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Jean Renoir by James Leahy James Leahy is a film historian, screenwriter, lecturer and actor, co-author of the screenplay of Ken McMullen's 1871. He has collaborated on other projects with Ken McMullen, Med Hondo and Nicholas Ray. He studied and taught film history and screenwriting at Northwestern University, Illinois, taught film history and theory at University College London, and has led workshops on these subjects in the U.K., Ghana and Bangladesh. He contributed to the 2000 School of Sound in Glasgow, and was a founding editor of the magazine Vertigo, as well as writing on film for Movie, Cahiers du Cinéma in English, Sight & Sound, the Monthly Film Bulletin, The Guardian, The Independent, the Chicago Daily News, PIX and Websters Microsoft Encarta. His book The Cinema of Joseph Losey was published in London and New York in 1967; he wrote a booklet about 1871 (London, Channel 4 Education, 1990) and has collaborated on such publications as Rediscovering the American Cinema (with Bill Routt, Illinois, 1970), After Empire: the New African Cinema (London, the Museum of the Moving Image, 1991). At other times in his life he's been a naval reservist, worked in both talcum powder and pork pie factories, as a chauffeur and a builders' labourer, and sold his blood to Cook County Hospital, the real-life original for ER' s County General. |
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| 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: 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.
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.
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
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: 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.
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)
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.
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.
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. Une Partie de campagne
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.
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.
—Peter Bogdanovich (36)
—The Times (London) (37)
—Andrew Sarris (38)
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:
Filmography Directed by Renoir: La Fille de
l'eau
(1924) France
La Règle
du jeu (The Rules of the Game) (1939; restored 1959) France |
