Renoir in the ‘30s Instructor: Michael Fox Tuesdays, 10 am-12:30 pm, Sept. 24-Oct. 29, 2019 [email protected]
The greatest filmmaker in the world, according to both Orson Welles and Francis Truffaut, Jean Renoir began making movies in the silent era. With the introduction of sound, the writer, director and occasional actor embarked on his most productive and greatest period. The remarkable body of work he produced in the 1930s, from the still-innovative La Chienne through the reviled and rediscovered The Rules of the Game, encompasses melodrama, social realism, tragicomedy, historical epic and farce. This lecture and screening class explores the genius and contradictions of a humanist who combined effortless artistry with accessible social critique.
The son of the great impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jean Renoir made his mark in the early thirties with an anarchic send-up of the bourgeoisie (Boudu Saved From Drowning) and a popular-front Gorky adaptation (The Lower Depths). He closed the decade with two critical humanistic studies of French society—Grand Illusion (celebrated in its time) and The Rules of the Game (trashed by critics and audiences, and reassessed much later)—that routinely make the lists of the greatest movies ever made. After a brief, unfulfilling Hollywood stint during World War II, Renoir traveled to India to make his first Technicolor film, The River, and returned to Europe in the early fifties to direct three visually impressive explorations of theater, The Golden Coach, French Cancan and Elena and Her Men. After completing The Little Theater of Jean Renoir, comprised of three short films, in the late sixties, he dedicated himself to writing.
Biography and filmography: http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/great-directors/renoir/ Biography and filmography: www.tcm.com/tcmdb/person/160204|80577/Jean-Renoir/ A browser’s paradise: www.revolvy.com/topic/Jean%20Renoir&item_type=topic An interesting rabbit hole: https://onlinejeanrenoir.wordpress.com Essay: https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/re-renoir 1976 review of several books about and by Renoir: www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2018/06/on- jean-renoir/
Sept. 24 La Chienne (1931) 94 min Renoir’s second sound film, a ruthless love triangle, is a true precursor to his brilliantly bitter The Rules of the Game, displaying his visual genius and imbued with his profound humanity. Michel Simon cuts a tragic figure as an unhappily married cashier and amateur painter who becomes so smitten with a prostitute that he refuses to see the obvious: She and her pimp boyfriend are taking advantage of him. Renoir’s elegant compositions and camera movements carry this twisting narrative—a stinging commentary on class and sexual divisions—to an unforgettably ironic conclusion.
DVD essay: www.criterion.com/current/posts/4105-la-chienne-he-she-and-the-other-guy essay: http://sensesofcinema.com/2013/cteq/la-chienne/
Oct. 1 Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932) 84 min Michel Simon gives one of the most memorable performances in screen history as Boudu, a Parisian tramp who takes a suicidal plunge into the Seine and is rescued by a well-to-do bookseller, Edouard Lestingois (Charles Granval). The Lestingois family decides to take in the irrepressible bum, and he shows his gratitude by shaking the household to its foundations. Renoir takes advantage of a host of Parisian locations and the anarchic charms of his lead actor to create an effervescent satire of the bourgeoisie.
“What happens with great actors, and consequently with Michel Simon, is that they unmask you, bring dreams that you've had, but haven't expressed, to light.”— Renoir
2000 review www.theguardian.com/culture/2000/sep/21/artsfeatures video essay: www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/dvd-of-the-week-boudu-saved-from- drowning
Oct. 8 The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936) 77 min Renoir’s only collaboration with Jacques Prévert tells of the employees of a publishing house who form a collective to publish the Western adventure novels of co-worker M. Lange after the corrupt owner Batala absconds with the firm’s capital and is presumed dead. A film that “emphasizes love as a social force” (André Bazin) depends upon the interactions of a marvelous cast, as David Thomson wrote: “Throughout the 1930s, Renoir was seeking ways to make spatial-emotional relationships between his characters more intricate and extensive. M. Lange comes from the years when Renoir was engaged with the Popular Front—it is a kind of propaganda; yet it’s also another Maupassant-like conte in which the gravity of Community is offset by the charming silliness of these characters, the tumbling sport of love and humor, and the amazing cinematic freshness that Renoir brings to a deliberately theatrical set. Moreover, everything is made more difficult by the fact that Batala is engaging, witty and ingenious. (This) gives the film all the ambiguity of Boudu and Cordelier, other works in which Renoir regards the disruptive force with mixed feelings....M. Lange bubbles with his delight in crowded frames and character actors. (And) Renoir was good enough to know that every crowd is an uneasy container for lonely, quirky individuals.”
“Of all Renoir’s films, Monsieur Lange is the most spontaneous, the richest in miracles of camera work, the most full of pure beauty and truth. In short, it is a film touched by divine grace.”—Francois Truffaut trailer: https://youtu.be/F7YjUceObN8 video essay: www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/dvd-of-the-week-the-crime-of- monsieur-lange 2005 review: www.slantmagazine.com/film/the-crime-of-monsieur-lange/ 2017 review: www.villagevoice.com/2017/11/14/renoirs-the-crime-of-monsieur-lange-is-the- most-humane-film-ever-made-about-killing-your-boss/
Oct. 15 Grand Illusion (1937) 113 min One of the first prison escape movies, Renoir's antiwar masterpiece stars Jean Gabin and Pierre Fresnay as French soldiers held in a World War I German prison camp, and Erich von Stroheim as Captain von Rauffenstein.
DVD essay: www.criterion.com/current/posts/15-grand-illusion essay: www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/greatest-films-all- time/great-escape-la-grande-illusion 1999 Ebert review: www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-grand-illusion-1937 article: www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/76799/Grand-Illusion/articles.html Renoir introduction in French: www.bing.com/videos/search?q=youtube+jean+renoir&qpvt=youtube+jean+renoir&view=detail &mid=CEE85F23E7E0DFE558B5CEE85F23E7E0DFE558B5&&FORM=VRDGAR Renoir introduction in English: www.bing.com/videos/search?q=youtube+jean+renoir&qpvt=youtube+jean+renoir&view=detail &mid=82122F0B90246615F89A82122F0B90246615F89A&&FORM=VRDGAR
Oct. 22 La Bete Humaine (1938) 100 min Renoir’s adaptation of Zola’s famous novel, as André Bazin noted, avoided entirely the novel’s particularly strained “cinematic vision” while rendering its background of social conflict in the documentary-inspired visuals. Jean Gabin earned a place in the hearts of the French people with his portrayal of the working-class hero/victim Lantier, a devoted engineer on the Paris–Le Havre line who is haunted by the threat of madness inherited from his alcoholic forebears. The stationmaster’s wife, Séverine (the feline Simone Simon), herself both femme fatale and victim (of her sex and her class), lures him into her desperate life. “Gabin, with the slightest tremor in his face, could express the most violent feelings,” Renoir wrote; Lantier’s melancholy is nowhere better defined than in the split second when he looks into a mirror to see the eyes, not so much of a murderer, perhaps, as of a suicide.—Judy Bloch, PFA
One of Renoir’s greatest popular successes, La Bete Humaine is part poetic realism, part film noir, it is a hard-boiled and suspenseful journey into the tormented psyche of a workingman. essay: http://sensesofcinema.com/2013/cteq/la-bete-humaine-unquiet-desperation/ article: www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/724177/La-Bete-Humaine/articles.html 2004 Ebert review: www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-rules-of-the-game-1939
Oct. 29 The Rules of the Game (1939) 106 min Denigrated by the public, vilified by the critics, re-cut at the insistence of its producers, and finally banned by the French government as “demoralizing” and unpatriotic, La Règle du jeu was a commercial disaster at the time of its original release.
On the surface, a series of interlinked romantic intrigues taking place at a weekend shooting party in a country chateau, the film is in fact a study in the corruption and decay of French society on the eve of the outbreak of the second world war. Renoir’s brilliant social comedy is now widely recognized as one of the greatest films ever made.
As in La Grande Illusion, Renoir used the convention of the microcosm, using the events of the house party to comment, with irony and despair, on the state of France on the eve of disaster. He described La Règle du jeu as “a sort of reconstructed documentary on the condition of society at a given moment. It is a war film, and yet there is no reference to the war. Beneath its seemingly innocuous appearance the story attacks the very structure of our society.”
Andre Jurieu, an aviator, loves Christine, wife of the Marquis de la Chesnaye. La Chesnaye is having a covert affair with the socialite Genevieve. Chesnaye’s gamekeeper, Schumacher, is violently jealous of his wife Lisette, Christine’s maid, whom he suspects of dallying with poacher-turned valet Marceau. Around them hovers the jocular, uneasy figure of Octave, mediator, confidant and go-between. During a weekend at La Chesnaye’s chateau, these intrigues bubble over into confusion, chaos and finally tragedy.
At the disastrous premiere of La Règle du Jeu, audiences howled, whistled, tore up seats and burned newspapers in protest. The film was attacked as frivolous, clumsy and incomprehensible. After its ban, it received occasional showings in various versions, but it wasn’t until 1956, when 200 cans of outtakes were discovered, that it could be restored to very nearly its original form.
DVD essay: www.criterion.com/current/posts/308-the-rules-of-the-game-everyone-has-their- reasons article: www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/88741/The-Rules-of-the-Game/articles.html Renoir introduction: www.bing.com/videos/search?q=youtube+jean+renoir+introduction&&view=detail&mid=FB84 EB2EF38B6FB026A4FB84EB2EF38B6FB026A4&&FORM=VDRVRV