Jean Renoir

Jean Renoir (French IPA: [ʀə'nwaʀ]) (September 15, 1894 – February 12, 1979) was a film director, actor and author. He was born in the Montmartre district of Paris, France, the second son of the French painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, then fifty three, and Aline Victorine Charigot, then thirty five, who had entered Auguste's life as apainting model. As a film director and actor, Jean Renoir made over forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s. As an author, he wrote the definitive biography of his father, Renoir My Father (1962).

Renoir is considered by many critics to have been one of the dozen or so greatest film directors in world cinema. Andrew Sarris included him in his Pantheon of American directors, even though Renoir made only a few of his films in America, and not his best ones. Renoir's greatest film, La Règle de jeu (known in English as The Rules of the Game), has often appeared near the top of critical lists–such as that made every decade after a poll of international critics by the British Film Institute's journal Sight and Sound–of the greatest films ever made.

Renoir’s early life

The young Jean grew up among his father’s artwork and artist friends. When Renoir was a child he moved with his family to the south of France. He and the rest of the Renoir family were the subjects of many of his father's paintings. As a young man, his father's financial success ensured that Jean was educated at fashionable boarding schools which, Jean later wrote, he was continually running away from.

By far the strongest influence on him, however, was that of Gabrielle Renard, his mother’s cousin. She had entered the Renoir household at the age of fifteen, shortly before Jean’s birth, to help care for mother and child. She remained and became Jean’s nurse, confidante, mother-surrogate, and comrade, and she became a model for Jean long after he had grown up. He ended his autobiography, My Life and My Films, written when he was near eighty, with a tribute to her, fifteen years after her death:

Certainly it was she who influenced me most of all. To her I owe Guignol and the Théâtre Montmartre. She taught me to realize that the very unreality of those entertainments was a reason for examining real life. She taught me to see the face behind the mask, and the fraud behind the flourishes. She taught me to detest the cliché. (My Life and My films, )

Renoir and Women

Women figured prominently in Renoir’s life and work. At least ten of his films have references to women in their titles. Complex and sympathetically depicted women are central characters in many of his films. His life was heavily influenced by four women, each of whom seems to have dominated him somewhat.

First was Gabrielle. Second was his first wife, Andree Heuschlig (known as Dedee). Third was film editor Marguerite Houllem who became his mistress and who took the name Marguerite Renoir (they apparently never married) and who worked intimately with him as editor on thirteen of his films. Fourth was his second wife, Dido Freire, a Brazilian. In fact Renoir’s film work can be divided into three periods: the Dedee period, the Marguerite period, and the Dido period.

The Dedee Period

Dedee had come into the Renoir household at age sixteen as a painter’s model for Auguste. Her youth, health, and beauty had inspired the sickly and elderly Renoir to renewed vigor, and she remained with him until he died in 1919. Jean, meanwhile, had become smitten with her and they were married a few weeks after Auguste’s death. Dedee confided to a friend, however, that she was not in love with Jean but had married him in order to gain access to the Renoir wealth and fame.

At the outbreak of World War I, Renoir was serving in the cavalry. Later, after receiving a bullet in his leg, he served as a reconnaissance pilot. His leg injury allowed him to discover the cinema; he saw a Charlie Chaplin movie and was profoundly affected by it. Later on in his autobiography he wrote that he was more than enthusiastic about it, in fact he had been “carried away.” Soon he became a fanatical cinema fan. After the war Jean and Dedee saw many films, concentrating on American movies by such pioneers as D.W. Griffith and Mack Sennett. In about 1923 they saw Le Brasier ardent, directed and played by the Russian, Mosjukine. It had been produced in France and this led Renoir to conclude that good films could be made in his native country.

In 1924 Renoir saw Erich von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives; in fact he saw it about ten times. It was Stroheim's films, Renoir later wrote, that made him realize that the creation of a film is the creation of the world within that film. This further strengthened his convictin that good films could be made in France depicting French subjects in French surroundings. He began to make a study of French gesture in his father's and others' paintings, gesture which he believed had enormous plastic value for the cinema.

Seeing Von Stroheim's film led to his decision to enter the cinema. (Von Stroheim would appear later in a leading role in Renoir’s great anti-war movie, Grand Illusion.) Moreover, Dedee had begun to think of herself as an actress on the model of Gloria Swanson or Mary Pickford. She took the name Catherine Hessling, and Renoir made his first (silent) films featuring her. These included Une vie sans joie (1924), La Fille de l’eau (1924), Nana (1926), Sur un air de Charleston (1927), and La Petite Marchande d’allumettes (1928).

The films of this period are notable for their visual innovations and for Renoir’s growing mastery of the film medium. This includes a dream sequence in La Fille de l’eau. Renoir produced these films with his own money and they did not return their investment, so he and Dedee were reduced to selling many of the paintings of Auguste that they owned. In 1927 however, with Marquitta, he began to direct films produced by others and receiving a salary for his work. These films did not feature Dedee, and she seems to have lost interest in him because of it. But her career ended after her appearances in only two films made by other directors.

The Marguerite Period

In 1928 Renoir directed Tire-au-flanc, featuring actor Michel Simon in his first film role. Renoir made several more films in 1929, most notably Le Bled, the first of his films to be edited by Marguerite Houlle, who edited all his subsequent films (except for On purge bebe, 1931) through and ending with Rules of the Game in 1939.

In 1931 Renoir directed La Chienne, in sound; this can be considered to be Renoir’s first major film. By choosing to make this film, which did not have a role for Dedee, Renoir brought about a final break with her.

This second period of Renoir’s creative work includes what are usually considered to be his greatest films, including La Nuit du Carrefour (1932); Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932); Madame Bovary (1934); The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936); the antiwar film La Grande Illusion (1937), considered by many film critics and connoisseurs to be one of the best films ever made; La Bete humaine (1938); and his greatest masterpiece La Regle de ju (Rules of the Game, 1939).

The Dido Period

After completing Rules of the Game, Renoir married Dido Freire, who had been script girl on the film. They then traveled to Italy, where Renoir was supposed to work on a film of La Tosca. But in July 1940 Italy entered the war and Renoir had to leave the film and return to France. Shortly after that Dido and Renoir made their way to America and settled in Hollywood, thus beginning the third epoch of Renoir’s career. The films of this third, Dido, period are characterized by some softening in the irony and darkness of those made in the second, Marguerite period. Renoir seems to have found a kind of human salvation through theater.

Renoir made a number of films in English in America, including Swamp Water (1941), This Land is Mine (1943), The Southerner (1945), Diary of a Chambermaid (1946), and The Woman on the Beach (1947). But despite the merits of these American films and despite the fact that Renoir and Dido seem to have had a happy life in Hollywood, Renoir never became a favorite of the studio moguls who controlled Hollywood because they deemed him not to be sufficiently commercial, so Renoir had increasing trouble getting his scripts and proposed films produced.

In 1946 Renoir discovered a review of the novel The River by the English authoress Rumer Godden. Renoir read the novel, was impressed by it, and succeeded in getting the film rights to it. He also got Godden to agree to collaborate with him on the script. The result was the film The River (1951), shot in India. This was his first color film; it also marked the end of his work in America, as the rest of his films were made in Europe.

Renoir’s post The River films include Le Carrosse d’or (The Golden Coach, 1952), with Anna Magnani; French Cancan (1955); Elena et les Hommes (1956) with Ingrid Bergman; Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe (Picnic on the Grass, 1959), shot on the grounds of Les Collettes, the Renoir estate where Auguste had made many paintings, and presenting Renoir’s recurring theme of the contrast between nature and society; The Testament of Dr. Cordelier (1959); Le Caporal Epingle (The Elusive Corporal, 1962); and Renoir’s last film Le Petit Theatre de Jean Renoir (1969)

Early life and career

When Jean Renoir was a child he moved with his family to the south of France. He and the rest of the Renoir family were the subjects of many of his father's paintings. As a young man, his father's financial success ensured that Jean was educated at fashionable boarding schools which, Jean later wrote, he was continually running away from.

At the outbreak of World War I, Renoir was serving in the cavalry. Later, after receiving a bullet in his leg, he served as a reconnaissance pilot. His leg injury allowed him to discover the cinema, watching the films of Charlot (as Charlie Chaplin was known in France) and others, only discovering Chaplin's actual name some years later. Then he tried making films.

This happened around the time he discovered the films of Erich von Stroheim. It was Stroheim's films, Renoir later wrote, that made him realize that the creation of a film is the creation of the world within that film, and that good films could be made in France depicting French subjects in French surroundings, something he had previously not thought possible. He began to make a study of French gesture in his father's and others' paintings, gesture which he believed had enormous plastic value for the cinema.

In 1924, Renoir directed the first of his nine silent films, most of which starred his first wife, who was also his father's last model, Catherine Hessling. At this stage his films did not produce a return, and Renoir gradually sold paintings inherited from his father to finance them.

A classic sequence of films

During the 1930s Renoir enjoyed great success as a filmmaker. In 1931 Renoir directed his first sound film La Chienne (Isn't Life a Bitch?), and the following year Boudu Saved from Drowning (originally Boudu sauvé des eaux) was strongly influenced by Chaplin's tramp. Here Michel Simon, the vagrant, is rescued from the River Seine by a bookseller, and the materialist bourgeois millieu of the bookseller and his family is contrasted with the attitudes of the tramp, who is invited to stay at their home.

By the middle of the decade Renoir was associated with the Popular Front; several of his films such as Le Crime de Monsieur Lange reflected the movement's politics. In 1937 he made one of his most well-known masterpieces, La Grande Illusion. A pacifist film about a series of escape attempts by French POWs during World War I, the film was enormously successful but was also banned in Germany, and later in Italy by Mussolini after having won the "Best Artistic Ensemble" award at the Venice Film Festival. This was followed by another cinematic success: La Bête Humaine (The Human Beast), a film noir tragedy based on the novel by Emile Zola

In 1939, now able to finance his own films, Renoir made what is regarded widely as his greatest film, as well as one of the greatest ever made, La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game), a satire on contemporary French society with an ensemble cast. Renoir himself played the character Octave, a sort of master of ceremonies in the film. The film was greeted with derision by Parisian audiences upon its premiere and was extensively reedited by Renoir, but without success. It was his greatest commercial failure. The Vichy government later banned the film as demoralizing and during the war the original negative of the film was lost. It was not until the 1950s that two French film enthusiasts, with Renoir's cooperation, were able to reconstruct a complete print of the film.

Exile in Hollywood

When World War II came, the 45-year-old Renoir was drafted into the Film Service of the French army. With the German invasion and Occupation of May 1940, he fled France with his second wife Dido, worked briefly in Italy, and then moved to the United States where he made films in Hollywood, California. Renoir had difficulty finding projects that suited him in the United States. In 1943, he produced and directed an anti-Nazi film set in France: This Land Is Mine. Two years later, he made The Southerner, a film about Texas sharecroppers that is often regarded as his best work in America and one for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Directing. His last two films were poorly received and were the last films Renoir made in America.

A transatlantic life

In 1949 Renoir traveled to India and made The River, his first color film. Bengali Indian citizen Satyajit Ray, who would go on to become an internationally acclaimed great director in his own right with films known as The Apu Trilogy and a number of of others set in Bengali India, was Renoir's assistant on that film. Based on the novel of the same name by Rumer Godden, The River is both a meditation on human beings' relationship with nature and the sensitive story of three young girls coming of age in colonial India. The film won the International Prize at Cannes in 1951 and marked the beginning of the second great creative period of Renoir's career.

After returning to work in Europe, Renoir made a trilogy of technicolor musical comedies on the subjects of theater, politics and commerce, Le Carrosse d'or (The Golden Coach) (1953) French CanCan (1954) and Eléna et les hommes (Elena and Her Men) (1956), which starred Ingrid Bergman in her first film since leaving Roberto Rossellini.

Renoir's next films were made in 1959 using techniques Renoir admired and adapted from live television at the time. Le Déjeûner sur l'herbe (Picnic on the Grass), starring Paul Meurisse, and Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier (The Testament of Doctor Cordelier) focused on the dangers Renoir saw in the overdevelopment of the human rational faculty at the expense of the education of the senses and emotions. The former was filmed on the grounds of Auguste Renoir's home and the latter film was made in the streets of Paris and its suburbs.

In 1962 Renoir made what was to be his penultimate film, Le Caporal épinglé (The Elusive Corporal). Set among French POW's during their massive internment in labor camps by the Nazis during World War II, the film explores the twin human needs for freedom, on the one hand, and emotional and economic security, on the other. Renoir believed it was his saddest film.

In 1962, Jean Renoir published a loving memoir of his father titled Renoir, My Father, in which he described the profound influence his father had on him and his work. As funds for his film projects were becoming harder to obtain, Renoir continued to write screenplays and then wrote a novel, The Notebooks of Captain Georges, published in 1966.

Last years

Renoir made his last film in 1969, Le Petit théâtre de Jean Renoir (The Little Theater of Jean Renoir). In sympathy with the student demonstrations at the time, Renoir's original title for the film was It's a Revolution! The film is a series of four short films made in a variety of styles with one unifying theme.

Thereafter, unable to find financing for his films and in declining health, Renoir spent the last years of his life receiving friends at his home in Beverly Hills and writing novels and his memoirs.

In 1975 he received an Academy Award for his lifetime contribution to the motion picture industry. Jean Renoir died in Beverly Hills, California on February 12, 1979. His body was returned to France to be buried beside his family in the cemetery at Essoyes, Aube, France.

On his death, fellow great director and personal friend, Orson Welles wrote an article titled 'Jean Renoir : The Greatest of all Directors'.[1]

Filmography

(copied from French Wikipedia)

1924 : Backbiters (Catherine ou Une vie sans Joie, also acted)
1925 : Whirlpool of Fate (La Fille de l'eau)
1926 : Nana
1927 : Charleston Parade (Sur un air de charleston)
1927 : Une vie sans joie (second version of Backbiters)
1927 : Marquitta
1928 : The Sad Sack (Tire-au-flanc)
1928 : The Tournament (Le Tournoi dans la cité)
1928 : The Little Match Girl (La Petite Marchande d'allumettes)
1929 : Le Bled
1931 : On purge bébé
1931 : Isn't Life a Bitch? (La Chienne)
1932 : Night at the Crossroads (La Nuit du carrefour)
1932 : Boudu Saved From Drowning (Boudu sauvé des eaux)
1932 : Chotard and Company (Chotard et Cie)
1933 : Madame Bovary
1935 : Toni
1936 : A Day in the Country (Une partie de campagne, also acted)
1936 : The People of France (La vie est à nous, also acted)
1936 : The Lower Depths (Les Bas-fonds)
1936 : The Crime of Monsieur Lange (Le Crime de Monsieur Lange)
1937 : The Grand Illusion (La Grande illusion)
1938 : The Marseillaise (La Marseillaise)
1938 : The Human Beast (La Bête humaine, also acted)
1939 : The Rules of the Game (La Règle du jeu, also acted)
1941 : Swamp Water (L'Étang tragique)
1943 : This Land Is Mine (Vivre libre)
1945 : The Southerner (L'Homme du sud)
1946 : The Diary of a Chambermaid (Le Journal d'une femme de chambre)
1946 : Salute to France (Salut à la France)
1947 : The Woman on the Beach (La Femme sur la plage)
1951 : The River (Le Fleuve)
1953 : The Golden Coach (Le Carrosse d'or)
1955 : French Cancan
1956 : Elena and Her Men (Elena et les hommes)
1959 : The Testament of Doctor Cordelier (Le Testament du docteur Cordelier)
1959 : Picnic on the Grass (Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe)
1962 : The Elusive Corporal (Le Caporal épinglé)
1971 : The Little Theatre of Jean Renoir (Le Petit Théâtre de Jean Renoir, TV movie in four parts)

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