Jean Renoir Films | Jean Renoir Filmography | Jean Renoir Biography | Jean Renoir Career | Jean Renoir Awards

Jean Renoir's major work dates from between 1924 and 1939. Of his 21 films the first six are silent features that put forward cinematic problems that come to dominate the entire oeuvre. All study a detachment, whether of language and image, humans and nature, or social rules and real conduct. Optical effects are treated as problems coextensive with narrative. He shows people who are told to obey rules and conventions in situations and social frames that confine them. A sensuous world is placed before everyone's eyes, but access to it is confounded by cultural mores. In Renoir's work, nature, like a frame without borders, isolates the impoverished subjects within limits at once too vast and too constricting for them. Inherited since the Cartesian revolution, and the growth of the middle class after 1789, bourgeois codes of conduct do not fit individuals whose desires and passion know no end.

The patterns established in the films appear simple, and they are. Renoir joins optical to social contradictions in the sense that every one of his films stages dramas about those who cannot conform to the frame in which they live. For the same reason his work also studies the dynamics of love in cinematography that marks how the effect is undeniably ?scopic??grounded in an impulse to see and thus to hold. Sight conveys the human wish to contain whatever is viewed, and to will to control what knows no border. As love cannot be contained, it becomes tantamount to nature itself.

The director has often been quoted as saying that he spent his life making one film. Were it fashioned from all of his finished works?including those composed in the 1920s or 1940s or 1960s in France, America, or India?it would tell the story of a collective humanity whose sense of tradition is effectively gratuitous or fake. The social milieu of many of his films is defined by a scapegoat who is killed in order to make that tradition both firm and precarious. All of Renoir's central characters thus define the narratives and visual compositions in which they are found. Boudu (Michel Simon), who escapes the confinement of bourgeois ways in Boudu sauv? des eaux, is the opposite of Lestingois (Charles Granval), ensconced in a double-standard marriage ? la Balzac. Boudu, a tramp, a trickster, and a refugee from La Chienne (1931) changes the imagination of his milieu by virtue of his passage through it. The effect he leaves resembles that of Am?d?e Lange (Ren? Lefevre) in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, who gives life to a collective venture?an emblem of Leon Blum's short-lived Popular Front government launched in 1936?that lives despite his delusions about the American West and the pulp he writes. Lange is the flip side of Jacques Lantier (Jean Gabin) of La B?te humaine (1938), a tragic hero whose suicide prefigures Andr? Jurieux's (Roland Toutain's) passion of La R?gle du jeu (1939).

Boudu floats through the frame in ways that the migrant laborers of Toni or the souls of La Vie est ? nous cannot. The latter are bound to conventions of capital exploitation that incarcerate humanity. In these and other films the characters all ?have their reasons,? that is, they have many contradictory drives that cannot be socially reconciled but that are individually well founded and impeccably logical on their own terms. When Renoir casts his characters' plural ?reasons? under an erotic aura, he offers superlative studies of love. His protagonists wish to find absolution for their passion at the vanishing points of the landscapes?both imaginary and real?in which they try to move. The latter are impossible constructs, but their allure is nonetheless tendered within the sensuous frame of deep-focus photography, long takes, and lateral reframing. Rosenthal and Mar?chal (Marcel Dalio and Gabin) seek an end to war when they tramp into the distance of a snowscape at the end of La Grande Illusion. Lange and Florelle (Valentine) wave goodbye as they walk into the flat horizon of Belgium. But Jurieux can imagine love only as a picture-postcard when he and Christine (Nora Gr?gor), he hopes in desperation, will rejoin his mother in snowy Alsace. Or Lantier can be imagined jumping from his speeding locomotive into a space where the two tracks of the railroad converge, at infinity, beyond the line between Paris and Le Havre. In Une Partie de campagne, Henri (Georges Darnoux), frustrated beyond end at the sight of melancholy Juliette (Sylvia Bataille) rowing upstream with her husband sitting behind her in their skiff, looks tearfully at the lush Marne riverside. Sitting on the trunk of a weeping willow arched over the current, he flicks his cigarette butt in the water, unable to express otherwise the fate he has been dealt.

These scenes are shot with an economy that underscores the pathos Renoir draws from figures trapped in situations too vast for their ken or their lives. If generalization can seek an emblem, Renoir's films appear to lead to a serre, the transparent closure of the greenhouse that serves as the site of the d?nouement of La R?gle du jeu. The ?serre? is literally what constricts, or what has deceptive depth for its beholder. It is the scene where love is acted out and extinguished by the onlooker. The space typifies what Renoir called ?the feeling of a frame too narrow for the content? of the dramas he selected from a literary heritage (Madame Bovary, The Lower Depths) or wrote himself, such as Rules.

Renoir's films have an added intensity and force when viewed in the 1990s. They manifest an urgent concern for the natural world and demonstrate that we are the ?human beast? destroying it. Clearly opposed to the effects of capitalism, Renoir offers glimpses of sensuous worlds that seem to arch beyond history. A viewer of La Fille de Veau (1924), Boudu, or Toni surmises that trees have far more elegance than the characters turning about them, or that, echoing Baudelaire's pronouncements in his Salons of 1859, landscapes lacking the human species are of enduring beauty. Renoir puts forth studies of the conflict of language and culture in physical worlds that possess an autonomy of their own. His characters are gauged according to the distance they gain from their environments or the codes that tell them how to act and to live. Inevitably, Renoir's characters are marked by writing. Boudu, a reincarnation of Pan and Nature itself, can only read ?big letters.? By contrast, Lantier is wedded to his locomotive, a sort of writing machine he calls ?la lison.? The urbane La Chesnaye (Dalio) in Rules cannot live without his writing, the ?dangerous supplements? of mechanical dolls, a calliope, or human toys. These objects reflect in the narrative the filmic apparatus that crafted Renoir's work as a model of film writing, a ?cam?ra-stylo,? or cin?-?criture. Use of deep focus and long takes affords diversity and chance. With the narratives, they constitute Renoir's signature, the basis of the concept and practice of the auteur.

Renoir's oeuvre stands as a monument and a model of cinematography. By summoning the conditions of illusion and artifice of film, it rises out of the massive production of poetic realism of the 1930s in France. He develops a style that is the very tenor of a vehicle studying social contradiction. The films implicitly theorize the limits that cinema confronts in any narrative or documentary depiction of our world.?TOM CONLEY