  Choose another writer in this calendar: by name: by birthday from the calendar. TimeSearch |
|
Jean Renoir (1894-1979) |
|
One of the greatest film directors of France, a humanist and "the least arrogant of all men," whose most creative period in the 1930s produced such masterworks as The Grand Illusion, The Human Beast, and The Rules of the Game. Jean Renoir conceived all his work as a collaborative effort by director, writer, technicians and actors. Typical for his films are continually changing relationships between people, deep-focus frame, moving camera, and long takes which recorded the intimate thoughts of his characters. "In nature nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed," Renoir once said. Simplicity is absolutely essential to creation. Those people who make love while saying: "We're going to have a magnificent child"; well, they won't have a magnificent child, they may not have any child at all that evening. . . . The magnificent child comes by chance, one day after a good laugh, a picnic, fun in the woods, a roll in the hay, then a magnificent child is born! (from an interview in Cahiers du cinéma, by Jacques Rivette and François Truffaut, in Renoir on Renoir: Interviews, Essays, and Remarks by Jean Renois, translated by Carol Volk, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 95) Jean Renoir was born in Paris, the second of three sons of the famous Impressionist painter Auguste Renoir and his wife, Aline (née Charigot). Renoir divided his childhood years between the family's house in Paris and a country estate in the south of France, developing there love for the nature. Also his father's works were an inseparable part of his early years. At the age of five, Renoir became interested in puppet theater. It was introduced to him by Gabrielle Renard, his nanny, with whom he developed a strong bond. "She taught me to see the face behind the mask and the fraud behind the flourishes." (My Life and My Films by Jean Renoir, 1974, p. 282) Later he found the adventure books of Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers, La Tour de Nesle, and others. Especially he was fascinated by the sense of honor between the musketeers. Before joining the cavalry, Renoir studied philosophy and mathematics at the University of Aix-en-Provence. During World War I, he served as a second lieutenant with the French Alpine Infantry, and as a pilot at the French Flying Corps. Renoir was wounded two times. A bullet in a thighbone left him with a permanent slight limp. Renoir's father died 1919. Next year he married his father's
beautiful model Andrée Madeleine Heuschling (Dédée), who gained fame as
an actress under
the name Catherine Hessling. Their only child, Alain, was born in 1921.
Already during the war, Renoir had became interested in the
cinema, but he earned his living between 1920 and 1923 as a potter and
ceramicist.
With his inherited money, Renoir set up an
independent production company. In 1924 he produced and wrote his first
film, Catherine ou Une vie sans joie.
His first direction was La Fille de
l'eau
(1924), his wife playing the role of a young woman escaping her uncle
as he attempts to rape her. Hessling acted also in Renoir's adaptation of Zola's famous novel Nana (1925), a complete commercial failure. Charleston (1927), an erotic fantasy, was again made for Hessling. However, in the beginning of the sound era they separated. Her place was taken by Marguerite Mathieu, a film editor, known as Marguerite Renoir although the director never married her. La Chienne
(1931) was Renoir's first major talkie. "... I adore, I love, I'm quite
excited – platonically – by the
women one meets on the streets of Paris," Renoir told about the idea of
the film. In Georges de la Fouchardière's novel, on which the story was
based, the protagonist is a prostitute.
La Nuit du carrefour (1932) was an adaptation of Georges Simenon's novel. Renoir's brother
Pierre played the famous Inspector Maigret. Michael Simon dressed as a
hobo in Boudu sauvé des eaux
(1932, Boudou Saved from Drowning), which was remade in 1986 in
Hollywood under the title Down and Out in Beverly Hills.
In this version Nick Nolte was the bum, who changes the life of a
middle-class family. Like a number of artists and intellectuals in the
1930s, Renoir felt sympathy for the struggle of the working class. He
contributed regularly the the French Communist Party journal Ce Soir and the antifascist Commune. Moreove, Renoir agreed to produce and direct La vie
est à nous
(1936) for the Party, but let his assistants, André
Zwobada and Jean-Paul de Chanois, direct most of the film. Its
exhibition to the general public in France was restricted by the
censors until 1969. Les Bas-fonds (1936, The Lower Depths) was based on the play by Maxim Gorky. Although there were enormous differences between Renoir's script and Gorki's play, the author himself approved it wholeheartedly. The Lower Depths started Renoir's cooperation with Jean Gabin. "He's certainly the most honest man I've ever met in my life," said Renoir once and after thinking for a moment he added: "Oh! wait, I know one other honest person, Ingrid Bergman." (Renoir on Renoir: Interviews, Essays, and Remarks, translated by Carol Volk, 1989, p. 90) With her Renoir made in 1956 Elena et les Hommes. Renoir took the idea for the film from the life of General Boulanger (1837-1891), who prepared a coup d'état, fled to Belgium, and committed suicide on the grave of his mistress. La Grande Illusion
(1937)
was Renoir's first international success, but in Germany it was banned
by Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels, who persuaded also Italians to
ban it. However, embarrassment was great when it won in Venice Film
Festival the "Best Artistic Ensemble" award. Grand Illusion was
based on a true story from World War I and illustrated the power of
wartime camaraderie between the French and German soldiers. Erich von
Stroheim played Von Rauffernstein, and Jean Gabin was Marechal, who try
to find a way out with Pierre Fresnay from the escape-proof fortress,
Wintersborn, commanded by Von Rauffenstein. Inside the walls, the
prisoners are treated well and there is some kind of natural bond
between all men. Von Rauffenstein is an aristocrat. He reluctantly
shoots Captain De Boeldieu, whose self-sacrifice helps two of his
comrades, Gabin and a Jewish officer, to escape from Wintersborn, back
to war. Paradoxically, outside the walls is freedom but not peace or
equality. Renoir was sensitive to his actors' bodies and gestures: "I
began to realize that the gesture of a laundress, of a
woman combining her hair before a mirror, of a streethawker near a car,
had an incomparable plastic eloquence. I made a sort of study of French
gestures through the paintings of my father, and those of his
generation." Von Stroheim, understanding Renoir's ideas, added a neck
brace and a corset to make his character look outside even stiffer and
inhuman, but inside he represents virtues of the old order – patriotic
heroism, chivalrous manner, and honor. Asked years later how much
effect pacifist films have, Renoir answered, "In 1936 I made a picture
named La Grande Illusion in which I tried to express all my
deep feelings for the cause of peace. This film was very successful.
Three years later the war broke out. That is the only answer I can
find..." (Film and
History by James Chapman, 2013, p. 85) La Bête humaine (1938, The Human Beast), starring Jean Gabin, was based on Emile Zola's novel. The title of the film was misleading – there are no clear villains or heroes in Renoir's world, and the locomotive was perhaps the most impressive character. To learn about railroads, Gabin drove the train several times from Le Havre to Paris. La Règle du jeu (1939) is considered Renoir's last masterpiece from the 1930s. However, it was a great commercial failure in its time; cut by Vichy censors and banned by Nazis. When the film was shown in July 1939 at the Colisée many people wanted to destroy the seats, and the director received plenty of insults. The original negative was destroyed in 1942 in an air raid. In 1950, Howard Thompson said in The New York Times: "Here we have a baffling mixture of stale sophistication, coy symbolism, and galloping slapstick that almost defies analysis... The master had dealt his admirers a pointless, thudding punch below the belt." The film restored to its original form in 1959. Renoir satirized the French ruling class, balancing between humor and pathos. "During the shooting of the film I was torn between my desire to make a comedy of it and the wish to tell a tragic story," the director later explained. "The result of this ambivalence was the film as it is." (European Art Cinema by John White, 2017, p. 48) One of its most famous sequences is the brutal "rabbit hunt," which parallels with the fatal and farcical game of love and bourgeois partying. Before directing his first film, Luchino Visconti worked as assistant director on three of Renoir's productions. Renoir gave him a transcript of James M. Cain's novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, a triangle drama with a grim conclusion, which Visconti rooted in Italy under the title Ossessione (1942). Made while Mussolini was still in power, its world of gloom and corruption was banned by the censors. When World War II broke out, Renoir joined the Film Service of
the
French army. In 1940, Robert Flaherty arranged his passage to the
United States. There he settled in
Hollywood and became an American citizen. In a letter he wrote to his
son Alain, who was still in the defeated French army: "I do not yet
know all the possibilities of Hollywood, because it's a place where you
never see anyone. I saw the heads of Fox one or two times for a few
minutes and that was all. If there weren't such formalities over your
visa and all the problems with the Bank and Taxes, which are very
complicated, we would only see a few friends and that's all." (Renoir on March 8, 1941) In 1944 Renoir married Dido Freire, his script girl and the
niece of director Alberto Cavalcanti. However,
his divorce
from Hessling was not recognized in France. Renoir made an anti-Nazi
propaganda film, This Land Is Mine
(1943), starring Maureen O'Hara and Charles Laughton, and two years
later The Southerner, which
was awarded at the Venice Film Festival in 1946. Generally it is
acknowledged Renoir's best American film. The Southener was adapted from a novel entitled Hold Autumn in Your Hand by George Sessions Perry. William Faulkner participated in the scriptwriting; his contribution is uncredited. Faulkner liked the result and would have been pleased to have had the credit. Renoir's co-writer, Hugo Butler, was blacklisted in the 1950s. In India Renoir made The River (1951), his first color production. It was based on a novel by the English writer Rumer Godden, who had been brought up in Bengal. Renoir's later works in Europe include French Cancan (1955), a great
box-office success, starring Jean Gabin, Maria Felix, Françoise Arnoul.
"French Cancan is
above all the story of Nini. Nini is a little laundress who walks
around with a basket under her arm. Nothing is more seductive than a
laundress walking in the street with a basket under her arm. There are
no more of them today, of course, but when I was little, there were
many of them, and I used to watch them." (Renoir about
the film; Chanteuse in the City: The
Realist Singer in French Film by Kelley Conway, 2004 p.
127) Le Testament du docteur Cordelier (1961), shot in black and white, was a version of R.L. Stevenson's horror classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. At the beginning of the film, the director arrives at a television studio to tell about events which have occurred on the outskirts of Paris. Le Caporal épinglé (1962, The Elisive Corporal) was according to Renoir his saddest film. In the Fall of 1963, Renoir was invited to teach directing at the Univeristy of California at Los Angeles. His budget was slim, but the lack of facilities did not concern him. "He did not need elaborare or substantial resources to accomplish what he considered fundamental. He had always begun with the nature of the individual actor . . . and the actor's embodiment of a palpable character, existing and active in and through relationships with others." ('Renoir: Our Teacher' by John Bragin, Scholarly Journal, Vol. 15, Iss. 2, Mar/Apr 1979) Renoir received in 1975 an honorary Oscar for his work and in
1977 he was made an officer of the French Legion of Honor. His
autobiography, My
Life and My Films,
came out in 1974. Between 1951 and 1969 Renoir wrote at least seventeen
synopses, treatments or sketches for films but could not interest
producers –
he was paid big compliments instead. "I've become a museum piece,"
Renoir complained. He finished also a biography of his father, Renoir
Mon Père
(1962). In 1966, Renoir published his first novel, Les Cahiers du capitaine Georges.
It was followed by Le Cœur à l'aise
(1978), Le Crime de l'Anglais
(1979) and Geneviève
(1979), completed only days before his death. Renoir died in Beverly
Hills in California, on February 12, 1979. Orson Welles wrote Renoir's
obituary for The Los Angeles Times
under the heading 'The Greatest of All Direcors.' Welles put in it his
ill-feeling toward Hollywood: "When we strain for perfect clarity, what
we finally achieve is perfectly banal. That, he [Renoir] was sure, was
the real trouble with Hollywood: Not that it worshiped money, but
something much worse – that it worshiped an ideal of so-called
perfection." Several of Renoir's films were based on novels or short stories. The critic André Bazin hailed Renoir as the spiritual godfather of the French "new wave" in the 1950s and 1960s. His influence is seen in the works of Visconti, Satyajit Ray, Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, and in many of their contemporaries. For further reading: A Modernist Cinema: Film Art from 1914 to 1941, edited by Scott W. Klein and Michael Valdez Moses (2021); Dictionnaire Jean Renoir: du cinéaste à l'écrivain by Philippe De Vita (2020); Renoir Father and Son: Painting and Cinema, edited by Sylvie Patry (2018); Cracking Gilles Deleuze's Crystal: Narrative Space-time in the Films of Jean Renoir by Barry Nevin (2018); Boats on the Marne: Jean Renoir's Critique of Modernity by Prakash Younger (2017); Jean Renoir: A Biography by Pascal Mérigeau; translated by Bruce Benderson; foreword by Martin Scorsese (2016); Selected writings / books:
Films:
|
