Fragments of Renoir

One of Jean Renoir’s preoccupations, he tells us in his volume of autobiography translated as My Life and My Films, was ‘to avoid fragmentation’. Sadly, this website dedicated to rounding up his cinematic universe has been, to put it politely, in abeyance these last few years. Or, if you prefer and following the logic of fragmentation, the wheel has come off. There’s two years’ worth of news to be caught up on, and the sections of bibliography and physical media need an updating overhaul too, not least because La Règle du Jeu is now available in ultra HD blu-ray editions following the 4k restoration of the film that premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2021. So look out for a number of capsule news pieces here – fragments, if you will – in the coming weeks.

RIP Lloyd, Tavernier, Menzel

The last year has witnessed the passing of three quite different figures from the lost worlds of cinema’s past.

Norman Lloyd had become the Methuselah of old Hollywood, living to 106 years of age and remaining a vivid raconteur. Never a household name, he nonethless worked with Orson Welles as a member of the Mercury Theatre company prior to the making of Citizen Kane, then with Renoir, Hitchcock and Chaplin in a number of roles in the 1940s and ’50s. Renoir cast Lloyd as Finley in The Southerner, thus initiaiting a personal friendship that later saw him place the direction of PBS TV production of his long-cherished theatrical project, Carola, in Lloyd’s hands. Mérigeau describes the play as ‘something of a work under a curse’ and it remains a relatively under-explored aspect of Renoir’s work. A video of Lloyd discussing Carola in 2014 can be found here.

Norman Llloyd died on 11 May. Obituary from the New York Times here.

Bertrand Tavernier may have belonged to the immediate post-Nouvelle Vague generation but his aesthetic allegiance was very much to the Classical French Cinema that preceded it. Tavernier made this and his particular love of Renoir and Jacques Becker clear in his final substantial work, the documentary My Journey Through French Cinema, and the influence on his own work was proclaimed in the (London) Times obituary notice which described him as ‘above all … a lyrical humanist in the tradition of Jean Renoir’. Tavernier died on 25 March.; Ryan Gibley’s obituary piece, published in The Guardian, is here.

Another great European director in Renoir’s debt yet also a major distinctive artist in his own right was Jiří Menzel, most famously associated with the Czechoslovakian New Wave and best remembered for the exquisite Closely Observed Trains. The American title for the film, Closely Watched Trains, isn’t quite right: ‘observed’ in the title is an effective transferred epithet for Menzel’s Renoir-like gift for noticing and capturing the lived detail of human nature. He once said ‘I always loved the films of Renoir, and Fellini; the way they saw life was close to how I saw it, and I loved how they make an audience enjoy themselves’ and in a 2012 BFI poll he nominated Partie de campagne as a personal favourite, declaring it to be a formative experience for him.

Jiří Menzel died on 5 September 2020. Peter Hames’ obituary appears on the BFI website here.

(Un)silent Renoir #2

To pick out a phrase from the publisher’s blurb for Colin Davis’s Silent Renoir – see immediately below – ‘the great director’s early work from the 1920s remains almost completely unknown, even to film specialists’. This is true despite a number of home video releases, including the similar box sets released in 2007 in France (by Studio Canal, as Jean Renoir – l’essentiel) and the United States (by Lions Gate as Jean Renoir Collector’s edition).

Fourteen years on, however, two of the silent features from those collections are being given their own free-standing US releases. Kino Classics (previously responsible for the blu-ray distribution of La Marseillaise and The Southerner) are releasing Renoir’s first two feature films in high definition: La fille de l’eau, under its commonly anglicised title of Whirlpool of Fate, and the Zola adapatation, Nana. Both flms give viewers a choice of accompaniment: a score by Antonio Coppola, uncle of Francis, or a Nick Pinkerton audio commentary.

Release details at blu-ray.com

Comparative review of Whirlpool of Fate at DVD Beaver

Review of Nana at Geek Vibes Nation and Whirlpool of Fate

A further couple of Renoir films are the subject to new HD upgrades. Criterion’s blu-ray treatment of Toni came out last August and it replicates a Kent Jones and Phillip Lopate commentary that had first appeared on the 2006 Masters of Cinema UK DVD of the film and adds some new extras for good measure: a Renoir-themed episode of Cinéastes de notre temps from 1967, a 25 minute video essay by Christopher Faulkner and a booklet essay by Ginette Vincendeau. For the UK market, the BFI are upgrading their earlier DVD release of The River, and the August 2021 blu-ray (a limited edition whose first pressing will include an ‘llustrated booklet including new writing on the film as well as previously published archival material’) will augment the extras of the earlier release with Arnaud Mandagaran’s documentary ‘Around the River’, as previously featured on American and French blu-ray releases.

Toni blu-ray lisiting on Amazon.com

Comparative review of Toni blu-ray on DVDBeaver

The River – BFI shop details

(Un)silent Renoir

Whatever form film culture will take after a global pandemic hastens the ongoing re-shaping of movie media and the West comes to terms with seemingly seismic shifts in identity politics and representation on the one hand and Brexit’s ramifications on the other, Jean Renoir remains for now a vibrant part of it. That’s a long-winded way of saying that it’s been a long while since the last post on this site. And also that Renoir remains just as keenly watched and studied in the time that has passed. The first jobs of catch-up, therefore, involve sharing details of recent publications.

First of all, I’m indebted to Barry Nevin for first drawing my attention to the February publication of Colin Davis’ Silent Renoir: Philosophy and the Interpretation of Early Film by Palgrave Macmillan. It is Davis’ third study of the director and represents the first book devoted entirely to Renoir’early, pre-talkie work, as negotiatied via Heidegger and Plato, to name two of the philosophical undercurrents. The publisher’s description reads as follows:

Jean Renoir (1894-1979) is widely regarded as one of the most distinguished directors in the history of world cinema. In the 1930s he directed a string of films which stretched the formal, intellectual, political and aesthetic boundaries of the art form, including works such as Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, La Grande Illusion, La Bête humaine and La Règle du jeu. However, the great director’s early work from the 1920s remains almost completely unknown, even to film specialists. If it is discussed at all, it is often seen to be of interest only insofar as it anticipates themes and techniques perfected in the later masterpieces. Renoir’s films of the 1920s were sometimes unfinished, commercially unsuccessful, or unreleased at the time of their production. This book argues that to regard them merely as prefigurations of later achievements entails a failure to view them on their own terms, as searching, unsettled experiments in the meaning and potential of film art.

Amazon link

Publisher’s page

Those who are French readers will also be interested in the first dedicated Jean Renoir dictionary, written by Philippe De vita and running to 459 pages. It was published in September 2020 as Dictionnaire Jean Renoir – Du cinéaste à l’écrivain by Honoré Champion, and the publisher’s blurb, roughly translated, states of Renoir that ‘we forget that his career was not limited to cinema and that it was always imbued with writing, the foremost being that of his meticulously crafted scenarios. He also cultivated a wide correspondence, archived from the forties when it acquired an existential importance during his exile in the United States. It allows us to read the stories behind the making of particualr films, and also provides an insight into various conversations. The chronology of the letters is replaced by the alphabetical order which makes it possible to juxtapose and connect the works he authored, the people from his inner circle or from his background with whom he corresponded, and finally some important themes. Thanks to more than one hundred and twenty entries, the career of a man who gradually turned to writing emerges, writing plays, a biography of his father, several novels … His correspondence, archived from forties, served as a workshop to allow him to practice writing.’

Amazon information

Outdoing Rivette, remaking Renoir

Having been the best part of a decade in the making and having spent over a year on the arthouse festival circuit, Mariano Llinás’ 14 hour-long La Flor is now reaching American movie theatre audiences. Longer by a distance than Jacques Rivette’s Out 1, it won’t face the same technical challenges that made the original exhibition of Rivette’s project so difficult, but it is a hugely bold undertaking in its own right given the disparate platforming of modern film culture and our increasingly distractible attention spans. The reason why the Argentinian epic features here is that the fifth of the six episodes into which the film is subdivided takes the form of a remake of Renoir’s unfinished Partie de campagne. The segment is silent and in black and white.

Llinás was interviewed by the journal Cinema Scope and specifically questioned about the remake. His comments were as follows:

What do you think about the idea of an homage? Who are we to make homages? Stealing would be more appropriate. I wanted to remake that picture—I wanted to be there. I worship Jean Renoir. But if I’m going to make an homage to him, the best thing wouldn’t be to remake one of this pictures. It’s more of an insult, actually, to make one of his pictures again. So I don’t see it as an homage. I’m nobody to make an homage to Jean Renoir. It’s like painting: great painters don’t do homages, they just paint the same pictures in their own style. When Picasso—sorry for the example, I’m not saying I’m Picasso—looks to Manet, or when Manet paints Olympia, it’s not an homage, they’re trying things for themselves that have been tried by the masters. Before painters could see paintings in books, they would have to go to museums and spend many days copying them. It’s a way to learn. We want to be better, so we copy, like the masters copied.

In Episode 1 I was copying Hitchcock—in many aspects I was copying his style to learn his style. In the second part as well I was copying Hitchcock, but also things other than cinema, like Tintin. In the third, it was sad Cold War espionage stories like those of Fritz Lang, le Carré too. So for Episode 5, it was making Partie de campagne again, making a silent picture again, trying to generate the intensity to tell a love story through acrobatic airplanes. All the great painters learned their skills by going back. They’re very modern when they begin, but as they proceed they get more into the past. And it’s the same for us. We’re getting older so we have to go back to the masters. It’s the only thing I know.

Nick Pinkerton’s review of the film on the occasion of its New York Film Festival (2018) screening is here.

A feature on the AV Club site, including the film’s official trailer, is here.

Nevin’s Renoir reviewed and distilled

Barry Nevin’s Cracking Gilles Deleuze’s Crystal: Narrative Space-Time in the Films of Jean Renoir, whose paperback edition is due to be published in February 2020, was reviewed by Colin Davis in the April issue of French Studies; Davis concluded that ‘this subtle and detailed book will be welcomed by all those interested in Renoir’s films and in film philosophy more broadly’.

A taster of Nevin’s thesis on Renoir can be read in his piece ‘Spatialising the Time-Image: Viewing Renoir Through Deleuze and Guattari that appeared in March in Mediapolis: a Journal of Cities and Culture.

Gabin biography forthcoming

Jean Gabin: The actor who was France is the title of a new biography by Joseph Harris, to be published by McFarland and Co. in December. Gabin worked with on four films with Renoir, who said this of him that he was ‘at his most expressive when he did not have to raise his voice. Magnificent actor that he was, he got the greatest effects with the smallest means. I devised scenes for his benefit which could be spoken in a murmer. Jean could express the most violent emotion with a mere quiver of his impassive face where another man had to shout to get the same effect’ (Jean Renoir, My Life and My Films, 1974).

As is typical with the book’s publisher, advance details are scant, with no cover art available yet and the following basic blurb:

Jean Gabin was more than just a star of iconic movies still screened in film festivals around the world. To many, he was France itself. During his 45-year career, he acted in 95 French films, including Le Quai des Brumes, La Grande Illusion, Touchez Pas au Grisbi and French Cancan. From his start as a reluctant song and dance man at the Moulin Rouge and Folies Bergère, Gabin became a first-magnitude actor under such directors as Julien Duvivier, Marcel Carné and Jean Renoir. This revealing biography traces his involvement in the réalisme poétique and film noir movements of the 1930s and 1940s, his unhappy Hollywood years, his role in the World War II liberation of France, his tumultuous affairs with Michèle Morgan and Marlene Dietrich and his real-life role as a Normandy gentleman farmer.

Pre-order details at Amazon are here (UK) and here (US).

Father and son at the Barnes Foundation

‘I have spent my life trying to determine the extent of the influence of my father upon me’ – Jean Renoir.

This quotation adorns an information board in a new American exhibition on the creative symbiosis between Pierre-Auguste and Jean Renoir, entitled ‘Renoir: Father and Son / Painting and Cinema’. It has opened at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and runs until 3 September.

Curated by Sylvie Patry, of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and organised in collaboration with that gallery and Paris’ Cinémathèque française, it it described as follows on the Barnes website:

Orson Welles described filmmaker Jean Renoir (1894–1979), son of renowned impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, as “the greatest of all directors.” This exhibition aims to retrace chapters of Jean’s productions through the course of a rich and fascinating dialogue between father and son. If Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s artistic practice and creative universe influenced Jean’s art, Jean’s films shed light on his father’s paintings.

Focusing on core themes in Jean’s works, such as his vision and recreation of Paris, the exhibition will examine his path to becoming a prominent international filmmaker, bringing together paintings, drawings, films, costumes, and photos—as well as the ceramics he made before he turned to cinema. The Barnes, with its collection of Jean Renoir pottery in addition to 181 works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, will provide a poignant setting for exploring this complex, fruitful relationship between painting and cinema.

The exhibition is reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, here.

A short video preview can be found here.

A substantial exhibition catalogue containing contributions from Dudley Andrew and Janet Bergstrom has also been issued.

A major new, Deleuzian study of Renoir

After several article-length studies of Renoir’s films (detailed in the newly updated bibliography) that deftly weave together theory, analysis and context, Barry Nevin has his Deleuze-inflected work published in book form by Edinburgh University Press in August, under the title Cracking Gilles Deleuze’s Crystal: Narrative Space-time in the Films of Jean Renoir. This promises to be a major if specialised study. The publisher’s blurb is as follows:

Jean Renoir is widely considered as one of the most important technical innovators and politically engaged filmmakers in cinema history. Reassessing the unique qualities of Renoir’s influential visual style by interpreting his films through Gilles Deleuze’s film philosophy, and through previously unpublished production files, Barry Nevin provides a fresh and accessible interdisciplinary perspective that illuminates both the consistency and diversity of Renoir’s oeuvre. Exploring canonised landmarks in Renoir’s career, including La Grande Illusion (1937) and La Règle du jeu (1939), the book also considers neglected films such as Le Bled (1929) and Diary of a Chambermaid (1946) to present a rounded analysis of this quintessential French auteur’s oeuvre.

Further publisher’s information is here.

The book will presumably re-work those earlier articles, the most recent of which, on Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, has appeared this year in the journal Studies in French Cinema and seems central to his third chapter (‘Portraying the Future(s) of the Front Populaire’). The article joins the burgeoning literature on the film, as does Douglas Pye’s contribution to last year’s excellent anthology The Long Take: Critical Approaches.

Fake Renoir news

Among the many delusions of fantasist president Donald Trump appears to be his belief that he owns a painting by père Renoir. Trump Tower’s adornments include a copy of Two Sisters (on the Terrace), the original of which sits in the Art Institute of Chicago. To the surprise of no-one, Donald insists upon the authenticity of his version. Vanity Fair’s account of the story, presumably consisting of the establishment LIES of very sad people, is here.