Jean Renoir

After the fall of France during World War II, the great American documentarist, Robert Flaherty, helped Renoir flee to Hollywood. He was accompanied by his new partner, Dido Freire, whom he subsequently married, and with whom he spent the rest of his life. They made their home in California, and Renoir became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1946, though he retained his French citizenship. While he found Hollywood’s working methods uncongenial, his films there remain of great interest, particularly This Land is Mine (1943), an attempt to evoke for an American audience conditions in occupied and Vichy France, The Southerner (1945), and The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946).

The River (1951) reunited him with his nephew, Claude Renoir Jr., who, though usually only an assistant cameraman, had been responsible for orchestrating the fluid camera movements of several of his finest 1930s films. This meditative account of childhood in Bengal, shot on location, is based on an autobiographical novel by the British writer Rumer Godden. The film suggests a new spiritual or religious dimension in Renoir’s work. It was the first of several colour films widely admired for their great visual beauty.

The second was The Golden Coach. This was shot in 1952 in Italy, and released in France in 1953 as Le Carrosse d’Or. Renoir, however, preferred the undubbed English-language version, with the actors’ own voices. This, arguably the greatest and most complex of films about the theatre, pushes the notion of the backstage musical way beyond the boundaries of the genre. Its stylistic discontinuities offer an unusual beauty, and it was an important influence on Jean-Luc Godard who, linking it to Pirandello and Six Characters in Search of an Author (1922), expressed his admiration for its interweaving of public display and private feelings, the theatre and real life. The resolution of this exercise in artifice confirmed Renoir’s new, albeit unorthodox, engagement with religious ideas, as did at least one of the films he made after his return to work in France, Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (1959; Picnic/Lunch on the Grass), a hymn to Pan, and a warning against the worship of technology.

Previously, French Cancan (1955), a second, and to some extent more conventional, backstage musical making spectacular use of colour, had reunited Renoir with Jean Gabin, star of several of his 1930s masterpieces. Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier (1959) showed him still willing to experiment by returning to black-and-white film and multi-camera techniques, which had been widely revived in the 1950s for the shooting of live television drama.

His final film, Le Petit Théâtre de Jean Renoir (The Little Theatre of Jean Renoir) appeared in 1970. It was at this time, though his health was deteriorating, that he dictated his memoirs, Ma Vie et Mes Films (My Life and My Films), published in 1974. Early the next year he made his final trip to Europe to attend the most complete retrospective of his films yet mounted, at the National Film Theatre in London. A few weeks later, however, he was only able to watch from home on television as Ingrid Bergman accepted an Academy Award on his behalf. A few days after his death, in Beverly Hills on February 12, 1979, Renoir’s obituary appeared in the Los Angeles Times under the heading: “The Greatest of All Directors.” It was written by one of his greatest admirers: Orson Welles.

See also French Cinema.