2 Renoir (1934): Framing Emma

2 Renoir (1934): Framing Emma Still recognized as one of France’s most talented filmmakers, Jean Renoir was born in Paris in 1894, but in fact spent the second half of his life in the USA. He died in Beverly Hills in 1979. Although his career began in the silent era and spanned forty years and two continents, his reputation rests largely on films made in France in the 1930s. Of these, La Grande Illusion (1937) and La Règle du jeu (1939) [The Rules of the Game] are most often cited as his masterpieces. Renoir is also known for his outstanding adaptations of such literary classics as Maupassant’s “Une partie de campagne” (1881) [A Country Excursion], adapted in 1936; and Zola’s La Bête humaine (1890) [The Beast in Man], filmed in 1938. These latter accomplishments are surprising because the filmmaker resolved at the outset of his career that he would avoid adapting literary works for the screen. Writing his memoirs in 1974, he describes his dawning realization that his original resolution was misguided and that adaptation was not incompatible with creativity: Après tout, ce qui nous intéresse dans une adaptation, ce n’est pas la possibilité de retrouver l’œuvre originale dans l’œuvre filmée, mais la réaction de l’auteur du film devant l’œuvre originale. Cette réaction peut nous entraîner à des résultats qui paraîtront sans rapport avec celle-ci, qu’importe. On n’admire pas un tableau à cause de sa fidélité au modèle, ce qu’on demande au modèle, c’est d’ouvrir la porte à l’imagination de l’artiste. (246) [After all, what interests us in an adaptation isn’t the possibility of finding the original work in the filmed work, but rather the director’s interpretation of the original work. That this interpretation can lead to results that may appear unrelated to the original work is irrelevant. We 42 Madame Bovary at the Movies don’t admire a painting because of its fidelity to the model it depicts; what we ask the model to do is to open the door to the artist’s imagination.] The analogy between painting and moviemaking came naturally to the son of the Impressionist artist Pierre Auguste Renoir. Associating the art of the painter with that of the director who adapts literary works to the screen, and the painter’s model with the literary work, Renoir lent the weight of his reputation to an early defense of the “freedom” side of the “fidelity” debate. Although his use of the term auteur betrays the influence of New Wave theorists who emphasized the autonomy and creativity of the film director, previously regarded merely as one member (albeit an important one) of a production team, his insistence on allying his art with that of his father testifies to his deeply personal perspective on the art of the filmmaker. One could of course speculate about the œdipal dimension of this perspective: it is well-known that Jean Renoir married his father’s model, Andrée Heuschling, not long after his father’s death in 1919, and moreover that he decided to direct films in order to make his young wife a movie star (Alan Williams 136), an ambition he accomplished repeatedly during the silent era, when Heuschling became known by her stage name, Catherine Hessling. However, for purposes of the present study, the importance of Renoir’s propensity for associating filmmaking with painting lies in the way this mindset finds expression on the screen, or, to use Robert Stam’s term, the way in which this “transtextuality” is realized in Renoir’s Madame Bovary (François Truffaut and Friends, xiii). As we have noted, film’s identity as a composite art that draws on poetry, sculpture, painting, music, dance, and architecture is well known. While it would be foolish to deny the strong influence of theater on Renoir’s adaptation of Flaubert’s novel, one could easily defend the thesis that it is above all the art of painting that gives the film its peculiar unity, that both semantically and syntactically, the paternal influence: is omnipresent in this adaptation of Madame Bovary. Renoir’s populist sympathies:and and his predilection for symbolism are also revealed in this adaptation, as we shall see. In order to understand the particular challenges that accompanied the filming in 1933 of a novel published in 1857, we need first to examine the historical and socio-political context in which the film was made. While French filmmakers had enjoyed a sterling reputation prior to World War I, Hollywood reigned supreme .

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