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 the entire hisotry of world cinema. 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. He and the rest of the Renoir family were the subjects of many of his father's paintings. When Renoir was a child he moved with his family to the south of France. 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 became Jean’s nurse, confidante, mother-surrogate, and comrade, and she remained 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.

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, Andreé Heuschlig (known as Dédée). Third was film editor Marguerite Houllé who became his mistress and who took the name Marguerite Renoir, although 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.

Each of these women seems to have had a dominant role inhis life for a time. In fact Renoir’s film work can conveniently and accurately be divided into three periods: the Dédée period, the Marguerite period, and the Dido period.

The Dédée Period of Renoir's Filmmaking

Dédée 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. Dédée 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 Dédée 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. Renoir later wrote that it was Von Stroheim's films that made him realize that the creation of a film is the creation of the world within that film. This further strengthened his conviction 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, Dédée 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 Dédée 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 Dédée, 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 Houllé, 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 Dédée, 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; in English Grand Illusion), considered by many film critics and connoisseurs to be one of the best films ever made; La Bete humaine (1938); and his masterpiece La Règle 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; this also marked Renoir's becoming an international filmmaker. After their marriage they 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), 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, Diary of a Chambermaid (1946), and The Woman on the Beach (1947). Andrew Sarris included Renoir in his Pantheon of American directors, even though he made only a small number of his films in America, and not his best ones. 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.

After The River, Renoir's films include Le Carrosse d’or (The Golden Coach, 1952), with Anna Magnani; French Cancan (1955); Eléna et les Hommes (1956) with Ingrid Bergman; Le Déjeuner 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 Épinglé (The Elusive Corporal, 1962); and Renoir’s last film Le Petit Théâtre de Jean Renoir (1969).

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]

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Master of Multiplicity

Gerald Mast, author of probably the best study of Rules of the Game, has pointed out that Renoir's films are acknowledged and admired by every school of film criticism — literary, auteurist, humanist, scholarly, popularist, sociological, and technical. Mast points out that Renoir's films are both entertaining and intellectual at the same time. His dominant intellectual and artistic trait, Mast wrote, is his doubleness, a multiplicity and ambivalence that allowed him to see more than one side of every person and question and to express this in his films. Some directors are singleminded, Mast claimed, and this meant that they could make only a few great films, but what Renoir lost in singleness he gained in a many sidedness of vision — Mast compared him to Shakespeare and Dickens and Ibsen in this respect — and this permitted him to express his artistic consciousness in many forms.

Mast went on to point out that Renoir was both an optimist and a pessimist, a romantic and an ironist, a cynic and a mystic. His films are often dependent on theater, on painting (he got this from his father), and on tones and rythms as in music. He also, Mast claimed, had a historic sence that allowed him to see the past in the present and the present in the past. In addition he had a sociological sense that allowed him to see the same characters in different cultures, and a dramatic sense that allowed him to see the farce in tragedy and the tragedy in farce.

Every character in Renoir's large oeuvre, no matter the person's occupation, station, or activity, is presented largely sympathetically. But each character's frailties, faults, and pathos is also presented. Even though his films contain murderers and other criminals, there is probably only one true villain in all of Renoir's work — the crooked boss Batala in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (one of Renoir's communist-produced and influenced works_ — but even here this wicked capitalist has sufficient charm and wit that he elicits the sympathy of most viewers.

There is also ambiguity about the process of making the films themselves. Some of them, such as Le Crime de Monsieur Lange and Rules of the Game, are sometimes reported to contain a great deal of improvisation, yet their structure, when analyzed, is shown to be extremely strict and formal and careful.

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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