Ren? Clair Films | Ren? Clair Filmography | Ren? Clair Biography | Ren? Clair Career | Ren? Clair Awards

During the 1930s, when the French cinema reigned intellectually preeminent, Ren? Clair ranked with Renoir and Carn? as one of its greatest directors?perhaps the most archetypally French of them all. His reputation has since fallen (as has Carn?'s), and comparison with Renoir may suggest why. Clair's work, though witty, stylish, charming, and technically accomplished, seems to lack a dimension when compared with the work of Renoir; there is a certain over-simplification, a fastidious turning away from the messier, more complex aspects of life. (Throughout nearly the whole of his career, Clair rejected location shooting, preferring the controllable artifice of the studio.) Critics have alleged that his films are superficial and emotionally detached. Yet, at their best, Clair's films have much of the quality of champagne?given so much sparkle and exhilaration, it would seem churlish to demand nourishment as well.

At the outset of his career, Clair directed one of the classic documents of surrealist cinema, Entr'acte, and this grounding in surrealism underlies much of his comedy work. The surrealists' love of sight gags (Magritte's cloud-baguettes, Duchamp's urinal) and mocking contempt for bourgeois respectability can be detected in the satiric farce of Un Chapeau de paille d'ltalie, Clair's masterpiece of the silent era. Dream imagery, another surrealist preoccupation, recurs constantly throughout his career, from Le Voyage imaginaire to Les Belles-de-nuit, often transmuted into fantasy?touchingly poetic at its best, though in weaker moments declining into fey whimsicality.

The key films in Clair's early career, and those which made him internationally famous, were his first four sound pictures: Sous les toits de Paris, Le Million, A Nous la libert?, and Quatorze Juillet. Initially sceptical of the value of sound?"an unnatural creation"?he rapidly changed his opinion when he recognized the creative, non-realistic possibilities that the soundtrack offered. Sound effects, music, even dialogue could be used imaginatively to counterpoint and comment on the image, or to suggest a new perspective on the action. Words and pictures, Clair showed, need not, and in fact should not, be tied together in a manner that clumsily duplicates information. Dialogue need not always be audible; and even in a sound picture, silence could claim a validity of its own.

In these four films, Clair created a wholly individual cinematic world, a distinctive blend of fantasy, romance, social satire, and operetta. Song and dance are introduced into the action with no pretence at literal realism, characters are drawn largely from stock, and the elaborate sets are explored with an effortless fluidity of camera movement, which would be impossible in real locations. These qualities, together with the pioneering use of sound and Clair's knack for effective pacing and brilliant visual gags, resulted in films of exceptional appeal, full of charm, gaiety, and an ironic wit, which at times?notably in the satire on mechanised greed in A Nous la libert??darkened toward an underlying pessimism.

As always, Clair wrote his own scripts, working closely on all four films with designer Lazare Meerson and cinematographer Georges P?rinal. Of the four, Le Million most effectively integrated its various elements, and is generally rated Clair's finest film. But all were successful, especially outside France, and highly influential: both Chaplin (Modern Times) and the Marx Brothers (A Night at the Opera) borrowed from them.

In some quarters, though, Clair was criticized for lack of social relevance. Ill-advisedly, he attempted to respond to such criticisms; Le Dernier Milliardaire proved a resounding flop. This led to Clair's long exile. For thirteen years he made no films in France other than the abortive Air pur, and his six English-language pictures?two in Britain, four in America?have an uneasy feel about them, the fantasy strained and unconvincing. By the time Clair finally returned to France in 1946, both he and the world had changed.

The films that Clair made after World War II rarely recapture the lighthearted gaiety of his early work. In its place, the best of them display a new-found maturity and emotional depth, while preserving the characteristic elegance and wit of his previous films. The prevailing mood is an autumnal melancholy that at times, as in the elegiac close of Les Grandes Manoeuvres, comes near to tragedy. Characters are no longer the stock puppets of the pre-war satires, but rounded individuals, capable of feeling and suffering. More serious subjects are confronted, their edges only slightly softened by their context: Porte des Lilas ends with a murder, La Beaut? du diable with a vision of the atomic holocaust. Nearest in mood to the earlier films is the erotic fantasy of Les Belles-de-nuit, but even this is darkly underscored with intimations of suicide.

In the late 1950s Clair came under attack from the writers of Cahiers du cinema, Francois Truffaut in particular, who regarded him as the embodiment of the ?Old Guard,? the ossified cin?ma de papa against which they were in revolt. To what he saw as Clair's emotionless, studio-bound artifice, Truffaut proposed an alternative, more ?truly French? cinematic tradition, the lyrical freedom of Renoir and Jean Vigo. Clair's reputation never fully recovered from these onslaughts, nor from the lukewarm reception which met his last two films, Tout l'or du monde and Les Fetes galantes.

Although Clair no longer commands a place among the very first rank of directors, he remains undoubtedly one of the most original and distinctive stylists of the cinema. His explorations of sound, movement, and narrative technique, liberating at the time, still appear fresh and inventive. For all his limitations, which he readily acknowledged?"a director's intelligence," he once wrote, "can be judged partly by his renunciations"?Clair succeeded in creating a uniquely personal vision of the world, which in his best films still retains the power to exhilarate and delight.?PHILIP KEMP