Jean Renoir

b. September 15, 1894, Montmartre, Paris, France d. February 12, 1979, Beverly Hills California, U.S.A.

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.

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.

Octave (Renoir) and Marceau (Carette) going into "exile" at the end of La Règle du jeu

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.

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

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

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

"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...”

Before: Jean in 1900

"...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)

and After...

Jean in 1901

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.

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

Boudu sauvé des eaux: Boudu (Michel Simon) and Lestingois (Charles Granval)

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Une Partie de campagne 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.

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 19

th-

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

French Cancan

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.

—Peter Bogdanovich (36)

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.

—The Times (London) (37)

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.

—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.

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Endnotes:

1. 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.'” ˄

2. 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 ˄

3. Interview filmed by ORTF 1961, cited in Alexander Sesonske, Jean Renoir: the

French Films, 1924-1939, Cambridge Mass. & London, Harvard University Press,

1980 ˄

4. Octave (Jean Renoir) in La Règle du jeu ˄

5. Interview with Marguerite Bussot, Pour Vous, 25 January 1939, reprinted in Bernard

Chardère, Jean Renoir, Lyon, Premier Plan nos. 22, 23, 24, May 1962 ˄

6. Martin O'Shaughnessy, Jean Renoir, Manchester and New York, Manchester University

Press, 2000 ˄

7. Eugène Lourié, My Work in Films, San Diego, New York and London, Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich, 1985 ˄

8. Jean Renoir, Ma Vie et mes films, Paris, Flammarion, 1974 (my translation) ˄

9. Jean Renoir, My Life and My Films, London, Collins 1974 ˄

10. 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. ˄

11. V. I. Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting, New York, Grove Press, 1960 ˄

12. Renoir, My Life and My Films, 1974 ˄

13. Renoir, Ma Vie et mes films, (my translation) ˄

14. Renoir, My Life and My Films, 1974 ˄

15. Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis, London, Starword, 2nd

edition, 1992 ˄

16. Lourié, 1985 ˄

17. Renoir, My Life and My Films, 1974 ˄

18. Bergan, 1992, who also cites the quotation, which is from Jean Renoir, Entretiens et

propos, Cahiers du cinéma, 1979 ˄

19. Cited in Christopher Faulkner, Jean Renoir: A Guide to References and Resources,

Boston, G.K. Hall, 1979. ˄

20. 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.” ˄

21. Renoir, My Life and My Films, 1974 ˄

22. 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. ˄

23. Bergan, 1992 ˄

24. Bergan, 1992, quoting La Cinématographie française (France's pre-war trade paper). ˄

25. Renoir, Ma Vie et mes films, (my translation) ˄

26. Renoir, My Life and My Films, 1974 ˄

27. 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

˄

28. Sesonske, 1980 ˄

29. Guy De Maupassant, Une Partie de campagne, Paris in La Vie moderne, April 1881,

reprinted (1881) in the collection La Maison Tellier ˄

30. Donald Posner, "The Swinging Women of Watteau and Fragonard", Art Bulletin, LXIV,

March 1982 ˄

31. “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 ˄

32. Guy De Maupassant, A Day in the Country and Other Stories, Oxford and New York,

Oxford University Press, 1990, translation by David Coward ˄

33. Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education, Baltimore, Maryland and

Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin Books, 1964, a translation by Robert

Baldick of L'Education sentimentale, Paris 1869 ˄

34. L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between, London, Penguin Books, 1997 (first published 1953) ˄

35. Raymond Durgnat, Jean Renoir, London, Studio Vista, 1975 ˄

36. Peter Bogdanovich, “Director's Cut”, The Independent (London), 21 December 1990 ˄

37. 29 August 1955, when the film was first released in the U.K.; at that time, reviews in The

Times were unsigned. ˄

38. Village Voice, 2 April 1985, on the occasion of the American première of a complete

Version of the film. ˄

© James Leahy 2003/2006/2011

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

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

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)

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

La Règle du jeu: The ambiguous image: we know that Robert and Genevieve are parting, but Christine

(watching through a spy-glass) does not

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 (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

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 cutsProduction 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 2000

th. 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)

More Reno r soon

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

i A Look at Layout