I.

Introduction

Renoir, Jean (1894-1979), French film director, widely considered to be one of the greatest in the history of cinema. Renoir was the recipient of several major honours: Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honour); Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and Academy Award (Oscar) for Lifetime Achievement. He usually collaborated on or wrote his screenplays, and was also a film producer, actor, stage director, playwright, and novelist, as well as the author of a world-famous biography of his father, the Impressionist painter Pierre Auguste Renoir.

II.

Early Life and Work

Renoir was born in Montmartre, Paris. His first ambition was to be a cavalry officer, to avoid becoming an artist like his father. He transferred to the Flying Corps after coming close to death from war wounds in 1915. Though he won the Croix de Guerre, World War I left him with one idea—not to be in the army.

Early in 1920, shortly after the death of his father, Renoir married Andrée Heuschling, model for several of his father’s last great paintings, including Les Grandes Baigneuses (1918). Their son, Alain, was born in 1921. In 1924, inspired in part by repeated viewings of Foolish Wives (1921), directed by Erich von Stroheim, Renoir started to make films. These were financed by the sale of paintings left him by his father, and starred his wife, who took Catherine Hessling as her screen name. Though, for many, Nana (1926), a big-budget adaptation of the novel by Émile Zola, is one of his greatest films, it failed commercially, and Renoir soon found it necessary to earn a living from film-making.

III.

Filmic Style and Technical Innovations

Renoir was an early admirer of Charlie Chaplin, and it is perhaps appropriate that the special poetry of his work is similarly generated from gesture and movement. Whereas Chaplin’s art at its most characteristic is centred on his own performance, Renoir’s is rooted in the vigorous, sometimes even broad, playing of an ensemble of performers. The action is typically staged in depth, and the kinetic poetry that results is enhanced through carefully choreographed camera movements and sensitive editing. Unlike many directors working during the silent era, Renoir welcomed the coming of sound. In his memoirs, Ma Vie et Mes Films (1974; My Life and My Films), he suggests that the voice is “the most direct expression of a human being’s personality”.

Renoir planned the leading roles in La Chienne (1931) for Catherine Hessling and Michel Simon. His decision not to abandon the project when the studio insisted on casting not his wife but an actress they had under contract caused the final breakdown of his marriage.

In this, his first sound masterpiece, he experimented by shooting some scenes with three cameras, and his use of direct sound recorded on location ensured that the individual drama was played out within its social context (a vibrantly alive Montmartre). He often achieved a comparable effect visually, having sections of the interior sets constructed on location, and shooting through doors or windows. Examples of the latter practice can be seen in such films as Boudu Sauvé des Eaux (1932; Boudu Saved from Drowning), and two from 1938, La Marseillaise and La Bête Humaine (The Human Beast, his second Zola adaptation).

IV.

Political Influences and Concerns

From the middle of the 1930s, Renoir’s concern with the spatial and social context of his dramas acquired an explicitly political dimension. Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936), one of his finest films—scripted by Jacques Prévert from a story by set designer Jean Castanier—shows a group of characters, a microcosm of society, whose lives and consciousness are transformed when a cooperative (involving both workers and capitalists) replaces an exploitative and corrupt employer. Lange himself changes from an unworldly dreamer into a successful writer of pulp Westerns. His transformation evokes the 1930s politicization of artists and intellectuals in response to the rise of fascism, including that of Renoir himself, responding as he did to the influence of his regular editor and new partner, Marguerite Houllé, who took the name Renoir. She was from a working-class background, and a campaigner for female suffrage, which was only achieved in France following the Liberation.

Renoir supervised the shooting of La Vie est à Nous (Life Belongs to Us/People of France) for the French Communist Party’s campaign in the 1936 election, then wrote and recorded the commentary for Ciné-Liberté’s release of The Spanish Earth (1937), Joris Ivens’s documentary about life in government-held areas during the Spanish Civil War.

From the same year as The Spanish Earth, La Grande Illusion was a major international success, and remains his best-known and most popular film. It is a plea, as much to the reactionary forces inside France as to those outside, on behalf of the egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution, and against anti-Semitism, the “religion” of the Nazis. These ideals, he suggests in La Marseillaise, a film initially financed by trade-union subscriptions, are heroically embodied in the ordinary people, not the powerful national leader glorified by his famous compatriot Abel Gance in his Napoléon (1927; re-released in a sound version in 1934).

Renoir has written that, during the shooting of La Règle du Jeu (1939; The Rules of the Game), he was torn between two conflicting desires, to make a comedy and to tell a tragic story. This tension resulted in probably his most complex work: “It’s a war film; nevertheless there’s not a mention of war in it. Beneath its benign appearance, this story strikes at the very structure of our society” (Ma Vie et Mes Films). Even the smallest elements of plot and characterization work together, as if in a marvellous mechanical construction, to precipitate the murder of a national hero. This image of a society ultimately as out of control as a runaway train eerily anticipates the national disaster to befall France a year later, when the country was invaded by Germany. The portrayal is all the more disturbing because so many of the characters are so likeable, their repeated inability to make a decisive choice resulting from generosity and understanding.

Not surprisingly, audiences found the film’s vision, and its changes of pace and tone, from drawing-room comedy through farce to tragedy and cover-up, intolerable. In despair, Renoir told Houllé to recut the film, omitting the passages most offensive to the audience.

V.

Hollywood and Beyond

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.