Filmmakers

FILMMAKERS Robert Bresson Robert Bresson Marcel Carné René Clément Jean Cocteau Jean-Luc Godard Jean Renoir Alain Resnais Eric Rohmer Jacques Tati François Truffaut Agnès Varda

FILMS Grand Illusion The Rules of the Game Daybreak Children of Paradise Beauty and the Beast Forbidden Games Mr. Hulot's Holiday A Man Escaped The 400 Blows Hiroshima mon amour Breathless Jules et Jim My Night at Maud's My American Uncle Vagabond

Born in Paris (Montmartre) in 1894, the second son of the famous Impressionist painter Auguste Renoir, Jean Renoir was the most important film director of the “poetic realism” movement which dominated the 1930s in France. Few directors have produced so many films of fine quality as Renoir, whose career extended over a period of forty-five years. Renoir shared a strong feeling of mutual admiration with another icon of the cinema, Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin is said to have responded to a question about the best filmmakers in the world with the following comment: “The greatest film director in the world? In my opinion he’s a Frenchman. He’s called Jean Renoir.”

Intimidated by his father’s celebrity, Renoir was not tempted by painting as a youth. When the First World War broke out in Europe, he volunteered for service. Wounded in the leg in 1915, he was sent to a hospital in Paris to recover. There he discovered the cinema, and in particular Chaplin. Fascinated, he haunted the Parisian cinemas, seeing around 25 films a week until his return to combat. He worked in the photographic services of the air force, first as a spotter, then as a pilot. After being wounded again when his plane crashed behind enemy lines (cf. the beginning of Grand Illusion), Renoir was repatriated in 1918.

In search of a career, Renoir began a ceramics workshop which was moderately successful for four years. Still obsessed with the movies, however, he resolved in 1924 to make films. His whole personal fortune, inherited from his father, was swallowed up in a few years while he learned his craft. His career began with a series of eight silent films, including an excellent adaptation of Emile Zola’s novel, Nana (1928) and a now famous version of the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale The Little Matchgirl (1928). His major body of works began a few years later with the advent of the talkies. Unlike many of the silent film directors, Renoir welcomed the invention of the sound film near the end of the twenties. He immediately understood its rich potential and produced a masterpiece with his second sound film, The Bitch (1931), about a middle-aged bank employee who falls in love with a young prostitute and kills her in a fit of jealous rage. In this film Renoir adopted a style that he later called “poetic realism,” a mixture of social realism and lyrical fantasy, the literal and the metaphorical. The Bitch will be remade by the great German filmmaker Fritz Lang, in 1945, as Scarlet Street.

Renoir directed a dozen more films in France in the thirties, including his greatest masterpieces of poetic realism, before settling in the United States to escape the German occupation of France. In 1936 he directed a remarkable adaptation of a Guy de Maupassant tale, A Day in the Country, followed by Grand Illusion (1937), The Human Beast (1938), and The Rules of the Game (1939). In the United States, working under the constraints of Hollywood, he directed five films, including Swamp Water (1941) and The Southerner (1945), generally considered to be his best American works. At the beginning of the fifties, Renoir left the U.S. for India to make The River (1950), before directing The Golden Coach in Italy (1952). When he returned to France, he added two masterpieces, French Cancan (1954) and Elena and Her Men (1956), in addition to several lesser films. He died in 1979 in southern California, where he had eventually established a permanent residence.

As an artist Renoir has often been compared to Balzac, Cervantes, Flaubert, and Shakespeare (among others), the latter owing to the stylistic diversity and the thematic richness of his works. He is known as one of the most “humanistic” film directors; in his films the plot is far less important than the human relations. Nontheless, Renoir was a technical virtuoso — seconded by his favorite directors of photography, Christian Matras and Claude Renoir (his nephew). From a stylistic viewpoint, Renoir’s films are distinguished, on the one hand, by long takes (“sequence shots”) which create whole sequences in a single shot through a complicated choreography of pans and trackings. On the other hand, Renoir is one of the first filmmakers to realize the expressive potential of deep focus photography, which allows the filming of two simultaneous actions, one in the foreground, the other in the background. He thus contributed to the creation of a new film esthetics emphasizing mise-en-scène (staging), as opposed to the “montage” approach promoted by the Soviet school (Koulechov, Eisenstein), which is predicated on the editing together of short shots.

Renoir is likewise an indisputable master of the tonal composition of images, whose expressive qualities are akin to those found in painting. In A Day in the Country, notably, he transposed the style of Impressionist painting that his father, among others, had made famous.

Selected Filmography

1926 Nana (silent)
1928 The Little Match Girl (silent)
1931 The Bitch
1934 Toni
1935 The Crime of Mr. Lange
1936 A Day in the Country (edited and first shown in 1946)
1936 The Lower Depths  
1937 Grand Illusion
1938 The Human Beast, La Marseillaise
1939 The Rules of the Game
1941 Swamp Water (USA)
1945 The Southerner (USA)
1950 The River (India)
1952 The Golden Coach (Italy)
1954 French Cancan
1956 Elena and Her Men