South Central Review

Although Jean Renoir (1894-1979) is best known for his films of the French Golden Age of cinema in the 1930s, his creative output spanned more than half a century, and several continents. From the silent era to television, and from film to literary works and essays, he casts a long shadow in cinema studies. As one of the greatest auteur filmmakers of all time—who wrote, directed and (at least through the thirties) sometimes appeared in his films—his influence on other directors has been extensive and sustained. François Truffaut and Alain Resnais, as well as Martin Scorsese, among many others, credit him with a profound impact on their work, not to mention Satyajit Ray on the other side of the world, whom Renoir mentored in India. Recently, Wes Anderson claimed his own The Darjeeling Limited owed much to Renoir's The River, and traces of The Rules of the Game, considered by most to be Renoir's masterpiece, appear in more contemporary films such as Alain Resnais's Mon Oncle d'Amérique and Robert Altman's Gosford Park.¹

Renoir's star has never waned in terms of serious critical attention paid to the singular socio-historical and aesthetic value of his films. In the 1950s, Andre Bazin devoted major essays to the vital aesthetic achievements of his cinema, hailing Renoir as the master of cinematic realism (particularly in his use of deep focus and extended takes), and Bazin's formal analysis of the pan in the murder scene of The Crime of Monsieur Lange remains a touchstone in discussions of the film (see O'Shaughnessy and Poague in this volume). Truffaut heralded him as "the greatest filmmaker in the world,"² and gave him pride of place as one of the major influences on the New Wave. In large part thanks to the critic/directors of the New Wave and their publication, Les Cahiers du Cinéma, the sixties and seventies saw a renewed interest in Renoir's oeuvre, and works such as Leo Braudy's Jean Renoir: The World of his Films confirmed his importance on the American critical scene. In the 1980s, Christopher Faulkner's The Social Cinema of Jean Renoir provided a major re-assessment of the social and ideological importance of Renoir's entire production, and it remains an invaluable contribution to the field. More recently, Martin O'Shaughnessy's Jean Renoir, and Colin Davis's Scenes of Love and Murder: Renoir, Film and Philosophy have [End Page 1] brought Renoir into the twenty-first century in terms of the currency of his cinema, particularly with regard to a much-needed re-evaluation of these films in terms of gender issues. All of these works, among others, have greatly expanded the scope and depth of the field of Renoir studies, and, in several cases, have also challenged earlier clichés regarding the inferior quality of his Hollywood productions during the 1940s.

Because shifts occur over time in the appreciation of any body of work, I hoped that this issue's open topic would serve as a barometer of the state of Renoir studies today in terms of what is currently of most interest, and why. This tack has elicited a broad range of absorbing essays, both with regard to period and approach. Some of Renoir's most canonical French works, such as The Crime of Monsieur Lange and The Rules of the Game, find their place here, as do his silent films and his Hollywood output, Swamp Water and This Land is Mine, and later productions such as The River and French Cancan. In considering this tremendous breadth, Leo Braudy in his Afterword explores race, gender, and colonialism as the primary lenses through which these essays engage Renoir today, preoccupations that attest to the enduring interest in films "created in time but now in some sense timeless."

The title of this issue is intended to reflect these new perspectives, each of which confirms yet again why Renoir's work is so socially, philosophically and aesthetically valuable. These re-framings, in many cases of films that have long been the focus of critical attention, even by those in this volume who are re-visiting them, go a long way toward demonstrating that Renoir's oeuvre still fascinates, and remains highly relevant in its engagement with a wide range of issues. In part, the richness of this field is due to the archival material available after a long life lived on two continents. This being said, in some cases, segments or entire films were lost and only rediscovered after the war (A Day in the Country [1935] and The Rules of the Game [1939]). There are also instances in which, for one reason or another, editing became a major issue (La Chienne [1931] and The Woman on the Beach [1947]). In addition, revealing drafts of screenplays, which not only plot the evolution of his projects, but show how he revised and improvised as he filmed, also lend the impression of a constant re-working of material. All of this speaks to Renoir's embrace of incompleteness, an insistent refusal of perfection, a continuous re-framing in and of his oeuvre, which in part explains why scholars have so much to work with, all the while understanding that, as Leo Braudy notes, in quoting Renoir: "Everything is provisional."

Often, a certain framing strategy in Renoir's films affects the entire scene, as in his hallmark close-ups of an object at the opening of a film [End Page 2] (the bottle on the bar in Lange, or the dumbwaiter in La Chienne). These framings can inflect the object of the camera's focus with a resonance far beyond its material manifestation, and they can create near paradigmatic shifts in the spectator's perceptions. This strategy, which brings a seemingly extraneous or insignificant object into sharper focus, has its equivalent in the critical arena. For example, Christopher Faulkner's essay on the automata (mechanical musical instruments) of The Rules of the Game puts to rest any notion that they play a minor role in the film, or that they represent little more than social anachronism or how Lachesnaye treats women. He ties the automata into the collector's simultaneous desire and failure to keep the world under control, a problematic situation that signals a degradation of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideal. Far from a curious or eccentric detail of the film, Faulkner argues that the automata offer a representation of both the mechanical function of cinema and, more critically, mark the end of cinema as capable of providing any kind of moral compass or catalyst for social change. The "play" ("jeu") in the machine/mechanism that causes it to malfunction is also, in a broader sense, the "play" of civilization in the collapse of reason and the Enlightenment heritage. By re-framing the role of the automata, Faulkner offers a new interpretation of the "jeu" of the title, and shows them to be central to the film's manifestation of cinema's failure to be enlightened, or to provide any sort of a moral, social or ethical roadmap in 1939 (or, he suggests, ever again).

Both Martin O'Shaughnessy and Colin Davis re-frame several of Renoir's works through the lens of major contemporary philosophical and historical analyses in order to demonstrate their sustained and lucid engagement with (sometimes radical) political and social questions. For O'Shaughnessy, in his essay on The Crime of Monsieur Lange, this involves a return to a particularly potent moment in the film that has been the focus of extensive critical reflection over the years. The famous pan in the courtyard when Lange kills Batala has always been a subject of contentious debate. O'Shaughnessy counters recent twenty-first century interpretations that have found the radical politics of Lange to be marked by a serious ambivalence. He endeavors to restore to the scene, and to the film as a whole, its revolutionary thrust, its embrace of political violence as a necessary path to freedom, which typified radical political action in the twentieth century. Referencing Alain Badiou's characterization of the different epistemological structures of community in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the West, O'Shaughnessy re-contextualizes the pan and murder scene within the broader philosophical issues of violence [End Page 3] and communal action, and questions our own contemporary inability to be receptive to such a revolutionary and "radical" text.

Colin Davis's essay addresses the question of Renoir's waning political engagement after the 1930s through the exploration of several later works, read through the lens the Henri Rousso's The Vichy Syndrome, the major opus on the historical phases of French attitudes towards the Occupation. In an important re-framing of three somewhat neglected works set during the Second World War—This Land is Mine (1943), Le Caporal épinglé (1962), and Carola, (1960)—Davis demonstrates that these two films and a play, far from displaying merely conventional attitudes, reveal a Renoir who was more lucid regarding the ambiguities of the Occupation than were many of his contemporaries. He suggests as well that the two latter works speak, albeit implicitly, to the French military's involvement in torture during the Algerian War of Independence. This essay represents an important revision of the general perception of Renoir's Hollywood and later films as lacking both the engagement and the socio-political acuity of his thirties productions.

In their essays on manifestations of America and of Paris in Renoir's oeuvre, Leland Poague and Sue Harris trace these tropes across a broad array of films and demonstrate their singular importance in re-framing certain tensions in his work. Poague shines the spotlight on particular objects and situations that represent "Americanness" in Renoir's films from the silent era through Hollywood. By re-situating these manifestations within the context of the much wider scope of race and modernity, he is able to significantly sharpen the focus on the prevalence of America as a trope in Renoir's works from the outset. Through a survey of films made both in France and Hollywood, he uncovers a plethora of references to modernity (and technology) that Renoir associated with America. He traces a far more sustained interest in race, class and colonialism in his American films than has previously been demonstrated. He shows that this fascination also had its dark side for Renoir, in the awareness in his films of America's ambivalence regarding its founding values, its "unfulfilled promise" of equality.

On a different topic, but with a similar approach in terms of the scope of works under review and the re-evaluation of a familiar trope, Sue Harris re-frames the place of Paris in Renoir's oeuvre. Far more than a nostalgic representation of his own childhood or his father's Belle-Epoque painting, Paris functions as a complex site of meaning in which competing representations of urban space play out over the span of his career. From early silent films, such as Charleston and Nana, to the 1954 French Cancan, Paris remains a dynamic and sustained tension in Renoir's oeuvre, both [End Page 4] a real material presence and a highly artificial construction harnessing a "collective memory of the city formulated by visual culture."

In my essay, I also take up the question of re-framings, not in terms of critical assessments, but within Renoir's own work. In an archival study of The River, made in India in 1950 immediately after his Hollywood years, I explore how and why the first draft version of the film, written with Rumer Godden and based on her novel, failed to render India with any semblance of authenticity, remaining mired in a colonialist perspective. The final film version was a far more successful venture in this arena, in large part thanks to the late inclusion of the Indian dancer Radha Sri Ram. Renoir's experience in India and his fascination with Radha led to plans for a second film there that was to feature her. A previously unknown draft scenario that he wrote while hosting her in Hollywood proves critical in terms of retrospectively re-framing not only The River, but Renoir's own statements about how India transformed both his life and work.

These essays attest to Renoir's sustained social and creative engagement with the world in which he lived, as well as to the vibrancy of Renoir studies today. The widening scope of interest in his entire production bodes well for a future of continuous re-framings of critical perspectives across his oeuvre. Near the end of his career as a director, Renoir remarked that he had the impression that he had made only one film, one film with 37 stories.³ What greater re-framing than that!