Jean Renoir

by James Leahy March 2003 Great Directors, Issue 25 

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.

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 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 withLa 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…“

“…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)

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 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)

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 deMonsieur Lange was made in collaboration with theGroupe 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 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 jeuas 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 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 inSearch 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. Acabinet particulier was a private dining room in a restaurant, and these were notorious as locations for sexual encounters. In Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale Madame Arnoux “took offence at being treated like a woman of easy virtue” when her husband wants to dine in one alone with her, ” when in fact, coming from Arnoux, such treatment was a proof of affection.” (33) In Zola’s La Curée, the guilty passion of Renée Saccard and her stepson Maxime is consummated in one, the same room that, the previous Wednesday, Maxime had entertained a woman he’d picked up on the boulevards. Renoir’s Les Bas fonds, shot later in 1936, has a scene in which Pepel the thief (Jean Gabin) rescues Natacha (Junie Astor) from the clutches of the inspector (Gabriello). The tragedy of Une Partie de campagne is that, though in both story and film Henri feels momentary pangs of regret over the affair, he treats Henriette as he would any casual pick-up, and her grace, innocence, energy and spontaneity are sacrificed to the prejudices and conventions of a patriarchal, class society. When I fell in love with the film nearly 40 years ago (I was taking a language course in France in the hope of being able to read Cahiers du cinéma more easily, and thus was watching an unsubtitled print), these emotions and meanings were communicated clearly and directly without need of explanatory commentary (though a term like “patriarchal” was yet to enter our discourse). Now, in our ostensibly more democratic society, the past, of the 1880s, when the film was set, or the 1930s, when it was shot, has, indeed, become “a foreign country.” (34)

Fragonard’s painting is currently once again the object of artistic attention. When Renoir made use of it he may have been drawing on material beyond his conscious awareness (though his father had been an admirer of Fragonard’s work). However the prize-winning choreographer Susan Stroman clearly set out to liberate Saint-Julien’s young mistress from his ownership, and his controlling gaze, when she made the painting the basis of the first segment of the dance musical Contact, a major box-office success originally in New York and now in London. She has replaced the elderly lackey, or bishop (or both: the Baron held a hereditary position of authority in relation to the French clergy!), guiding the swing by a lusty young servant who, when the Baron swans off for some more champagne, delights the mistress by initiating her into the erotic potential of the swing.

For many critics the extraordinary energy of the dance which is the climax of Renoir’s French Cancan represents a comparable liberation from male control. Ray Durgnat makes the point with passion and enthusiasm: “Renoir makes sense of the cancan and its social significance. The dancers unleash the insolence not only of proletarian energy, but of the aggressive female, and storm the 19th-century bourgeois male patriarchy like the light brigade of sexual suffragettes which they are. As they sport the sweet dynamism of thighs long smothered under petticoats and startle the exhilarated male in a massed scissors-splits which is, of course, a kinaesthetic equivalent of crutch photography, the suggestion is that the erstwhile weaker sex won’t henceforth find the erstwhile lord of creation too hard a nut to crack. A river of feminine energy flows devastatingly, but not destructively, through society.” (35)

…the final cancan sequence… It’s extraordinary: it wraps up the whole story, but has practically no dialogue; it keeps cutting backstage and to the audience. There’s no sequence I can think of that has suchjoie 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 Cancanerupts 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.

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 ditPhilippe (Uncle Jeff), Pierre Champagne (Justin Crépoix), Harold Lewingston (Georges Raynal), Maurice Touzé (Ferret), Pierre Renoir (peasant with pitchfork)

Nana (1926) France/Germany

Production Company: Films Jean Renoir

Distribution: Aubert-Pierre Braunberger

Screenplay: Pierre Lestringuez from the novel by Emile Zola

Intertitles: Denise Leblond-Zola, Jean Renoir

Assistant Director: André Cerf

Photography: Edmund Corwin, Jean Bachelet

Production Design: Claude Autant-Lara

Cast: Catherine Hessling (Nana), Werner Krauss (Count Muffat), Jean Angelo (Count de Vandeuvres), Valeska Gert (Zoé), Pierre Lestringuez dit Philippe (Bordenave), Pierre Champagne (La Faloise), Raymond Guérin-Catelain (Georges Hugon), Claude Autant-Lara dit Moore (Fauchery), André Cerf (‘Le Tigre’), Pierre Braunberger (spectator at the theatre)

Charleston (Sur un air de Charleston) (1927) France

Production Company: Films Jean Renoir

Distribution: Néo-Film (Pierre Braunberger)

Producer: Jean Renoir

Assistant Directors: André Cerf, Claude Heymann

Screenplay: Pierre Lestringuez, from an idea by André Cerf

Photography: Jean Bachelet

Cast: Catherine Hessling (The Dancer), Johnny Huggins (The Explorer), André Cerf (The Monkey), Pierre Braunberger, Jean Renoir, Pierre Lestringuez, André Cerf (Four Angels)

Marquitta (1927) France

Production Company: La Société des Artistes Réunis

Production Manager: M. Gargour

Distribution: Jean de Merly

Screenplay: Pierre Lestringuez and Jean Renoir

Photography: Jean Bachelet, Raymond Agnel

Production Design: Robert-Jules Garnier

Cast: Marie-Louise Iribe (Marquitta), Jean Angelo (Prince Vlasco), Henri Debain (Count Dimitrieff, the Chamberlain), Lucien Mancini (Step-Father), Pierre Lestringuez dit Philippe (Casino Owner), Pierre Champagne (Taxi Driver)

La Petite marchande d’allumettes (The Little Match Girl) (1928) France

Producers: Jean Renoir, Jean Tedesco

Distribution: Films SOFAR

Screenplay: Jean Renoir, from stories by Hans Christian Andersen

Photography: Jean Bachelet

Production Design: Erik Aaes

Assistant Directors: Claude Heymann, Simone Hamiguet

Cast: Catherine Hessling (Karen), Jean Storm (Young Man/Wooden Soldier), Manuel Raaby (Policeman/Death), Aimée Tedesco dit Amy Wells (Mechanical Doll)

With synchronized music arranged by Manuel Rosenthal and Michael Grant.

Tire au flanc (1928) France

Production Company: Néo-Film

Producer: Pierre Braunberger

Distribution: Armor-Film, Editions Pierre Braunberger

Screenplay: Jean Renoir, André Cerf, Claude Heymann, from the play by André Mouézy-Eon, A. Sylvane

Intertitles: André Rigaud

Photography: Jean Bachelet

Production Design: Erik Aaes

Assistant Directors: André Cerf, Lola Markovitch

Cast: Georges Pomiès (Jean Dubois d’Ombelles), Michel Simon (Joseph), Fridette Faton (Georgette), Félix Oudart (Colonel Brochard), Jean Storm (Lieutenant Daumel), Manuel Rabinovitch dit Raaby (adjutant), Kinny Dorlay (Lily), Maryanne (Madame Blandin), Zellas (Muflot), Jeanne Helbing (Solange), Catherine Hessling (girl), André Cerf (soldier), Max Dalban (soldier)

Le Tournoi (Le Tournoi dans la cité) (1928)

Production Company: Société des Films Historiques

Producer: Henry Dupuy-Mazuel

Assistant Director: André Cerf

Distribution: Jean de Merly, Fernand Weil

Screenplay: Henry Dupuy-Mazuel, André Jaeger-Schmidt after the novel by Henry Dupuy-Mazuel

Photography: Marcel Lucien, Maurice Desfassiaux

Production Design: Robert Mallet-Stevens

Editor: André Cerf

Cast: Aldo Nadi (François de Baynes), Jackie Monnier (Isabelle Ginori), Enrique Rivero (Henri de Rogier), Blanche Bernis (Catherine de Médicis), Suzanne Desprès (Countess de Baynes), Manuel Rabinovitch dit Raaby (Count Ginori), Max Dalban (captain of the watch)

Le Bled (1929) France

Production Company: Société des Films Historiques

Producer: Henry Dupuy-Mazuel

Assistant Directors: André Cerf and René Arcy-Hennery

Distribution: Mappemonde Films

Screenplay: Henry Dupuy-Mazuel, André Jaeger-Schmidt

Intertitles: André Rigaud

Photography: Marcel Lucien, Léon Morizet

Production Design: William Aguet

Editor: Marguerite Houlé

Cast: Jackie Monnier (Claude Duvernet), Enrique Rivero (Pierre Hoffer), Diana Hart (Diane Duvernet), Manuel Rabinovitch dit Raaby (Manuel Duvernet), Alexandre Arquillière (Christian Hoffer), Jacques Becker (a Hoffer farmhand)

On purge bébé (1931) France

Production Company/Distribution: Braunberger-Richebé

Production Manager: Charles David

Assistant Directors: Claude Heymann, Pierre Schwab

Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Pierre Prévert, from the play by Georges Feydeau

Photography: Théodore Sparkhul, Roger Hubert

Production Design: Gabriel Scognamillo

Music: Paul Misraki

Sound: D. F. Scanlon, Bugnon

Editor: Jean Mamy

Cast: Jacques Louvigny (Bastien Follavoine), Marguerite Pierry (Julie Follavoine), Sacha Tarride (Toto), Michel Simon (Chouilloux), Olga Valéry (Madame Chouilloux), Fernandel (Horace Truchet)

La Chienne (1931) France

Production Company: Braunberger-Richebé

Distribution: Braunberger-Richebé, Europa-Films (C.S.C.)

Production Manager: Charles David

Assistant Directors: Pierre Prévert, Claude Heymann, Pierre Schwab

Screenplay: Jean Renoir, André Girard, from the novel by Georges de la Fouchardière and the play adapted from it by André Mouézy-Eon

Photography: Théodore Sparkhul

Continuity: Suzanne de Troye

Production Design: Gabriel Scognamillo

Sound: Joseph de Bretagne, Marcel Courme

Songs: Eugénie Buffet (“La Sérénade du pavé”), Toselli (“Sérénade”), “Malbruk s’en va-t’en guerre”

Editors: Denise Batcheff, Paul Féjos; then Marguerite Houlé dit Renoir, Jean Renoir

Cast: Michel Simon (Maurice Legrand), Janie Marèze (Lulu), Georges Flammand (Dédé), Magdeleine Berubet (Adèle Legrand), Gaillard (Alexis Godard), Jean Gehret (M. Dagodet), Alexandre Rignault (Langelard, the Art Critic), Lucien Mancini (Walstein, the Art Dealer), Max Dalban (Bonnard), Marcel Courme (Colonel), Sylvain Itkine (lawyer), Jane Pierson (concierge)

La Nuit du carrefour

(Night at the Crossroads) (1932) France

Production Company: Europa Films

Distribution: Comptoir Française Cinémathèque

Production Manager: Gaillard

Assistant Directors: Jacques Becker, Maurice Blondeau

Screenplay: Jean Renoir and Georges Simenon, from the latter’s novel

Photography: Marcel Lucien, Georges Asselin, assistants Paul Fabian, Claude Renoir Jr.

Production Design: William Aguet, assistant Jean Castanier

Sound: Joseph de Bretagne, Bugnon

Editor: Marguerite Renoir, assisted by Suzanne de Troyes, with the participation of Walter Ruttmann

Cast: Pierre Renoir (Inspector Maigret), Georges Térof (Lucas), Winna Winfried (Else Andersen), Georges Koudria (Carl Andersen), Jean Gehret (Emile Michonnet), Jane Pierson (Madame Michonnet), Michel Duran (Jojo), Jean Mitry (Arsène), Max Dalban (doctor), Gaillard (the butcher), Manuel Rabinovitch dit Raaby (Guido)

Boudu sauvé des eaux (Boudu Saved from Drowning) (1932) France

Production Company: Société Sirius

Distribution: Etablissements Jacques Haik

Producers: Michel Simon, Jean Gehret, Marc le Pelletier

Assistant Directors: Jacques Becker, Georges Darnoux

Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Albert Valentin from the play by René Fauchois

Photography: Marcel Lucien, assistants Jean-Paul Alphen, Asselin

Production Design: Jean Castanier, Hugues Laurent

Sound: Igor B. Kalinowski

Music: Raphael, Johann Strauss

Song: “Sur les bords de la Rivièra”

Flautist: Jean Boulze

Orpheon: Edouard Dumoulin

Editor: Marguerite Renoir, assistant Suzanne de Troye

Continuity: Suzanne de Troye

Cast: Michel Simon (Boudu), Charles Granval (Edouard Lestingois), Marcelle Hainia (Madame Lestingois), Séverine Lerczinska (Anne-Marie), Max Dalban (Gadin), Jean Gehret (Vigour), Jean Dasté (Student), Jacques Becker (poet in park), Jane Pierson (Rose), Georges Darnoux (oarsman)

Chotard et Cie (Chotard & Co.) (1933) France

Production Company: Société des Films Roger Ferdinand

Producer: Roger Ferdinand

Assistant Director: Jacques Becker

Distribution: Universal

Screenplay: Jean Renoir, from the play by Roger Ferdinand

Photography: Joseph-Louis Mundwiller, assistants Claude Renoir Jr., René Ribault

Production Design: Jean Castanier

Sound: Igor B. Kalinowski

Continuity: Suzanne de Troye

Editors: Marguerite Renoir, Suzanne de Troye

Cast: Fernand Charpin (Français Chotard), Jeanne Lory (Madame Chotard), Georges Pomiès (Julien Collinet), Jeanne Boitel (Reine Chotard Collinet), Max Dalban (Emile)

Madame Bovary (1933) France

Production Company: La Nouvelle Société de Film

Producer: Gaston Gallimard, Robert Aron

Distribution: Compagnie Independente de Distribution

Production Manager: René Jaspard

Assistant Directors: Pierre Desouches, Jacques Becker

Screenplay: Jean Renoir, from the novel by Gustave Flaubert

Photography: Jean Bachelet, assistants Alphonse Gibory, Claude Renoir Jr.

Production Design: Robert Gys, Eugène Lourié, Georges Wakhevitch

Sound: Marcel Courme, Joseph de Bretagne

Music: Darius Milhaud.(“Le Printemps dans la plaine”), Donizetti (“Lucia de Lammermoor”)

Editor: Marguerite Renoir

Cast: Valentine Tessier (Emma Bovary), Pierre Renoir (Charles Bovary), Alice Tissot (Old Madame Bovary), Max Dearly (M. Homais), Daniel Lecourtois (Léon Dupuis), Fernand Fabre (Rudolphe Boulanger), Pierre Laquey (Hippolyte Tautin), Robert le Vigan (Lheureux), Romain Bouquet, (Maître Guillaumin), André Fouche (Justin)

Toni (1934) France

Production Company: Films d’Aujourd’hui

Distribution: Films Marcel Pagnol

Production Manager: Pierre Gaut

Assistant Directors: Georges Darnoux, Antonio Canor

Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Carl Einstein, from a true story found by Jacques Mortier

Photography: Claude Renoir Jr.

Production Design: Marius Braquier, Léon Bourrely

Sound: Barbishanian

Music: Paul Bozzi, Joseph Kosma

Editors: Marguerite Renoir, Suzanne de Troye

Cast: Charles Blavette (Toni), Jenny Hélia (Marie), Celia Montalvan (Josefa), Max Dalban (Albert), Edouard Delmont (Fernand), Andrex (Gabi), André Kovachevitch (Sebastien), Paul Bozzi (Jacques, the guitarist)

Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936) France

Production Company: Obéron

Distribution: Minerva

Producer: André Halley des Fontaines

Production Manager: Geneviève Blondeau

Assistant Directors: Georges Darnoux, Jean Castanier

Screenplay: Jacques Prévert, Jean Renoir, from a story by Jean Castanier

Photography: Jean Bachelet

Production Design: Jean Castanier, Robent Gys

Sound: Guy Moreau, Louis Bogé, Roger Loisel, Robert Teisseire

Music: Jean Wiener

Song “Au jour le jour, à la nuit la nuit”: Joseph Kosma

Orchestra: Roger Desormière

Editor: Marguerite Renoir, Marthe Huguet

Continuity: Marguerite Renoir

Cast: Jules Berry (Batala), René Lefèvre (Amédée Lange), Florelle (Valentine), Nadia Sibirskaïa (Estelle), Sylvia Bataille (Edith), Marcel Levesque (le concierge), Maurice Baquet (Charles), Jacques Brunius (Baigneur), Henri Guisol (Meunier fils), Marcel Duhamel (Louis), Paul Grimault (Typesetter), Jean Dasté (Illustrator), Sylvain Itkine (Inspector Juliani), Odette Talazac (la concierge)

La Vie est à nous (Life Belongs to Us/ People of France) (1936) France

Production Company: Parti Communiste Français

Distribution: 1936 (non-commercial: the film had not been passed by the censorship, and screenings were not open to the public) Ciné-Liberté; from 1969 Cinémas Associés, prints owned by L ‘Avant-Scène du Cinéma.

Directors: Jean Renoir, Jacques Becker, André Zwoboda, Jean-Paul le Chanois, dit Dreyfus, Jacques Brunius, André Swoboda, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Pierre Unik, Maurice Lime

Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Paul Vaillant-Couturier, Jean-Paul Dreyfus, Pierre Unik; (the content of one scene suggests that Ilya Ehrenburg, the Izvetsia correspondent in Paris throughout the 1930s, may have had an input)

Photography: Louis Page, Jean-Serge Bourgoin, Jean Isnard, Alain Douarinou, Claude Renoir Jr., Nicholas Hayer (and, according to various sources, Marcel Carné and Henri Cartier-Bresson)

Music: “Internationale”, “Song of the Komsomols” by Shostakovitch, “Auprès de ma blonde”, “La Cucaracha” sung by Chorale Populaire de Paris, directed by Suzanna Conte

Sound: Robert Teisseire

Editor: Marguerite Renoir

Cast: Jean Dasté (teacher), Jacques Brunius (President of the Administrative Council), Pierre Unik (Marcel Cachin’ s secretary), Julien Bertheau (René, a young worker), Nadia Sibirskaia (Ninette), Emile Drain (Gustave), Gaston Modot (Philippe), Charles Blavette (Tonin), Max Dalban (Foreman), Madeleine Solange (factory worker), Jacques Becker (unemployed worker), Jean Renoir, Sylvain Itkine, Jean-Paul Dreyfus, Léon Larive, Roger Blin, Vladimir Sokoloff, and (as themselves) Marcel Cachin, André Marty, Maurice Thorez, Jacques Duclos, Paul Vaillant-Couturier. Stock footage of Léon Blum, Colonel de la Roque, Adolf Hitler, et al.

Une Partie de campagne (A Day in the Country) (1936; final cut 1946) France

Production Company: Films du Panthéon

Distribution: Films de la Pléiade

Producer: Pierre Braunberger

Production Manager: Roger Woog

Production Administrator: Jacques Brunius

Assistant Directors: Jacques Becker, Henri Cartier-Bresson dit Cartier (some sources also list Yves Allégret, Claude Heymann and Jacques Brunius)

Screenplay: Jean Renoir, from the story by Guy de Maupassant

Photography: Claude Renoir Jr., Bourgoin

Stills: Eli Lotar

Production Design: Robert Gys

Sound: Marcel Courme, Joseph de Bretagne

Music: Joseph Kosma, song sung by Germaine Montero

Orchestra: Roger Desormière

Assistant Director: Jacques Becker

Editor: Marguerite Renoir, Marinette Cadix

Cast: Sylvia Bataille (Henriette Dufour), Georges Darnoux dit Saint-Saëns (Henri), Gabriello (M. Dufour), Jane Marken (Madame Dufour), Paul Temps (Anatole), Jacques Brunius dit Borel (Rodolphe), Jean Renoir (Père Poulain), Marguerite Renoir (Servant), Gabrielle Fontan (Grandmother), Pierre Lestringuez (priest), Henri Cartier-Bresson and Georges Bataille (seminarians), Alain Renoir (boy fishing)

Les Bas-fonds (The Lower Depths) (1936) France

Production Company: Albatross (Alexandre Kamenka)

Distribution: Les Distributeurs Français, S.A.

Production Manager: Vladimin Zederbaum

Assistant Directors: Jacques Becker, Joseph Soiffer

Screenplay: Eugene Zamiatine, Jacques Companéez, from the play by Maxim Gorky

Adapted by Jean Renoir, Charles Spaak

Photography: Jean Bachelet, Fedote Bourgassof

Production Design: Eugène Lourié, Hugues Laurent

Sound: Robert Ivonnet

Music: Jean Wiener, Charles Desormière

Song: lyrics Charles Spaak, voice Irène Joachim

Editor: Marguerite Renoir

Cast: Louis Jouvet (Baron), Jean Gabin (Pepel), Suzy Prim (Vassilissa), Vladimir Sokoloff (Kostileff), Junie Astor (Natacha), Robert le Vigan (Actor), Gabriello (Inspector), René Genin (Luka), Jany Holt (Nastya), Maurice Baquet (Aliocha), Léon Larive (Félix), Paul Temps, Sylvain Itkine, Jacques Becker

La Grande illusion (1937) France

Production Company: RAC (Frank Rollmer, Alexandre and Albert Pinkéwitch)

Distribution: Réalisation d’Art Cinématographique

Production Manager: Raymond Blondy

Assistant Director: Jacques Becker

Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Charles Spaak

Technical Consultant: Carl Koch

Photography: Christian Matras, assistants: Claude Renoir Jr., Jean Bourgoin, Bourreaud

Stills: Sam Lévin

Production Design: Eugène Lourié

Sound: Joseph de Bretagne

Music: Joseph Kosma

Editor: Marguerite Renoir, assistant Marthe Huguet; 1958, restoration for re-release, Renée Lichtig

Cast: Jean Gabin (Lt. Maréchal), Pierre Fresnay (Captain de Boeldieu), Erich von Stroheim (Captain von Rauffenstein), Marcel Dalio (Rosenthal), Julien Carette (Traquet), Dita Parlo (Elsa), Gaston Modot (Engineer), Jean Dasté (Teacher), Sylvain Itkine (Demolder), Jacques Becker (English officer)

La Marseillaise (1938) France

Production Company: Conféderation General de Travail (confederation of trade unions), then Société de Production et d’Exploitation du Film La Marseillaise

Distribution: RAC, World Pictures

Production Managers: André Zwoboda, A. Seigneur

Assistant Directors: Jacques Becker, Carl Koch, Claude Renoir Sr., Jean-Paul Dreyfus, Louis Demazure, Marc Maurette, Tony Corteggiani

Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Carl Koch, M. and Mme. N. Martel Dreyfus

Photography: Jean-Serge Bourgoin, Alain Douarinou, Jean-Marie Maillols, assistants Jean-Paul Alphen, Jean Louis

Stills: Sam Lévin

Production Design: Léon Barsacq, Georges Wakhevitch, Jean Périer

Editor: Marguerite Renoir, assistant Marthe Huguet

Shadow Theatre: Lotte Reiniger

Sound: Joseph de Bretagne, Jean-Roger Bertrand, J. Demede

Music: Lalande, Rameau, Grétny, Mozart, J.S. Bach, Joseph Kosma, Rouget de l’Isle, Sauveplane

Orchestra: Roger Desormière

Cast: Pierre Renoir (Louis XVI), Lisa Delamere (Marie Antoinette), Louis Jouvet (Roederer), William Aguet ((La Rochefoucauld), Georges Spanelly (La Chesnaye), Andrex (Honoré Arnaud), Ardisson (Bomier), Nadia Sibirskaïa (Louison), Jenny Hélia (orator in the Assembly), Léon Larive (Picard), Gaston Modot and Julien Carette (volunteer soldiers), Marthe Marty (Bomier’ s mother)

La Bête humaine (The Human Beast, but better The Beast in Man) (1938) France

Production Company/Distribution: Paris Film Production (Robert and Raymond Hakim)

Production Manager: Roland Tual

Assistant Directors: Claude Renoir Sr., Suzanne de Troye

Screenplay: Jean Renoir, from the novel by Emile Zola

Dialogue: Jean Renoir, Denise Leblond-Zola

Photography: Curt Courant, Claude Renoir Jr

Stills: Sam Lévin

Production Design: Eugène Lourié

Sound: Robert Tesseire

Music: Joseph Kosma

Continuity: Suzanne de Troye

Editor: Marguerite Renoir, railway sequences Suzanne de Troye

Cast: Jean Gabin (Jacques Lantier), Simone Simon (Séverine Roubaud), Fernand Ledoux (Roubaud), Julien Carette (Pecqueux), Jenny Hélia (Pecqueux’s girlfriend), Colette Régis (Madame Victoire), Jacques Berlioz (Grandmorin), Jean Renoir (Cabuche), Balanchette Brunoy (Flore)

La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game) (1939; restored 1959) France

Production Company/Distribution: Nouvelle Edition Française

Production Administrator: Camille François

Production Manager: Claude Renoir Sr

Assistant Directors: André Zwobada, Henri Cartier-Bresson

Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Carl Koch, André Zwobada

Photography: Jean Bachelet, assistants: Jean-Paul Alphen, Alain Renoir

Technical Advisor: Tony Corteggiani

Continuity: Dido Freire

Stills: Sam Lévin

Production Design: Eugène Lourié, Max Douy

Costumes: Coco Chanel

Sound: Joseph de Bretagne

Music (arranged by Roger Désormière and Joseph Kosma): Mozart, Monsigny, Saint-Saëns, Johann Strauss, Chopin, Sallabert, Vincent Scotto

Orchestra: Roger Desormière

Editor: Marguerite Renoir, assistant Marthe Huguet

Cast: Marcel Dalio (Robert de la Chesnaye), Nora Grégor (Christine), Roland Toutain (André Jurieu), Jean Renoir (Octave), Paulette Dubost (Lisette), Mila Parély (Geneviève), Julien Carette (Marceau), Gaston Modot (Edouard Schumacher), Odette Talazac (Charlotte de la Plante), Pierre Magnier (the General), Pierre Nay (Saint-Aubin), Richard Francoeur (M. la Bruyère), Claire Gérard (Mme. la Bruyère), Eddy Debray (Corneille, the butler), Léon Larive (Chef), Anne Mayen (Jackie), Lise Elina (Radio Reporter), André Zwoboda (Caudron engineer), Henri Cartier-Bresson (English servant), Tony Corteggiani (Berthelin), Jenny Hélia (servant), Camille François (voice of radio announcer)

Swamp Water (1941) U.S.A.

Production Company: Twentieth Century-Fox

Producer and dialogue director: Irving Pichel

Screenplay: Dudley Nichols, from the story by Vereen Bell

Photography: Peverell Marley, Lucien Ballard

Production Design: Thomas Little, Richard Day

Music: David Buttolph

Editor: Walter Thompson

Cast: Dana Andrews (Ben Ragan), Walter Huston (Thursday Ragan), Walter Brennan (Tom Keefer), Anne Baxter (Julie), John Carradine (Jesse Wick), Mary Howard (Hannah), Ward Bond (Jim Donson), Guinn Williams (Bud Donson), Virginia Gilmore (Mabel), Eugene Pallette (Sheriff), Russell Simpson (Marty McCord)

This Land is Mine (1943) U.S.A.

Production Company/Distribution: R.K.O.

Producers/Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Dudley Nichols

Photography: Frank Redman

Production Design: Eugène Lourié, Albert d’Agostino, Walter F. Keeler

Sound: Terry Kellum, James Stewart

Music: Lothar Perl

Editor: Frederic Knudtson

Cast: Charles Laughton (Albert Lory), Maureen O’Hara (Louise Martin), Kent Smith (Paul Martin), George Sanders (George Lambert), Walter Slezak (Major von Keller), Una O’Connor (Mrs. Lory), Nancy Gates (Julie Grant), George Coulouris (prosecutor)

Salute to France (1944) U.S.A.

Production Company: Office of War Information

Project Officer: Burgess Meredith

Distribution: United Artists

Screenplay: Philip Dunne, Jean Renoir, Burgess Meredith

Photography: George Webber (Army Pictorial Service)

Music: Kurt Weill

Supervising Editor: Helen van Dongen

Editors: Marcel Cohen, Maria Reyto, Jean Oser

Technical Advisor: Office of Strategic Services

Cast: Burgess Meredith (Tommy), Garson Kanin (Joe and Commentary Voice), Claude Dauphin (Narrator and French soldier)

The Southerner (1945) U.S.A.

Production Company: Producing Artists Inc.

Distribution: United Artists

Producers: Robert Hakim, David L. Loew

Assistant Director: Robert Aldrich

Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Hugo Butler, from the novel Hold Autumn in Your Hand by George Sessions Perry

Photography: Lucien Andriot

Production Design: Eugène Lourié

Sound: Frank Webster

Music: Werner Janssen

Editor: Gregg Tallas

Cast: Zachary Scott (Sam Tucker), Betty Field (Nora Tucker), Beulah Bondi (Grandma), J. Carrol Naish (Devers), Percy Kilbride (Harmie Jenkins), Norman Lloyd (Finlay), Charles Kemper (Tim)

The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946) U.S.A.

Production Company: Camden productions Inc.

Producers: Benedict Bogeaus, Burgess Meredith

Distribution: United Artists

Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Burgess Meredith, from the play by André Heuzé, André de Lorde and Thielly Norès, based on the novel by Octave Mirbeau

Photography: Lucien Andriot

Production Design: Eugène Lourié

Costumes: Barbara Karinska

Music: Michel Michelet

Editor: James Smith

Cast: Paulette Goddard (Célestine), Burgess Meredith (Captain Mauger), Hurd Hatfield (Georges Lanlaire), Reginald Owen (M. Lanlaire), Judith Anderson (Mme. Lanlaire), Francis Lederer (Joseph), Florence Bates (Rose)

The Woman on the Beach (1947) U.S.A.

Production Company/Distribution: R.K.O.

Producer: Jack J. Gross

Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Frank Davis, J. R. Michael Hogan, from the novel None So Blind by Mitchell Wilson

Photography: Harry Wild, Leo Trover

Production Design: Albert d’Agostino, Walter E. Keller

Sound: Jean L. Speak, Clem Portman

Music: Hanns Eisler

Editors: Roland Gross, Lyle Boyer

Cast: Joan Bennett (Peggy Butler), Robert Ryan (Scott Burnett), Charles Bickford (Tod Butler), Nan Leslie (Eve), Walter Sande (Vernecke)

The River (1951) U.S.A.

Production Company: Oriental International Film Inc. Theater Guild

Producers: Kenneth McEldowney, Jean Renoir

Production Manager: Kalyan Gupta

Distribution: United Artists

Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Rumer Godden, from the latter’s novel

Photography (Technicolor): Claude Renoir Jr., operator Ramananda Sen Gupta

Production Design: Eugène Lourié, Bansi Chandra Gupta

Sound: Charles Paulton, Charles Knott

Music: classical Indian, Schumann, Mozart, Weber (“Invitation to the Dance”)

Musical Director: M. A. Partha Sarathy

Editor: George Gale

Cast: Nora Swinburne (Mother), Esmond Knight (Father), Arthur Shields (Mr. John), Thomas E. Breen (Captain John), Radha Sri Ram (Melanie), Adrienne Corri (Valerie), Patricia Walters (Harriet), Suprova Mukerjee (Nan), Richard Foster (Bogey), June Hillman (narrator)

The Golden Coach (Le Carrosse d’or, La Carrozzo d’Oro) (1953) France/Italy

Production Company: Panaria Films, Delphinus & Hoche Productions

Distribution: Corona

Producer: Francesco Alliata

Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Renzo Avenzo, Giulio Macchi, Jack Kirkland, Ginette Doynel, from the play Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement by Prosper Merimée

Photography (Technicolor): Claude Renoir Jr.

Technicolor Consultant: Joan Bridge

Production Design: Mario Chiari

Costume design: Maria de Matteïs

Sound: Joseph de Bretagne, Ovidio del Grande

Music: Vivaldi, Corelli, Olivier Mettra

Editors: Mario Serandrei, David Hawkins

Cast: Anna Magnani (Camilla), Duncan Lamont (Viceroy), Odouardo Spadaro (Don Antonio), Riccando Rioli (Ramon), Paul Campbell (Felipe), Nadia Fiorelli (Isabelle), Dante (Harlequin), Ralph Truman (the Duke), Jean Debucourt (the Bishop), George Higgins (Martinez), Gisella Mathews (Marquisa Altamirano), Raf de la Torre (Chief Justice), Medini Brothers (child acrobats)

(All 35 mm. English-language prints I have seen have suffered three brief but significant trims; these are not found in 16mm English language or the dubbed 35mm French language prints).

French Cancan (1955) France

Production Company: Franco London Films, Jolly Films

Distribution: Gaumont

Producer: Louis Wipf

Assistant Directors: Serge Vallin, Pierre Kast, Jacques Rivette

Screenplay: Jean Renoir, from an idea by André-Paul Antoine

Photography (Technicolor): Michel Kelber

Production Design: Max Douy

Costume Design: Rosine Delamare

Sound: Antoine Petitjean

Music: Georges van Parys

Songs: “Complainte de la Butte,” lyrics by Jean Renoir; airs from Caf’Conc’ of 1900, sung by Cora Vaucaire, Mario Juillard

Choreography: Georges Grandjean

Editor: Borys Lewin

Cast: Jean Gabin (Danglard), Maria Félix (La Belle Abbesse), Françoise Arnoul (Nini), Jean-Roger Caussimon (Baron Walter), Gianni Esposito (Prince Alexandre), Philippe Clay (Casimir), Michel Piccoli (Valorgueil), Jean Panédès (Coudrier), Lydia Johnson (Guibole), Max Dalban (Owner of La Reine Blanche), Jacques Jouanneau (Bidon), Valentine Tessier (Mme. Olympe), Franco Pastorino (Paulo), Pierre Olaf (Pierrot the whistler), Patachou (Yvette Guilbert), Edith Piaf (Eugénie Buffet), Gaston Modot (Danglard’s Servant), Lia Amenda (Esther Georges), Paquerette (Prunelle), Michel Piccoli (Valorgueil), Patachou (Yvette Guilbert)

Eléna et les hommes (1956) France

Production Company: Franco London Films, Les Films Gibé, Electra Compagnia Cinematografica

Distribution: Cinédis

Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Jean Serge, Cy Howard

Photography (Eastmancolor): Claude Renoir Jr.

Production Design: Jean André

Costume Design: Rosine Delamare, Monique Plotin

Sound: William Sivel

Music: Joseph Kosma

Songs: “Méfiez-vous de Paris”, “O Nuit”

Singers: Léo Marjane, Juliette Greco

Arrangements: Georges van Parys

Editor: Borys Lewin

Cast: Ingrid Bergman (Princess Eléna Sorokovska), Jean Marais (General François Rollan), Mel Ferrer (Henri de Chevincount), Pierre Bertin (Martin-Michaud), Jean Richard (Hector), Magali Noel (Lolotte), Elina Labourdette (Paulette Escoffier), Juliette Greco (Miarka), Jean Castanier (Isnard), Gaston Modot (Gypsy chief), Léo Marjane (street singer)

Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier (1959) made for television, and not distributed till 1961; France

Production Company: O.R.T.F., Sofirad, Compagnie Jean Renoir

Distribution: Consortium Pathé

Production Manager: Albert Hollebecke

Screenplay: Jean Renoir, from the novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Photography: Georges Leclerc

Production Design: Marcel-Louis Dieulot

Sound: Joseph Richard

Music: Joseph Kosma

Editor: Renée Lichtig

Cast: Jean-Louis Barrault (Dr. Cordelier/Opale), Teddy Billis (Maître Joly), Michel Vitold (Dr. Lucien Séverin), Jean Topant (Désiré), Micheline Gary (Marguerite), André Ceres (Inspector Salbris), Jean Renoir (as himself, the narrator), Gaston Modot (Blaise, the gardener)

Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Lunch on the Grass, Picnic on the Grass) (1959) France

Production Company: Compagnie Jean Renoir

Distribution: Consortium Pathé

Production Manager: Ginette Doynel

Screenplay: Jean Renoir

Photography (Eastmancolor): Georges Leclerc

Production Design: Marcel-Louis Dieulot

Sound: Joseph de Bretagne

Music: Joseph Kosma

Editor: Renée Lichtig

Cast: Paul Meurisse (Professon Etienne Alexis), Catherine Rouvel (Nénette), Fernand Sardou (Nino), Ingrid Nordine (Marie-Charlotte), Charles Blavette (Gaspard), Jean Claudio (Rosseau)

Le Caporal épinglé (The Vanishing Corporal, The Elusive Corporal) (1962) France

Directors: Jean Renoir, Guy Lefranc

Production Company: Films du Cyclope

Distribution: Pathé

Production Manager: René G. Vuattoux

Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Guy Lefranc, from the novel by Jacques Perret

Photography: Georges Leclerc

Production Design: Eugene Herrly

Sound: Antoine Petitjean

Music: Joseph Kosma

Editor: Renée Lichtig

Cast: Jean-Pierre Cassel (Corporal), Claude Brasseur (Pater), Claude Rich (Ballochet), Jean Carmet (Guillaume), Jacques Jouanneau (Penche-à-gauche), Cornelia Froebass (Erika), Mario David (Caruso), O.E. Hasse (Drunken Passenger), Guy Bedos (the Stutterer)

Le Petit théâtre de Jean Renoir (1969) France

Production Company: Son et Lumière, RAI, Bavaria, ORTF

Producer: Pierre Long

Production Manager: Robert Paillardon

Screenplay: Jean Renoir

Production Design: Gilbert Margerie

Photography (colour): Georges Leclerc, assistants Antoine Georgiakis, Georges Liron

Sound: Guy Rolphe

Music: Jean Wiener (Le Dernier réveillon, Le Roi d’Yvetot), Joseph Kosma (La Cireuse électrique)

Song: “Quand l’amour meurt” by Octave Crémieux

Editor: Geneviève Winding

Cast: Le Dernier réveillon: Nino Formicola and Milly-Monti (Tramps), Roland Bertin (Gontran), Robert Lombard (Maître d’); La Cireuse électrique: Marguerite Cassan (Emilie), Pierre Olaf (Gustave), Jacques Dynam (Jules), Jean-Louis Tristan (Salesman); Quand l’amour meurt: Jeanne Moreau (Singer); Le Roi d’Yvetot: Fernand Sardou (Duvallier), Françoise Arnoul (Isabelle), Jean Carmet (Feraud), Dominique Labourier (Paulette)

OTHER CREDITS

Films featuring Renoir or his work, or in which he had a major involvement:

Catherine (1924) France

Director: Albert Dieudonné

Production Company: Films Jean Renoir

Distribution: Pierre Braunberger (1927, re-edited and released under the title Une Vie sans joie)

Screenplay: Jean Renoir

Photography: Jean Bachelet, Alphonse Gibory

Cast: Catherine Hessling (Catherine Ferrand), Louis Gauthier (Georges Mallet), Maud Richard (Mme. Mallet, his wife), Eugénie Naud (Mme. Laisné, his sister), Albert Dieudonné (Maurice Laisné, his nephew), Pierre Lestringuez, dit Philippe (Adolphe), Pierre Champagne (the Mallets’ son), Jean Renoir (sub-prefect).

La P’tite Lili (1927) France

Director: Alberto Cavalcanti,

Production Company/Distribution: Néo—Film

Producer: Pierre Braunberger

Screenplay: Alberto Cavalcanti, from a song by Eugène Gavel and Louis Benech

Photography: Jimmy Rogers

Production Design: Erik Aaes

Music: Darius Milhaud (1930 version)

Editor: Marguerite Houlé

Cast: Catherine Hessling (La P’tite Lili), Jean Renoir (Pimp), Guy Ferrand (Singer), Roland Cailloux (Concierge), Jean Storm (Minister), Dido Freire (the Little Cousin), Alain Renoir (trespasser)

Le Petit chaperon rouge (Little Red Riding Hood) (1929) France

Director: Alberto Cavalcanti,

Producer: Jean Renoir

Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Alberto Cavalcanti, from the story by Charles Perrault

Photography: Marcel Lucien, René Ribault; Camera Operator: Jimmy Rogers; Assistant: Eli Lotar

Editor: Marguerite Houlé

Assistant Directors: Pierre Prévert and André Cerf

Cast: Catherine Hessling (Little Red Riding Hood), Jean Renoir (the Wolf), André Cerf (Notary), Pierre Prévert (a little girl and other parts), Pablo Quevado (Young Man), Marcel la Montagne (Farmer), Odette Talazac (Farmer’s Wife), William Aguet (old Englishwoman), Aimée Tedesco dit Amy Wells (newspaper seller)

Die Jagd nach dem Gluck (1930) Germany

Directors: Rochus Gliese, Carl Koch,

Production Company: Comenius Film GmbH

Distribution: Deutscher Wenkfilm GmbH

Screenplay: Lotte Reiniger, Carl Koch, Rochus Glieser from an idea by Lotte Reiniger and Alex Strasser

Photography: Fritz Arno Wagner

Sets: Rochus Gliese, Arno Richter

Shadow Theatre Effects: Lotte Reiniger, assisted by Carl Koch and Berthold Bartosch

Music: Théo Mackeben

Editor: Marguerite Houlé

Cast: Cathenine Hessling (Aimée), Jean Renoir (Robert, a businessman), Alexander Murski (Marquand, a pedlar), Berthold Bartosch (Mario), Aimée Tedesco dit Amy Wells (Jeanne)

(This seems to be a lost film).

The Spanish Earth (1937) U.S.A.

Director: Joris Ivens

Production Company: Contemporary Historians, Inc.

Distribution (U.S.A.): Prometheus Pictures; France: Ciné-Liberté

Script: Joris Ivens

Photography: John Ferno (Fernhout), Joris Ivens

Editor: Helen van Dongen

Music: Marc Blitzstein, Virgil Thompson, after Spanish folk music

Sound: Irving Reis

Commentary: written and spoken by Ernest Hemingway. Renoir wrote and spoke the commentary for the French version (Terre d’Espagne), which, apparently, is now lost.

La Tosca (1940) Italy

Director: Carl Koch (started by Renoir),

Production Company/Distribution: Era-Scalera Films

Producer: Arturo Ambrosio

Assisatnt Director: Luchino Visconti

Screenplay: Allesandro De Stefani, Carl Koch, Jean Renoir, Luchino Visconti, from the play by Victorien Sardou

Photography: Ubaldo Arata

Production Design: Gustavo Abel, Amleto Bonetti

Sound: Piero Cavazzuti

Music: Giacomo Puccini

Editor: Gino Betrone

Cast: Imperio Argentina (Tosca), Michel Simon (Scarpia), Rossano Brazzi (Mario Cavaradossi)

L’Album de famille de Jean Renoir (1956) France

Director: Roland Gritti

Production Company: Paris Télévision, then Franco-London Films

Distributor: Cinédis

Script: Pierre Desgraupes

Photography: Jean Tournier

Cast (as themselves): Jean Renoir, Pierre Desgraupes

Jean Renoir: le patron (1967) Dir: Jacques Rivette, France

1. La Recherche du relatif

2. La Direction des acteurs

3. La Règle et l’exception

Production company: O.R.T.F.

Producers: Janine Bazin and André S. Labarthe

Photography: Pierre Mareschal

Sound: Guy Solignac

Edited by Jean Eustache

Also featuring Marcel Dalio, Pierre Braunberger and Catherine Rouvel.

Three three feature-length films featuring Renoir and his work, made for the television series Cinéastes de notre temps. Part 2 was not broadcast, because Renoir’s conversation with Michel Simon was judged too “racy”!

La Direction d’acteur par Jean Renoir (1968) France

Director: Gisèle Braunberger

Producer: Pierre Braunberger

Production Manager: Roger Fleytoux

Photography: Edmond Richard

Sound: René Forget

Editor: Mireille Maubena

Cast (as themselves): Jean Renoir, Gisèle Braunberger

Jean Renoir directs actress Gisèle Braunberger in rehearsals of a text he has adapted from Rumer Godden’s storyBreakfast at the Nikolaïdes, using the “Italian Method”.

Louis Lumière (1967) France

Director: Eric Rohmer

Production Company: O.R.T.F. in the series Allez au cinéma

Cast (as themselves): Henri Langlois and Jean Renoir

This is the film which inspired the polemical lecture about film history which Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Léaud) delivers to fellow members of the collective in Godard’s La Chinoise (1967): “There’s a false idea going the rounds concerning newsreels in the cinema… people say it was Lumière who invented newsreels, that he made documentaries, whilst, at the same time, there was another guy called Méliès, and everybody says about him that he made fiction, that he was a dreamer, that he filmed ghosts, optical illusions. I think it was precisely the opposite… A couple of days ago, at the Cinémathèque, I saw a film on Lumière by Monsieur Henri Langlois… And this film proved that Lumière was a painter, which is to say that he filmed… exactly the same things as were being painted by the painters of his time, people like Picasso, Manet or Renoir… He filmed stations, public gardens, people coming out of factories… people playing cards, tramways… Méliès filmed… a trip to the moon, the visit of the King of Yugoslavia to President Fallières… and now, with the passage of time, one can see that these are really the newsreels of the era… O.K., maybe as he did them they were reconstructed newsreels, and I’ll go even further: I would say that Méliès was a Brechtian…” (my translation)

The visual quality of the Lumière material is a revelation.

The Christian Licorice Store (1971) U.S.A.

Director: James Frawley

Production Company: National General Pictures

Producers: Michael S. Laughlin, James Frawley

Dsirtibution: Cinema Center Films

Photography (color): David Butler

Music: Lalo Schifrin

Cast: Beau Bridges, Maud Adams, Gilbert Roland and (as themselves) Jean and Dido Renoir.

Jean Renoir (1993) U.K.

Director: David Thompson

Production Company/Distributor: Omnibus, BBC TV

Two one-hour films on Renoir and his work.

Un Tournage à la campagne (1994) France

A revealing compilation (by Alain Fleischer) of out-takes from the shooting of Une Partie de campagn, illustrating, amongst other things, the subtle changes in lines of dialogue from one take to another, the result of the actors being encouraged to improvise.

Renoir in the Theatre:

Jules César (Julius Caesar), France 1954

Adaptation of Shakespeare’s play by Grisha Dabat and Mitsou Dabat

Director: Jean Renoir.

Producer: Philippe Decharte:

Production Manager: Jean Serge

Music: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony

Cast: Paul Meurisse (Brutus), Jean-Pierre Aumont (Marc Anthony), Henri Vidal (Julius Caesar), Yves Robert (Cassius), Loleh Bellon (Portia), Françoise Christophe ( Calpurnia), Jean Parédès (Casca), Jean Topart (Octavius Caesar), Gaston Modot (Ligarius), Henri-JacquesHuet (Flavius), Jaque-Catelain (Decius), François Vibert (soothsayer).

A gala production, staged for a single night in the Roman Arena in Arles to celebrate the 2000th. anniversary of the foundation of the city by Julius Caesar.

Orvet, France 1955

An original play in three acts by Jean Renoir.

Director: Jean Renoir

Producer: Jean Dercante

General Manager: Alex Desbiolles

Sets: Georges Wakhevitch

Scene Painting: Laverdet

Costumes: Barbara Karinska, Givenchy

Music: Joseph Kosma

Lighting Albert Richard

Technical Assistant: Robert Petit

Stage manager: Maurice Fraigneau

Cast: Leslie Caron (Orvet), Paul Meurisse (Georges), Michel Herbault (Olivier), Catherine Le Couey (Mme. Camus), Raymond Bussières (Coutant), Jacques Jouanneau (William), Marguerite Cassan (Clotilde), Yorick Royan (Berthe), Suzanne Courtal (Mère Vipère), Pierre Olaf (Phillipe-le-pod-bot), Georges Saillard (Doctor), Georges Hubert (First Huntsman), Henry Charret (Second Huntsman).

Written for Leslie Caron.

Le Grand couteau (The Big Knife), France 1957

Translation and adaptation by Jean Renoir of the play by his friend Clifford Odets, which had been filmed in 1955 by Renoir’s former assistant Robert Aldrich.

Director: Jean Serge

Film Sequence with Daniel Gélin shot by Jean Renoir,

Sets: Fred Givone

Lighting: Hughes Pinneux

Stage Manager: Georges Frémeuax

Cast: Daniel Gélin (Charles Castle), Claude Génia (Marion Castle), Paul Bernard (Marcus Hoff), Paul Cambo (Smiley Coy), France Delahalle (Patty Benedicte), Vera Norman (Dixie Evans), Teddy Bilis (Nat), Andrea Parisy (Connie Bliss), François Marie (Buddy Bliss), Robert Montcade (Hank Teagle), Andrès Wheatley (Russell), Jacques Dannoville (Gardener)

Carola, U.S.A. 1960

Translation from French and adaptation by Jean Renoir, Robert Goldsby and Angela Goldsby of Renoir’s original three act play

Director: Jean Renoir

Assistant Director: Robert Goldsby

Sets: John T. Dreier

Costumes: Shan Slattery

Technical Assistant: Herbert Schoeller

Stage Manager: Larry Belling

Cast: Deneen Peckinpah (Carola Janssen), Robert Martinson (General von Clodius), Eileen Coltrell (Mireille), Caroline Rosqui (Josette), Sydney Field (Campan), Dan Moore (Henri), David Grimsted (Colonel Kroll), James Tripp (Parmentier), Duke Stroud (Camille), Malcolm Green (Lieutenant Keller), Robert Phalen (First French Gestapo Member), Charles Head (Second French Gestapo Member), David Vilner (First German Military Policeman), Dan Rich (Second German Military Policeman), Tony Loeb & Cliff Ghames (Members of the Gestapo), Jim Mantell & Lewis Brown (German Soldiers), Wendy Goodman, Shelia Ryan & Susan Brewer (Actresses), Miles Snyder & Stephen Vause (Actors).

A new adaptation by James Bridges for Hollywood Television Theater was booadcast on 3 February, 1973, on WNET, New York, directed by Norman Lloyd. The cast included Leslie Caron, Mel Ferrer, Albert Paulsen, Michael Sacks, Anthony Zerbe, Carmen Zapete and Douglas Anderson. The Production Designer was Eugène Lourié

Select Bibliography

By Renoir, including transcripts of his finished films:

Orvet, Paris, Gallimard, 1955

Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier (continuity of the film), L’Avant-scène du cinéma, 1961

Renoir: My Father, London and Boston, Collins and Little Brown, 1962 (translation [by Randolph and Dorothy Weaver] of Pierre-August Renoir, mon père, Paris, Hachette, 1962)

Une Partie de campagne (continuity of the film), L’Avant-scène du cinéma, 1962 (published together with that of Vigo’s Zéro de conduite)

Grand Illusion, London, Lorrimer, 1970, revised 1984 (a translation [by Marianne Alexandre and Andrew Sinclair] of the continuity of the film La Grand illusion, published by L’Avant-scène du cinéma, 1964)

The Rules of the Game, London, Lorrimer, 1970, revised 1984 (a translation [by John McGrath and Maureen Teitelbaum] of the continuity of the film La Règle du jeu published by L’Avant-scène du cinéma, 1965)

The Notebooks of Captain Georges, London and Boston, Collins and Little Brown, 1966 (translation [by Norman Denny] of Renoir’s novel Les Cahiers du capitaine Georges, Paris, Gallimard, 1966)

My Life and My Films, London, Collins 1974 (a translation [by Norman Denny] of the director’s memoirs: Ma Vie et mes films, Paris, Flammarion, 1974; this contains an account of the setting up of La Grande illusion)

Ecrits 1926-1971, Paris, Pierre Belfond, 1974 (Renoir’s journalism and other writings collected by Claud Gauteur)

La Chienne (continuity of the film), L’Avant-scène du cinéma, 1975

Carola (a play in three acts, complete text), L’Avant-scène du théâtre, 1976

Entretiens et propos, Cahiers du cinéma, 1979

Renoir on Renoir: Interviews, Essays and Remarks, translated by Carol Volk, Cambridge, New York, Port Chester, Melbourne, Sydney, Cambridge University Press, 1989

Letters, edited by Lorraine Lo Bianco and David Thompson, translated by Craig Carison, Natasha Arnold, Michael Wells, Anneliese Varaldviev, London and Boston, Faber and Faber, 1994

La Coeur à l’aise, Paris, Flammarion, 1978, novel

Le Crime de l’anglais, Paris, Flammarion, 1979, novel

Geneviève, Paris, Flammarion, 1979, novel

Julienne et son amour and En avant, Rosalie !, Henri Veyrier, 1979, unproduced scripts

Oeuvres de cinéma inédites, Paris, Les Cahiers du cinéma/Gallimard, 1982, synopses, treatments, découpages

On Renoir and his Films:

André Bazin (ed. by François Truffaut, from the notes left by Bazin on his death), Jean Renoir, Paris, Lebovici, 1989

Ronald Bergan, Jean Renoir, Projections of Paradise: a Biography, London, Bloomsbury, 1992

Richard Boston, Boudu Saved from Drowning (Boudu sauvé des eaux), London, BFI Classics, 1992, (recommended critical and contextual study of a much-loved film)

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

Raymond Durgnat, Jean Renoir, London, Studio Vista, Cassell and Collier Macmillan, 1975 (a pioneering English-language study of the films; full of illuminating critical insights, despite many minor errors in its descriptions of the action)

Christopher Faulkner, Jean Renoir: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, G.K. Hall, 1979 (contains a biographical chronology; a critical introduction to the films; a complete filmography; publication details and outline summaries of books and articles by and about Renoir, up to 1975)

Christopher Faulkner, The Social Cinema of Jean Renoir, Princeton, N.J. and Guildford, Princeton University Press, 1986

Max Gaillard and Vincent Pinard (conception), Exposition Jean Renoir, Le Havre, L’Unité Cinéma de la Maison de la Culture du Havre and Centre d’Animation Culturelle Jean Renoir de Dieppe, 1982

Penelope Gilliatt (ed.), Jean Renoir: Essays, Conversations, Reviews, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1975

Pierre Guislain, La Règle du jeu: Jean Renoir, Paris, Hatier, 1990

James Leahy, “Image, Meaning, History… & the Voice of God”, Vertigo, no. 4, Spring, 1994 (on La Vie est à nous, narration and March of Time)

James Leahy, “Is it on Video? The Angel and the Vampire”, Vertigo, no. 5, Winter 1994-5 (on Le Crime de Monsieur Lange)

James Leahy, notes on Renoir, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange and French Cancan, published with the release of those films on video, London, Connoisseur Video, Spring 1996

James Leahy, “Jean Renoir”, London, Encarta CD-ROM, Websters Microsoft International, 1998 and subsequent editions

Martin O’Shaughnessy, Jean Renoir, Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press, 2000

Alexander Sesonske, Jean Renoir: the French Films, 1924-1939, Cambridge Mass. and London, Harvard University Press, 1980 (comprehensively researched critical account of the films, a mixture of the insightful and the pedestrian)

Gerry Turvey, “1936, the culture of the Popular Front and Jean Renoir”, London, Academic Press, Media, Cultureand 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, ofPraxis du cinéma, Paris, Gallimard, 1969 and includes a major essay on Nana)

“Cinéma/Sound”, special issue of Yale French Studies, New Haven, Conn., No. 60, 1980

Colin Crisp, French Classic Cinema, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1993

Goffredo Fofi, “The Cinema of the Popular Front in France (1934-38)”, London, Society for Education in Film and Television, Screen, Vol.13, No.4, Winter 1972-3

John Gibbs, Mise-en-scène: Film Style and Interpretation, London and New York, Wallflower Press, 2002

Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, Paris, Collection des Cahiers du cinéma, Pierre Belfond, 1968

Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (eds.), French Film: Texts and Contexts, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1990

Susan Hayward, French National Cinema, London & New York, Routledge, 1993 (important, revealing and well-researched account of the economic infrastructure of French filmmaking)

Norman King, Abel Gance: a Politics of Spectacle, London, BFI, 1984

Rémi Fournier Lanzoni, French Cinema: from its Beginnings to the Present, New York & London, Continuum 2002

James Leahy, “Historical Development of Cinema in France”, London, Encarta CD-ROM, Websters Microsoft International, 1997 and subsequent editions

James Leahy, “All in the Script? So Why Make the Movie?”, Vertigo, Vol.2, No.2, 2002

Eugène Lourié, My Work in Films, San Diego, New York and London, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985 (the memoirs of the production designer whose collaboration with Renoir lasted from Les Bas fonds through the Hollywood years to The River)

Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Screen, Vol.16, No.3, Autumn 1975

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (d.), The Oxford History of World Cinema, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1996

Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium, Baltimore, Maryland, John Hopkins University Press, 1998

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

Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis, London, Starword, 2nd edition, 1992

David Thomson, Movie Man, New York, Stein and Day, 1967

David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, U.S.A. and U.K., Alfred A. Knopf and Little Brown, 2002

Ginette Vincendeau and Keith Reader (eds.), La Vie est à nous: French Cinema of the Popular Front 1935-1938, London, National Film Theatre, BFI, 1986 (a collection of essays, some in translation, to introduce a major season of films at the National Film Theatre on the 50th anniversary of the election of the Popular Front government in France)

Alan Williams, Republic of Images, Cambridge, Mass. and London, Harvard University Press, 1992

Non-Verbal Communication Systems:

Michael Argyle, The Psychology of Interpersonal Behaviour, Harmondswoth, Mx., Penguin Books, 1967

Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, St. Albans, Paladin, 1973 (essays on order and organisation in living systems, including discussions of non-verbal communication, and how these have been elaborated into complex forms of art)

Ray L. Birtwhistell, Kinesics and Context: Essays on Body-Motion Communication, U.S.A., University of Pennsylvania Press 1970 (pioneering scientific investigation of the systems now popularly known as “body language”)

Edward Hall, The Silent Language, New York, Fawcett World Library, 1966

(space considered not as a metaphor for human relationships, but as a major determinant of communicative and emotional interactions within and across cultures)

Edward Hall, The Hidden Dimension, New York, Doubleday Anchor, 1969

(introduction to proxemics, Hall’s name for his pioneering scientific study of humanity’s organisation and use of space)

John Laver and Sandy Hutcheson (eds.), Communication in Face to Face Interaction, Harmondswoth, Mx., Penguin Books, 1972

Alan Lomax, “Choreometrics and Ethnographic Filmmaking”, Filmmaker’s Newsletter Vol. 4, No. 4, February 1971. (Lomax’s seminal account of the scientific study of dance patterns was brought to my attention by Nick Ray, his friend since the 1930s. We were sitting in Lomax’s apartment, which Nick used to borrow when the owner was away for the weekend. Drawing on the ideas of some of the writers above, I was explaining that I believed that much of the power and poetry of Nick’s films depended on their articulations of space and movement. The same is true of those of Renoir. Lomax’s insights are relevant not only to documentary and ethnographic filmmakers, but to any analysis of how films communicate their meanings and generate their impact).

General:

John Berger and others, Ways of Seeing, London, BBC and Penguin Books, 1972 (based on the television series of the same name)

Tom Bishop, Pirandello and the French Theater, New York, New York University Press, 1960. (Includes short but effective discussions of Renoir’s plays, and of The Golden Coach, plus an extract from a letter from Renoir to the author affirming Pirandello’s importance)

Guy de Maupassant, Une Partie de campagne, originally published in La Vie moderne (April 1881) and reprinted in the same year in the collection La Maison Tellier. The translation mentioned in the text appears in A Day in the Country and Other Stories, trans. David Coward, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1990

Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education, Baltimore, Maryland and Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin Books, 1964 (a translation by Robert Baldick of L’Education sentimentale, Paris ,1869)

Rumer Godden, A House with Four Rooms, London, Macmillan, 1989 (the second volume of the novelist’s autobiography, which contains a full account of her friendship with Renoir, and their collaboration on The Riverwhilst the film was being written in California then shot on location in Bengal)

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

Herbert R. Lottman, The Left Bank: Writers, Artists and Politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War, London, Heinemann, 1982.

John Northam, Ibsen’s Dramatic Method: a Study of the Prose Plays, London, Faber and Faber 1953 (a study of the dramatist’s use, as revealed by his stage directions, of the elements of staging [costume, sets, props, lighting, movement, physical appearance] to generate poetic and dramatic impact, and to articulate his themes)

Donald Posner, “The Swinging Women of Watteau and Fragonard”, Art Bulletin LXIV, March 1982

Articles in Senses of Cinema

French CanCan by Rick Thompson

Lunch on the Grass by Stuart Lord

Renoir and the Scandal of “First Love” or The Perils of Catherine by Tag Gallagher

Web Resources

Canadian Journal of Communication

A long piece by Christopher Faulkner on Renoir’s politics in the USA.

A Guide to Online Jean Renoir Materials

Sister site to Film Directors: Articles on the Internet Website; in addition to articles, this Renoir resource centre provides information on films, recent news, retrospectives and bibliographies.

Film summary: Grand Illusion

Not recommended for individuals who haven’t seen the film.

The French films of Jean Renoir from The New York film Annex

Some Renoir films available here.

Jean Renoir

Capsule reviews of La Chienne, La Grande illusion and The River.

Je m’appelle Jean Renoir…

A French language site dedicated to Renoir.

Click here to search for Jean Renoir DVDs, videos and books at 

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. and 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.