliette Greco (Miarka), Jean Castanier
(Isnard), Gaston Modot (Gypsy chief), Léo Marjane (street singer)
Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier (1959) made for television,
and not distributed till 1961; France
Production Company: O.R.T.F., Sofirad, Compagnie Jean Renoir
Distribution: Consortium Pathé
Production Manager: Albert Hollebecke
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, from the novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Photography: Georges Leclerc
Production Design: Marcel-Louis Dieulot
Sound: Joseph Richard
Music: Joseph Kosma
Editor: Renée Lichtig
Cast: Jean-Louis Barrault (Dr. Cordelier/Opale), Teddy Billis (Maître
Joly), Michel Vitold (Dr. Lucien Séverin), Jean Topant (Désiré),
Micheline Gary (Marguerite), André Ceres (Inspector Salbris), Jean
Renoir (as himself, the narrator), Gaston Modot (Blaise, the gardener)
Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (Lunch on the Grass, Picnic
on the Grass) (1959) France
Production Company: Compagnie Jean Renoir
Distribution: Consortium Pathé
Production Manager: Ginette Doynel
Screenplay: Jean Renoir
Photography (Eastmancolor): Georges Leclerc
Production Design: Marcel-Louis Dieulot
Sound: Joseph de Bretagne
Music: Joseph Kosma
Editor: Renée Lichtig
Cast: Paul Meurisse (Professon Etienne Alexis), Catherine Rouvel (Nénette),
Fernand Sardou (Nino), Ingrid Nordine (Marie-Charlotte), Charles Blavette
(Gaspard), Jean Claudio (Rosseau)
Le Caporal épinglé (The Vanishing Corporal,
The Elusive Corporal) (1962) France
Directors: Jean Renoir, Guy Lefranc
Production Company: Films du Cyclope
Distribution: Pathé
Production Manager: René G. Vuattoux
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Guy Lefranc, from the novel by Jacques Perret
Photography: Georges Leclerc
Production Design: Eugene Herrly
Sound: Antoine Petitjean
Music: Joseph Kosma
Editor: Renée Lichtig
Cast: Jean-Pierre Cassel (Corporal), Claude Brasseur (Pater), Claude Rich
(Ballochet), Jean Carmet (Guillaume), Jacques Jouanneau (Penche-à-gauche),
Cornelia Froebass (Erika), Mario David (Caruso), O.E. Hasse (Drunken Passenger),
Guy Bedos (the Stutterer)
Le Petit théâtre de Jean Renoir (1969) France
Production Company: Son et Lumière, RAI, Bavaria, ORTF
Producer: Pierre Long
Production Manager: Robert Paillardon
Screenplay: Jean Renoir
Production Design: Gilbert Margerie
Photography (colour): Georges Leclerc, assistants Antoine Georgiakis,
Georges Liron
Sound: Guy Rolphe
Music: Jean Wiener (Le Dernier réveillon, Le Roi d'Yvetot),
Joseph Kosma (La Cireuse électrique)
Song: “Quand l'amour meurt” by Octave Crémieux
Editor: Geneviève Winding
Cast: Le Dernier réveillon: Nino Formicola and Milly-Monti
(Tramps), Roland Bertin (Gontran), Robert Lombard (Maître d'); La
Cireuse électrique: Marguerite Cassan (Emilie), Pierre Olaf
(Gustave), Jacques Dynam (Jules), Jean-Louis Tristan (Salesman); Quand
l'amour meurt: Jeanne Moreau (Singer); Le Roi d'Yvetot: Fernand
Sardou (Duvallier), Françoise Arnoul (Isabelle), Jean Carmet (Feraud),
Dominique Labourier (Paulette)
OTHER
CREDITS
Films
featuring Renoir or his work, or in which he had a major involvement:
Catherine (1924)
France
Director: Albert Dieudonné
Production Company: Films Jean Renoir
Distribution: Pierre Braunberger (1927, re-edited and released under the
title Une Vie sans joie)
Screenplay: Jean Renoir
Photography: Jean Bachelet, Alphonse Gibory
Cast: Catherine Hessling (Catherine Ferrand), Louis Gauthier (Georges
Mallet), Maud Richard (Mme. Mallet, his wife), Eugénie Naud (Mme.
Laisné, his sister), Albert Dieudonné (Maurice Laisné,
his nephew), Pierre Lestringuez, dit Philippe (Adolphe), Pierre
Champagne (the Mallets' son), Jean Renoir (sub-prefect).
La P'tite Lili (1927) France
Director: Alberto Cavalcanti,
Production Company/Distribution: Néo—Film
Producer: Pierre Braunberger
Screenplay: Alberto Cavalcanti, from a song by Eugène Gavel and
Louis Benech
Photography: Jimmy Rogers
Production Design: Erik Aaes
Music: Darius Milhaud (1930 version)
Editor: Marguerite Houlé
Cast: Catherine Hessling (La P'tite Lili), Jean Renoir (Pimp), Guy Ferrand
(Singer), Roland Cailloux (Concierge), Jean Storm (Minister), Dido Freire
(the Little Cousin), Alain Renoir (trespasser)
Le Petit chaperon rouge (Little Red Riding Hood) (1929)
France
Director: Alberto Cavalcanti,
Producer: Jean Renoir
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Alberto Cavalcanti, from the story by Charles
Perrault
Photography: Marcel Lucien, René Ribault; Camera Operator: Jimmy
Rogers; Assistant: Eli Lotar
Editor: Marguerite Houlé
Assistant Directors: Pierre Prévert and André Cerf
Cast: Catherine Hessling (Little Red Riding Hood), Jean Renoir (the Wolf),
André Cerf (Notary), Pierre Prévert (a little girl and other
parts), Pablo Quevado (Young Man), Marcel la Montagne (Farmer), Odette
Talazac (Farmer's Wife), William Aguet (old Englishwoman), Aimée
Tedesco dit Amy Wells (newspaper seller)
Die Jagd nach dem Gluck (1930) Germany
Directors: Rochus Gliese, Carl Koch,
Production Company: Comenius Film GmbH
Distribution: Deutscher Wenkfilm GmbH
Screenplay: Lotte Reiniger, Carl Koch, Rochus Glieser from an idea by
Lotte Reiniger and Alex Strasser
Photography: Fritz Arno Wagner
Sets: Rochus Gliese, Arno Richter
Shadow Theatre Effects: Lotte Reiniger, assisted by Carl Koch and Berthold
Bartosch
Music: Théo Mackeben
Editor: Marguerite Houlé
Cast: Cathenine Hessling (Aimée), Jean Renoir (Robert, a businessman),
Alexander Murski (Marquand, a pedlar), Berthold Bartosch (Mario), Aimée
Tedesco dit Amy Wells (Jeanne)
(This seems to be a lost film).
The Spanish Earth (1937) U.S.A.
Director: Joris Ivens
Production Company: Contemporary Historians, Inc.
Distribution (U.S.A.): Prometheus Pictures; France: Ciné-Liberté
Script: Joris Ivens
Photography: John Ferno (Fernhout), Joris Ivens
Editor: Helen van Dongen
Music: Marc Blitzstein, Virgil Thompson, after Spanish folk music
Sound: Irving Reis
Commentary: written and spoken by Ernest Hemingway. Renoir wrote and spoke
the commentary for the French version (Terre d'Espagne), which,
apparently, is now lost.
La Tosca (1940) Italy
Director: Carl Koch (started by Renoir),
Production Company/Distribution: Era-Scalera Films
Producer: Arturo Ambrosio
Assisatnt Director: Luchino Visconti
Screenplay: Allesandro De Stefani, Carl Koch, Jean Renoir, Luchino Visconti,
from the play by Victorien Sardou
Photography: Ubaldo Arata
Production Design: Gustavo Abel, Amleto Bonetti
Sound: Piero Cavazzuti
Music: Giacomo Puccini
Editor: Gino Betrone
Cast: Imperio Argentina (Tosca), Michel Simon (Scarpia), Rossano Brazzi
(Mario Cavaradossi)
L'Album de famille de Jean Renoir (1956) France
Director: Roland Gritti
Production Company: Paris Télévision, then Franco-London
Films
Distributor: Cinédis
Script: Pierre Desgraupes
Photography: Jean Tournier
Cast (as themselves): Jean Renoir, Pierre Desgraupes
Jean Renoir: le patron (1967) Dir: Jacques Rivette, France
1. La Recherche du
relatif
2. La Direction
des acteurs
3. La Règle
et l'exception
Production company: O.R.T.F.
Producers: Janine Bazin and André S. Labarthe
Photography: Pierre Mareschal
Sound: Guy Solignac
Edited by Jean Eustache
Also featuring Marcel Dalio, Pierre Braunberger and Catherine Rouvel.
Three three feature-length films featuring Renoir and his work,
made for the television series Cinéastes de notre temps.
Part 2 was not broadcast, because Renoir's conversation
with Michel Simon was judged too “racy”!
La Direction d'acteur par Jean Renoir (1968) France
Director: Gisèle Braunberger
Producer: Pierre Braunberger
Production Manager: Roger Fleytoux
Photography: Edmond Richard
Sound: René Forget
Editor: Mireille Maubena
Cast (as themselves): Jean Renoir, Gisèle Braunberger
Jean Renoir directs actress Gisèle Braunberger in rehearsals of
a text he has adapted from Rumer Godden's story Breakfast at the Nikolaïdes,
using the “Italian Method”.
Louis Lumière (1967) France
Director: Eric Rohmer
Production Company: O.R.T.F. in the series Allez au cinéma
Cast (as themselves): Henri Langlois and Jean Renoir
This is the film which inspired the polemical lecture about film history
which Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Léaud) delivers to fellow members
of the collective in Godard's La Chinoise (1967): “There's
a false idea going the rounds concerning newsreels in the cinema... people
say it was Lumière who invented newsreels, that he made documentaries,
whilst, at the same time, there was another guy called Méliès,
and everybody says about him that he made fiction, that he was a dreamer,
that he filmed ghosts, optical illusions. I think it was precisely the
opposite... A couple of days ago, at the Cinémathèque, I
saw a film on Lumière by Monsieur Henri Langlois... And this film
proved that Lumière was a painter, which is to say that he filmed...
exactly the same things as were being painted by the painters of his time,
people like Picasso, Manet or Renoir... He filmed stations, public gardens,
people coming out of factories... people playing cards, tramways... Méliès
filmed... a trip to the moon, the visit of the King of Yugoslavia to President
Fallières... and now, with the passage of time, one can see that
these are really the newsreels of the era... O.K., maybe as he did them
they were reconstructed newsreels, and I'll go even further: I would say
that Méliès was a Brechtian...” (my translation)
The visual quality of the Lumière material is a revelation.
The Christian Licorice Store (1971) U.S.A.
Director: James Frawley
Production Company: National General Pictures
Producers: Michael S. Laughlin, James Frawley
Dsirtibution: Cinema Center Films
Photography (color): David Butler
Music: Lalo Schifrin
Cast: Beau Bridges, Maud Adams, Gilbert Roland and (as themselves) Jean
and Dido Renoir.
Jean Renoir (1993) U.K.
Director: David Thompson
Production Company/Distributor: Omnibus, BBC TV
Two one-hour films on Renoir and his work.
Un Tournage à la campagne (1994) France
A revealing compilation (by Alain Fleischer) of out-takes from the shooting
of Une Partie de campagn, illustrating, amongst other things, the
subtle changes in lines of dialogue from one take to another, the result
of the actors being encouraged to improvise.
Renoir
in the Theatre:
Jules César
(Julius
Caesar),
France 1954
Adaptation of Shakespeare's play by Grisha Dabat and Mitsou Dabat
Director: Jean Renoir.
Producer: Philippe Decharte:
Production Manager: Jean Serge
Music: Beethoven's Fifth Symphony
Cast: Paul Meurisse (Brutus), Jean-Pierre Aumont (Marc Anthony), Henri
Vidal (Julius Caesar), Yves Robert (Cassius), Loleh Bellon (Portia), Françoise
Christophe ( Calpurnia), Jean Parédès (Casca), Jean Topart
(Octavius Caesar), Gaston Modot (Ligarius), Henri-JacquesHuet (Flavius),
Jaque-Catelain (Decius), François Vibert (soothsayer).
A gala production, staged for a single night in the Roman Arena in Arles
to celebrate the 2000th. anniversary of the foundation of the
city by Julius Caesar.
Orvet, France 1955
An original play in three acts by Jean Renoir.
Director: Jean Renoir
Producer: Jean Dercante
General Manager: Alex Desbiolles
Sets: Georges Wakhevitch
Scene Painting: Laverdet
Costumes: Barbara Karinska, Givenchy
Music: Joseph Kosma
Lighting Albert Richard
Technical Assistant: Robert Petit
Stage manager: Maurice Fraigneau
Cast: Leslie Caron (Orvet), Paul Meurisse (Georges), Michel Herbault (Olivier),
Catherine Le Couey (Mme. Camus), Raymond Bussières (Coutant), Jacques
Jouanneau (William), Marguerite Cassan (Clotilde), Yorick Royan (Berthe),
Suzanne Courtal (Mère Vipère), Pierre Olaf (Phillipe-le-pod-bot),
Georges Saillard (Doctor), Georges Hubert (First Huntsman), Henry Charret
(Second Huntsman).
Written for Leslie Caron.
Le Grand couteau (The Big Knife), France 1957
Translation and adaptation by Jean Renoir of the play by his friend Clifford
Odets, which had been filmed in 1955 by Renoir's former assistant Robert
Aldrich.
Director: Jean Serge
Film Sequence with Daniel Gélin shot by Jean Renoir,
Sets: Fred Givone
Lighting: Hughes Pinneux
Stage Manager: Georges Frémeuax
Cast: Daniel Gélin (Charles Castle), Claude Génia (Marion
Castle), Paul Bernard (Marcus Hoff), Paul Cambo (Smiley Coy), France Delahalle
(Patty Benedicte), Vera Norman (Dixie Evans), Teddy Bilis (Nat), Andrea
Parisy (Connie Bliss), François Marie (Buddy Bliss), Robert Montcade
(Hank Teagle), Andrès Wheatley (Russell), Jacques Dannoville (Gardener)
Carola, U.S.A. 1960
Translation from French and adaptation by Jean Renoir, Robert Goldsby
and Angela Goldsby of Renoir's original three act play
Director: Jean Renoir
Assistant Director: Robert Goldsby
Sets: John T. Dreier
Costumes: Shan Slattery
Technical Assistant: Herbert Schoeller
Stage Manager: Larry Belling
Cast: Deneen Peckinpah (Carola Janssen), Robert Martinson (General von
Clodius), Eileen Coltrell (Mireille), Caroline Rosqui (Josette), Sydney
Field (Campan), Dan Moore (Henri), David Grimsted (Colonel Kroll), James
Tripp (Parmentier), Duke Stroud (Camille), Malcolm Green (Lieutenant Keller),
Robert Phalen (First French Gestapo Member), Charles Head (Second French
Gestapo Member), David Vilner (First German Military Policeman), Dan Rich
(Second German Military Policeman), Tony Loeb & Cliff Ghames (Members
of the Gestapo), Jim Mantell & Lewis Brown (German Soldiers), Wendy Goodman,
Shelia Ryan & Susan Brewer (Actresses), Miles Snyder & Stephen Vause (Actors).
A new adaptation by James Bridges for Hollywood Television Theater was
booadcast on 3 February, 1973, on WNET, New York, directed by Norman Lloyd.
The cast included Leslie Caron, Mel Ferrer, Albert Paulsen, Michael Sacks,
Anthony Zerbe, Carmen Zapete and Douglas Anderson. The Production Designer
was Eugène Lourié
Select
Bibliography
By
Renoir, including transcripts of his finished films:
Orvet,
Paris, Gallimard, 1955
Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier (continuity of the film),
L'Avant-scène du cinéma, 1961
Renoir: My Father, London and Boston, Collins and Little Brown,
1962 (translation [by Randolph and Dorothy Weaver] of Pierre-August
Renoir, mon père, Paris, Hachette, 1962)
Une Partie de campagne (continuity of the film), L'Avant-scène
du cinéma, 1962 (published together with that of Vigo's Zéro
de conduite)
Grand Illusion, London, Lorrimer, 1970, revised 1984 (a
translation [by Marianne Alexandre and Andrew Sinclair] of the continuity
of the film La Grand illusion, published by L'Avant-scène
du cinéma, 1964)
The Rules of the Game, London, Lorrimer, 1970, revised 1984
(a translation [by John McGrath and Maureen Teitelbaum] of the continuity
of the film La Règle du jeu published by L'Avant-scène
du cinéma, 1965)
The Notebooks of Captain Georges, London and Boston, Collins and
Little Brown, 1966 (translation [by Norman Denny] of Renoir's novel Les
Cahiers du capitaine Georges, Paris, Gallimard, 1966)
My Life and My Films, London, Collins 1974 (a translation [by Norman
Denny] of the director's memoirs: Ma Vie et mes films, Paris, Flammarion,
1974; this contains an account of the setting up of La Grande illusion)
Ecrits 1926-1971, Paris, Pierre Belfond, 1974 (Renoir's journalism
and other writings collected by Claud Gauteur)
La Chienne (continuity of the film), L'Avant-scène du
cinéma, 1975
Carola (a play in three acts, complete text), L'Avant-scène
du théâtre, 1976
Entretiens et propos, Cahiers du cinéma, 1979
Renoir on Renoir: Interviews, Essays and Remarks, translated
by Carol Volk, Cambridge, New York, Port Chester, Melbourne, Sydney,
Cambridge University Press, 1989
Letters, edited by Lorraine Lo Bianco and David Thompson, translated
by Craig Carison, Natasha Arnold, Michael Wells, Anneliese Varaldviev,
London and Boston, Faber and Faber, 1994
La Coeur à l'aise, Paris, Flammarion, 1978, novel
Le Crime de l'anglais, Paris, Flammarion, 1979, novel
Geneviève, Paris, Flammarion, 1979, novel
Julienne et son amour and En avant, Rosalie !, Henri Veyrier,
1979, unproduced scripts
Oeuvres de cinéma inédites, Paris, Les Cahiers
du cinéma/Gallimard, 1982, synopses, treatments, découpages
On Renoir and his Films:
André Bazin (ed. by François Truffaut, from the notes left
by Bazin on his death), Jean Renoir, Paris, Lebovici, 1989
Ronald Bergan, Jean Renoir, Projections of Paradise: a Biography,
London, Bloomsbury, 1992
Richard Boston, Boudu Saved from Drowning (Boudu sauvé
des eaux), London, BFI Classics, 1992, (recommended critical
and contextual study of a much-loved film)
Bernard Chardère, Jean Renoir, Lyon, Premier Plan nos. 22,
23, 24, May 1962
Raymond Durgnat, Jean Renoir, London, Studio Vista, Cassell and
Collier Macmillan, 1975 (a pioneering English-language study of the films;
full of illuminating critical insights, despite many minor errors in its
descriptions of the action)
Christopher Faulkner, Jean Renoir: A Guide to References and Resources,
Boston, G.K. Hall, 1979 (contains a biographical chronology; a critical
introduction to the films; a complete filmography; publication details
and outline summaries of books and articles by and about Renoir, up to
1975)
Christopher Faulkner, The Social Cinema of Jean Renoir, Princeton,
N.J. and Guildford, Princeton University Press, 1986
Max Gaillard and Vincent Pinard (conception), Exposition Jean Renoir,
Le Havre, L'Unité Cinéma de la Maison de la Culture du Havre
and Centre d'Animation Culturelle Jean Renoir de Dieppe, 1982
Penelope Gilliatt (ed.), Jean Renoir: Essays, Conversations, Reviews,
New York, McGraw-Hill, 1975
Pierre Guislain, La Règle du jeu: Jean Renoir, Paris, Hatier,
1990
James Leahy, "Image, Meaning, History... & the Voice of God",
Vertigo, no. 4, Spring, 1994 (on La Vie est à nous,
narration and March of Time)
James Leahy, "Is it on Video? The Angel and the Vampire", Vertigo,
no. 5, Winter 1994-5 (on Le Crime de Monsieur Lange)
James Leahy, notes on Renoir, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange and French
Cancan, published with the release of those films on video, London,
Connoisseur Video, Spring 1996
James Leahy, "Jean Renoir", London, Encarta CD-ROM, Websters
Microsoft International, 1998 and subsequent editions
Martin O'Shaughnessy, Jean Renoir, Manchester and New York, Manchester
University Press, 2000
Alexander Sesonske, Jean Renoir: the French Films, 1924-1939,
Cambridge Mass. and London, Harvard University Press, 1980 (comprehensively
researched critical account of the films, a mixture of the insightful
and the pedestrian)
Gerry Turvey, "1936, the culture of the Popular Front and Jean Renoir",
London, Academic Press, Media, Culture and Society, Vol.4,
No.4, October 1982
Peter Wollen, "La Règle du jeu and Modernity",
Film Studies, no.1, 1999
General Film:
J. Dudley Andrew, Mists of Regret, Princeton N.J., Princeton University
Press, 1995
Mary Lea Bandy (ed.), Rediscovering French Film, New York, Museum
of Modem Art, 1983 (an anthology of important articles by film historians,
critics and filmmakers; has a substantial bibliography)
Jacques B. Brunius, En Marge du cinéma français,
Paris, Arcanes, 1954
Noël Burch, Theory of Film Practice, New York, Praeger, 1973
(this is a translation and revision, by the author, of Praxis du cinéma,
Paris, Gallimard, 1969 and includes a major essay on Nana)
"Cinéma/Sound", special issue of Yale French Studies,
New Haven, Conn., No. 60, 1980
Colin Crisp, French Classic Cinema, Bloomington and Indianapolis,
Indiana University Press, 1993
Goffredo Fofi, "The Cinema of the Popular Front in France (1934-38)",
London, Society for Education in Film and Television, Screen, Vol.13,
No.4, Winter 1972-3
John Gibbs, Mise-en-scène: Film Style and Interpretation,
London and New York, Wallflower Press, 2002
Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, Paris, Collection
des Cahiers du cinéma, Pierre Belfond, 1968
Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (eds.), French Film: Texts and
Contexts, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1990
Susan Hayward, French National Cinema, London & New York, Routledge,
1993 (important, revealing and well-researched account of the economic
infrastructure of French filmmaking)
Norman King, Abel Gance: a Politics of Spectacle, London, BFI,
1984
Rémi Fournier Lanzoni, French Cinema: from its Beginnings to
the Present, New York & London, Continuum 2002
James Leahy, "Historical Development of Cinema in France", London,
Encarta CD-ROM, Websters Microsoft International, 1997 and subsequent
editions
James Leahy, "All in the Script? So Why Make the Movie?", Vertigo,
Vol.2, No.2, 2002
Eugène Lourié, My Work in Films, San Diego, New York
and London, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985 (the memoirs of the production
designer whose collaboration with Renoir lasted from Les Bas fonds
through the Hollywood years to The River)
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Screen,
Vol.16, No.3, Autumn 1975
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (d.), The Oxford History of World Cinema,
Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1996
Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium, Baltimore,
Maryland, John Hopkins University Press, 1998
V. I. Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting, New York, Grove
Press, 1960
Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis, London,
Starword, 2nd edition, 1992
David Thomson, Movie Man, New York, Stein and Day, 1967
David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, U.S.A.
and U.K., Alfred A. Knopf and Little Brown, 2002
Ginette Vincendeau and Keith Reader (eds.), La Vie est à
nous: French Cinema of the Popular Front 1935-1938, London, National
Film Theatre, BFI, 1986 (a collection of essays, some in translation,
to introduce a major season of films at the National Film Theatre on the
50th anniversary of the election of the Popular Front government in France)
Alan Williams, Republic of Images, Cambridge, Mass. and London,
Harvard University Press, 1992
Non-Verbal Communication Systems:
Michael Argyle, The Psychology of Interpersonal Behaviour, Harmondswoth,
Mx., Penguin Books, 1967
Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, St. Albans, Paladin,
1973 (essays on order and organisation in living systems, including discussions
of non-verbal communication, and how these have been elaborated into complex
forms of art)
Ray L. Birtwhistell, Kinesics and Context: Essays on Body-Motion Communication,
U.S.A., University of Pennsylvania Press 1970 (pioneering scientific investigation
of the systems now popularly known as “body language”)
Edward Hall, The Silent Language, New York, Fawcett World Library,
1966
(space considered not as a metaphor for human relationships, but as a
major determinant of communicative and emotional interactions within and
across cultures)
Edward Hall, The Hidden Dimension, New York, Doubleday Anchor,
1969
(introduction to proxemics, Hall's name for his pioneering scientific
study of humanity's organisation and use of space)
John Laver and Sandy Hutcheson (eds.), Communication in Face to Face
Interaction, Harmondswoth, Mx., Penguin Books, 1972
Alan Lomax, “Choreometrics and Ethnographic Filmmaking”, Filmmaker's
Newsletter Vol. 4, No. 4, February 1971. (Lomax's seminal account
of the scientific study of dance patterns was brought to my attention
by Nick Ray, his friend since the 1930s. We were sitting in Lomax's apartment,
which Nick used to borrow when the owner was away for the weekend. Drawing
on the ideas of some of the writers above, I was explaining that I believed
that much of the power and poetry of Nick's films depended on their articulations
of space and movement. The same is true of those of Renoir. Lomax's insights
are relevant not only to documentary and ethnographic filmmakers, but
to any analysis of how films communicate their meanings and generate their
impact).
General:
John Berger and others, Ways of Seeing, London, BBC and Penguin
Books, 1972 (based on the television series of the same name)
Tom Bishop, Pirandello and the French Theater, New York, New York
University Press, 1960. (Includes short but effective discussions of Renoir's
plays, and of The Golden Coach, plus an extract from a letter from
Renoir to the author affirming Pirandello's importance)
Guy de Maupassant, Une Partie de campagne, originally published
in La Vie moderne (April 1881) and reprinted in the same
year in the collection La Maison Tellier. The translation mentioned
in the text appears in A Day in the Country and Other Stories,
trans. David Coward, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1990
Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education, Baltimore, Maryland and
Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin Books, 1964 (a translation by Robert
Baldick of L'Education sentimentale, Paris ,1869)
Rumer Godden, A House with Four Rooms, London, Macmillan, 1989
(the second volume of the novelist's autobiography, which contains a full
account of her friendship with Renoir, and their collaboration on The
River whilst the film was being written in California then shot on
location in Bengal)
L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between, London, Penguin Books, 1997 (first
published 1953)
Herbert R. Lottman, The Left Bank: Writers, Artists and Politics from
the Popular Front to the Cold War, London, Heinemann, 1982.
John Northam, Ibsen's Dramatic Method: a Study of the Prose Plays,
London, Faber and Faber 1953 (a study of the dramatist's use, as revealed
by his stage directions, of the elements of staging [costume, sets, props,
lighting, movement, physical appearance] to generate poetic and dramatic
impact, and to articulate his themes)
Donald Posner, "The Swinging Women of Watteau and Fragonard",
Art Bulletin LXIV, March 1982
Articles
in Senses of Cinema
French
CanCan
by Rick Thompson
Lunch
on the Grass by Stuart Lord
Renoir
and the Scandal of "First Love" or The Perils of Catherine
by Tag Gallagher
Web
Resources
Canadian
Journal of Communication
A long piece by Christopher Faulkner on Renoir's politics in the USA.
A
Guide to Online Jean Renoir Materials
Sister site to Film Directors: Articles on the Internet Website; in addition
to articles, this Renoir resource centre provides information on films,
recent news, retrospectives and bibliographies.
Film
summary: Grand Illusion
Not recommended for individuals who haven't seen the film.
The
French films of Jean Renoir from The New York film Annex
Some Renoir films available here.
Jean
Renoir
Capsule reviews of La Chienne, La Grande illusion and The
River.
Je
m'appelle Jean Renoir...
A French language site dedicated to Renoir.
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