South Central Review

That Paris should be a frequent setting in the films of Jean Renoir is unsurprising. Paris is the city in which the director was born, and from which he was exiled by war and occupation; it is the city immortalised in painting by his father Auguste Renoir and his nineteenth-century Impressionist peers; and the city where the figure of the auteur was first celebrated in the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma magazine and on the screens of Henri Langlois's Cinémathèque Française. Born in 1894 in the gothically-named Château des Brouillards high up on the hill of Montmartre, Renoir's initial association with the city is satisfyingly symbolic: as Ronald Bergan suggests, from Auguste's attic studio one could look across the sprawling urban city and "see Mont Valerien, the hills of Meudon, Argenteuil and Saint-Cloud, and the plain of Gennevilliers. The plain of Saint-Denis was visible [. . .] as were the woods at Montmorency. On a clear day you could even make out the basilica of Saint-Denis in the distance."¹ The temptation to which Bergan succumbs here is a compelling one: the nascent filmmaker-artist as a panoramic eye, an omnipotent yet benevolent force located at the very center of a picturesque and harmonious French landscape. And the temporal convenience of Renoir's childhood is also irresistible: Montmartre at the height of Belle Epoque bohemianism. From such a vantage point, the vibrant, heady Paris of French Cancan (1954) seems to emerge all too easily from the instincts and affections of the fortunate witness in place and time that the boy Renoir seems to have been.

We know as much as we do about Renoir's life and background thanks to the extensive scrutiny—to an unusual level even within film studies—that he has received in the form of biographical writing. As one of the first French directors to have his entire career formally examined as an authorial project by the new auteurist critics such as François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette and Andrew Sarris, Renoir serves as a model of how the personal and the circumstantial have been claimed to offer insight into a body of film work. Renoir was famously generous in his response to the interest of his post-war European and American acolytes, contributing a vast amount of "testimonial" material in the form of written and filmed interviews and autobiographical reflections, most notably in the [End Page 84] books Ma vie et mes films (1974) and Pierre-Auguste Renoir: mon père (1981).² This generosity has arguably brought "evidence" to bear on the observations and critiques of many writers, and certainly intensified the possibility of a project of artistic continuities predicated on a personal sensibility. As Martin O'Shaughnessy rightly cautions, as auteurist approaches have come to dominate Renoir criticism, so much of Renoir's own writing knowingly builds upon an "evolutionary account of the director's life and work tailored to account for the emergence of his mature outlook and style."³ As far as Paris is concerned, it is both the real and the sentimental heart of these reminiscences: a childhood home, a cultural playground, a working environment, a filmic backdrop and a rich historical idea. Some of the youthful city experiences claimed by Renoir include attending an early film screening at the Grands Magasins Dufayel in 1897, visiting the Eiffel Tower during the 1900 World's Fair, and seeing a range of entertainment forms ranging from Guignol to the Ballet-Russes, from melodrama on the Boulevard du Crime, to foreign films by the likes of Chaplin and D.W. Griffith.⁴ Like any native son, his relationship to the city is inevitably instinctive at some level, and it is to be expected that Paris might recur regularly as a narrative space. Nevertheless, the visual representation of the city, and its deployment as a performative space are more complex than readings based on wistful retrospection might suggest. Indeed, the relevance of Paris as a cinematic space in Renoir's films lies precisely in the productive tension it offers between mythology and authenticity: the acknowledged celebration of a known or idealized city, and the will to document the "real" Paris of which he is both a product and an unwitting cinematic ambassador. His view of how he personally responds to the "real" in art is apt in this respect: "The Africa shown in the paintings of Henri Rousseau is more real than the real Africa. The personal vision of Rousseau's Africa interests me more than a beautiful photograph of a beautiful spot in Africa."⁵

Paris serves many purposes in Renoir's films and is a profoundly fluid site of meaning: it exists as an action space, as an easily identifiable setting, and as a place that boasts an array of distinct character types living in close proximity. Alternately an urban reality, a treasured memory, and a populated community, Paris is a rich site of meaning, even when the city itself seems incidental to the narrative action. In La Marseillaise (1938) for example, Paris is a far-distant place of revolution, unknown in any meaningful way by the southern volunteers. Newly arrived in the city, the fledgling revolutionaries are escorted like avid tourists, moving in a group from the ruins of the Bastille prison, to the Club des Jacobins, on to a theater on the Champs-Elysées, before ending their sojourn in [End Page 85] camaraderie and battle at the Tuileries Palace. In this determinedly ideological film, Paris—designed by Léon Barsacq and Georges Wahkévitch, and supplemented by location shooting on the Place du Panthéon—is acknowledged as the foundational centre of modern France, a site in which Frenchness originates in a journey of republican fellowship. Here, the status of Paris is as a historic referent, or "lieu de mémoire"/site of memory, indicative of the possibilities of progressive democracy. The city's function as a unifying space of French identity is also apparent in films set far away from Paris; in La Grande Illusion (1937), for example, it is a shared memory of Paris that provides the initial bond between the prisoners of war as they sit down for a first meal together. Rosenthal's generous sharing of his food package with the new arrivals cements a discussion about pre-war dining pleasures in the capital: cognac from Fouquet's, dinner at the exclusive Maxim's, a modest "plat du jour" at the local bistro in the twentieth arrondissement, and simple family dinners with in-laws. And while La Règle du jeu (1939) may use Paris only schematically to set up the arrival of the aviator Jurieux at Le Bourget airport in Paris, it stands throughout the film as a geographical alternative to the Sologne and its barbaric hunting party. La Colinière is the place in which the city's privileged citizens give free rein to their hedonistic excesses, and Paris is the anonymous haven to which the anachronistic La Chesnayes and their discredited entourage will retreat once their appetites have been sated.

These three examples share a common feature in the figure of Julien Carette, one of the most distinctive Parisian performers in French cinema history. Carette's recurring presence as a variant on the same popular 'man of the people' type cements a Parisian presence across the films and in the minds of viewers. His rough "parigot" accent and loquacious interventions immediately mark him as a "titi parisien": a cheeky everyman figure, indelibly associated with the working class Parisian male. In La Marseillaise, Carette is a hungry and disillusioned volunteer in the "Armée de la nation," a foot-soldier who despairs at the leadership's dismissal of the working class Batignolles brigade as "useless." As Carette valiantly cooks a mangy crow for his supper, he watches provincial Frenchmen flee to the side of the enemy, and notes that he (a Parisian painter) and his comrade (a Parisian barrel-maker) will soon be all that is left of the population. In this instance, Paris, in the figure of Carette, has the clear moral high-ground: Parisians are the country's true patriots, the deep-rooted center of Frenchness. In La Grande Illusion Carette as a prisoner of war is a more spirited and comic version of the frank volunteer: the ebullient, undefeated heart of the community, a [End Page 86] vaudeville actor from the Bouffes du Nord theatre, whose companionship and joyful performance lift the spirits of soldiers on both side of the divide. Once again, in La Règle du jeu, Carette's wily Parisian workingman-turned-poacher, Marceau, offers relief from the petty machinations of the resident aristocrats, and serves as a reminder of the moral distance of the French elite from the realities of life in 1939.

In the films outlined above, the narrative referencing of Paris is of course cursory and peripheral; one would not wish to claim them as Parisian films in any way. What I wish to suggest, nevertheless, is that the variety of encounters with the city across Renoir's work—even in films that are not set in Paris—confirm the city as an important site of enquiry for the director; a site that is complex, multi-dimensional, and crucially unfixed. In his Paris-set films, the representation of the city is both more elaborate and more sustained; and the evolution of the conception of this site allows us to trace another route—and new lines of continuity—across Renoir's career. On the surface, his silent films seem to offer little more than a passing engagement with Paris, either as setting or as a constructed space. In Nana (1926), an adaptation of Emile Zola's novel of the same name, the location of the action is predetermined by the literature, while in Sur un Air de Charleston (1926), the fantastic qualities of a tale set one hundred years in the future divert attention from questions of topographical setting. Nevertheless, these two works, in tandem with La Petite Marchande d'allumettes (1928), offer a preliminary template for an engagement with the city predicated on thematic anchors that Renoir goes on to develop in his directorial career. What André Bazin terms Renoir's familiar "moral universe"⁶ emerges very clearly in these early films as a universe organized around the spatial, cultural and social experience of the modern city. The city at this stage in his career takes two forms: that of a place of wonder, attractions, and human exchange; and one of savagery, alienation and moral failing. Both specifically and more generally, Paris is multiply anchored in the films of the early period of the director's career: as an iconic space of literary and artistic creation; as a space of performance and spectacle; and as a space of social encounter, conflict and injustice.

La Petite Marchande d'allumettes transposes Hans Christian Andersen's classic fairy tale to a vague northern city, described in the opening intertitle as "remote" ("lointain"). The city in question is not explicitly named as Paris, but nevertheless presents the generic possibilities of Parisian living: an imposing church at the center, traversed by fast trains, chauffeur-driven cars, lined with elegant restaurants, luxury shops and—inevitably—the abject poverty of the population on the margins of [End Page 87] the affluent core. The temporal setting in winter intensifies the hardship experienced by the Little Match Girl, Karen, as she experiences the city as a site of exclusion and class difference. Exploited by her guardians, ignored by well-heeled diners, taunted by young hooligans, and left to die of hunger and fatigue by unsympathetic bystanders, Renoir's northern city is a pitiless, segregated place. The social inequality and moral failing on the part of its more privileged citizens seem to reside in the spatial framework of modern capitalist society, visually expressed through Karen's place in the street. As she peers through frozen windows into the warmth of the restaurant and the opulence of the fancy toy shop, she is literally an "outsider," one whose realm is the street, and whose experience of class difference is framed in terms of artificial barriers imposed upon urban space.

Indeed, the second half of this short film confirms the centrality of the urban paradigm to the narrative. As Karen freezes to death, she suddenly finds herself inside, transported in her imagination into the toy shop, where it comes alive in spectacular fashion. First the nursery-room toys spring into life—the ballerina on the music box, the toy bear with a ball, the jack-in-the-box—then more toys begin to circulate on the toyshop floor: toy soldiers march up and down as if on parade, a train passes, animals wander across the frame. As figures from earlier in the film reappear as characters in this world (notably Karen's first potential customer and a policeman), so a previously unkind world is fully transformed into a vibrant and energetic town community, a magical space suffused with light, movement and human kindness. That Karen will die after her hallucination is a given of the story, and this and her subsequent flight into the skies above the city merely delay the inevitable outcome of the tale. But first Karen is allowed to enjoy the city in all its egalitarian potential: as a playful spectacle of beauty and compassion, a place of music, dance and personal transformation. In this way, the creative force of urban space is tentatively suggested, if not yet confirmed, in Renoir's "moral universe."

Nana, with sets designed by Claude Autant-Lara, is set in 1860s Paris and opens at the Théâtre des Variétés on the Boulevard Montmartre. Acknowledged in the film as "one of our most Parisian theaters,"⁷ the Variétés is a meeting point for Parisians from all walks of life. The different types and classes are fixed spatially in the film's opening scenes, with sober aristocrats and bourgeois in the theater boxes, and the raucous, disordered lower-class populace in the upper tier. While the more refined elements of the audience observe the action through binoculars, the popular audience interacts loudly with the actors on stage. The performers [End Page 88] comprise a third Parisian community, placed at a clear remove from both classes, but constituting the common center of attention. The triangular structure of Parisian society set out here is one to which Renoir will return over and over again in his career, placing performers and artists at the apex of social relations across classes. The importance of the creative world to sound social functioning is of course catastrophically denied by the dénouement of Nana's story; but the immediate and sustained depiction of the backstage working environment of the theater—Nana's dressing room, the props room, the concierge's office, the many service corridors—anticipates the priorities and utopic affirmation of French Cancan in the mature stage of Renoir's career.

As the narrative action moves beyond the stratified spaces of the theater, and out into the city of Paris, so the rigid distribution of classes established in the opening is compromised, as Nana and her world disrupt the spatial integrity of Parisian society. The first actual footage of Paris follows an intertitle announcing Nana's intention to abandon her life as a mediocre actress for life as a top courtesan. After the cramped interiors of the Théâtre des Variétés, we suddenly have an exterior shot of Nana's new residence, a grandiose mansion in which she is to be "kept" by the Count de Muffat. This exterior shot of the residence marks Nana's elevation and transportation across the city, while locating her experience of the city in the naturalistic aesthetic of Zola's eponymous heroine. The interiors, however, designed by Autant-Lara and Robert-Jules Garnier, introduce a striking sense of distortion to Nana's relocation. The volume, scale and excessive ornamentation of Nana's home not only serve to indicate distance from the world of the theater, but they also provide a grotesque new stage on which to bring together the characters whom society otherwise keeps apart. As noted in the initial treatment of the film, Count Vandeuvres is ruined because, like the other men in Nana's life, he finds himself caught up in the world of "a girl whom Paris ought to have kept well away from him."⁸

In this space of moral and decorative excess, Nana's otherwise reputable suitors—Muffat, Vandeuvres, Hugon—all transgress their own codes of conduct, courting her in full view of her servants, each other and the eyes of "respectable" Paris. Their physical diminishment in Nana's immense bedroom, salon and bathroom is a prelude to their emotional rejection: the uniformed Muffat on his way to a formal lunch at the Tuileries is humiliated by Nana as she makes him beg like a dog for bonbons; the besotted young aristocrat Georges Hugon commits suicide in an ante-room after Nana's many cruel rejections; and Vandeuvres, rejected and abandoned at the bottom of her imposing staircase understands [End Page 89] that it is their transgression of Parisian spatial codes that is at the core of Nana's power; and is the reason for his undoing.

The greater the sense of moral decline in the narrative, the more precise the Parisian frame of reference becomes. During an excursion to Long-champ (where Vandeuvres is running horses and Muffat is a spectator), location footage of the grandstand and carriages in the Bois de Boulogne is inserted into the largely set-based film. The shift in decor from generic staging to identified Parisian sites is completed as the film builds to a conclusion at the Bal Mabille, a once exclusive venue, now associated with prostitution and chicanery. As historian Harvey Levenstein notes "the Bal Mabille was famous as a meeting place for, in the words of a French guidebook 'rich foreigners and beautiful mendicants, money eaters and heart-eaters.'"⁹ Renoir's mise-en-scene of the Bal Mabille is forcefully reminiscent of both Auguste Renoir's Le Bal du Moulin de la Galette (1876) and Toulouse Lautrec's La Goulue au Moulin Rouge (1891). Auguste Renoir's outdoor setting of trellised screens, garlands of tree lanterns, an orchestra, and crowd on the perimeter of the performance is collapsed onto Lautrec's lithograph of La Goulue dancing the cancan, in a preliminary attempt at staging the elaborate set-pieces of the dance sequences in French Cancan. Nana, like Nini in the 1954 film, is placed at the center of the action, high-kicking the top hats of the male spectators gathered in a circle around her. The slippage here between the depiction of Paris as a historic space associated with late nineteenth-century art (the Paris of the Belle Epoque), and the film's temporal setting in the mid-century (the Paris of the Second Empire) is a common trope in Renoir's films. In Partie de Campagne (1936), French Cancan, and Elena et les hommes (1956) we find the iconic register of Auguste Renoir used in the service of the creation of an idealized Paris that corresponds not to a precise point in time, but rather to the period of Jean Renoir's childhood, and to his father's artistic legacy. Elsewhere, in more contemporary-set films, the citation of this imagined Paris also echoes within the mise-en-scene: as Ronald Bergan notes of Les Bas-Fonds (1936), filmed on locations between Epinay and Saint-Denis on the banks of the Seine, "the camera pans through the gardens of a restaurant as a brass band plays on a summer's day. It is Renoir père's Moulin de la Galette again that comes into frame."¹⁰ The "bal" scene in Nana is perhaps the first instance of a conception of the city founded not in topographical documentation, but in a common heritage of artistic texts: Paris as artistically, rather than historically, authentic.

Charleston (1926) reveals a more experimental approach to the depiction of the city. Shot on a shoestring in only three days in October 1926, [End Page 90] in the courtyard of the Albatros studios at Epinay-sur-Seine, the film is set one hundred years in the future, in 2028. In this futuristic world, France is a post-apocalyptic no-man's land ("terre inconnue") in which Paris has been destroyed. An African explorer, played in blackface by black vaudeville star Johnny Huggins, arrives by space capsule in a deserted street. We know this is Paris because he lands his spherical vehicle directly on top of a distinctive "colonne Morris," a common Parisian landmark, ironically advertising a performance of Zola's Nana at the Théâtre du Châtelet. As the well-dressed explorer surveys his surroundings from the vantage point of the advertising column, he sees the Eiffel Tower, bent in the middle at a dramatic angle. The celebrated, heady Paris of Nana has been dramatically reduced to comic shorthand—an advertising column, an ironic poster, and a broken landmark. Similarly, the "Parisienne," played once again by Catherine Hessling, has been reduced in complexity to a set of basic codes: costume, performance, erotic dance, with only an ape for a companion. The Paris of Charleston is thus a distillation of the Paris over which Nana presided: savage, untamed, elemental; a place of latent menace and primitive instincts.

With the scrutiny of the civilized world effaced (to be reinstated for the duration of the film by the figure of the explorer), and the surface markers of modern civilization all but destroyed, what remains is a place reduced to its most basic function: Paris as a site of spectacle and performance. The Paris of Charleston is a Paris stripped of its visual, social and political significance and reformulated as pure spectacle, with the street serving as a bare stage. The Charleston dance performed by Hessling is conveyed in a frenzy of physical movement and filmic techniques that draw attention to the body as a vehicle of expression: notably alternation between slow motion and fast-speed filming. The plot comprises the explorer's recognition of the dance as "the dance of our distant ancestors," "the traditional dance of the white man,"¹¹ followed by his energetic apprenticeship at the hands of his improbable tutor. While the film is unsystematic in its engagement with issues of race and colonialism, it nevertheless offers a space for reflection on Paris as a site of cross-cultural exchange and communication. The elemental qualities of the dance are understood by both parties, and it is this that allows their relationship to develop from one of mutual hostility to one of expressive equality. An intellectual, verbal exchange is redundant in this case, but a productive—choreographed—complicity is nevertheless established across visible differences of race, gender and class.

The performance, with its risqué movements, scanty costuming, and a provocative sub-text of transgressive sexuality, is indicative of a reflection [End Page 91] on conflicting conceptions of modern Paris in the 1920s, the period of the film's production. As historian Jeffrey Jackson notes in his study of jazz culture in inter-war Paris, the cultural complexion of the city at this time was undergoing rapid change, and two different versions of the city were emerging. As Jackson says "Although many of these transformations were often perceived rather than real, such perceptions were crucial in shaping how many Parisians thought about their city in the years after World War I [ . . . . ] [W]hich of these visions of Paris would triumph was one of the burning cultural questions of the day."¹² As Jackson sees it, on one side was the nostalgic Paris of the nineteenth century, represented by the Montmartre culture of cabarets and chanson, in which jazz represented an attack on indigenous French culture; on the other was the avant-garde Paris of Montparnasse, with its appeal to cosmopolitanism, in which jazz was an element of cultural regeneration. Renoir's Nana and Charleston, both starring Hessling, and made in quick succession from the same film stock, articulate precisely the nature of the dual Paris preoccupying artists in these years: on the one hand looking inward to French tradition; on the other looking outwards to Paris as a modern, international hub, open to external cultural influence. The affinities between Hessling's Charleston and Josephine Baker's "danse sauvage," performed in the Revue Nègre from 1925, suggest a considered reflection on Paris as a site of cultural tensions and territorial impulses. Renoir's ability to present both aspects as counterpoints to each other is something he establishes here and revisits creatively as his career develops.

The transition to sound created opportunities for Renoir to develop a cinematic conception of the city as a contemporary space, in which the established tropes of topographical authenticity and performative staging informed topical narratives of Parisian life. The bulk of his output in the 1930s is defined by a broadly realist aesthetic, achieved through a combination of location shooting, blended with the use of sophisticated sets. In an era when many directors favored the controlled environment of the studios, where they could rely on the talents of a new generation of set designers and art directors, Renoir's first sound films seem to go against the grain of industry practice. The 1930s films of René Clair and Marcel Carné are renowned for their meticulous and poetic studio sets of the popular districts of the city. Sous les Toits de Paris (Clair, 1930), Le Million (Clair, 1931), Quatorze Juillet (Clair, 1932), Hôtel du Nord (Carné, 1938) and Le Jour se lève (Carné, 1939) give evidence of the stylistic approaches and technical accomplishments of the advocates of Paris as cinematic recreation.¹³ [End Page 92]

Renoir's Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, with its courtyard, living and working spaces built on a single vast set in the courtyard of the Billancourt studios, falls into this category.¹⁴ The action of the film is centred on the Marais district, which as Keith Reader notes "at the time of the film [it] was still largely working class, with the vertical relations of community and kinship characteristic of the Parisian tenement."¹⁵ The film uses the typical topographical features of this working class district as the basis for set that can house "a microcosm of le Paris populaire and a latter-day avatar of the Pension Vauquer in Balzac's Le Père Goriot."¹⁶ Here Paris exists as a community of workers, whose transcendence of issues of class and gender is expressed spatially by the interpenetration of workshops, offices, domestic spaces and a circular courtyard overlooked and shared by all parties. N.T. Binh's description of the setting as a "paradoxical decor, fake yet naturalistic, symbolic yet realistic"¹⁷ points to the complexity of the film's spatial organisation. This is Paris as a levelled social community, a possibility to be found in "real" Paris (naturalistic, realistic), but only achievable as a staged idea (fake, symbolic). As a film made under the auspices of the drama collective Le Groupe Octobre, conceived, as Bazin suggests "in the little world of the film intelligentsia of the Left bank, which during the prewar years seemed more or less in opposition to its counterpart along the Champs-Elysées on the Right bank,"¹⁸ Lange is a film designed to comment politically on Parisian society; reading it as a staging post in Renoir's evolving cinematic relationship with the city is therefore problematic. For while inspired by authentic topographies within Paris, the spatial coherence of the set is a deliberately political vehicle, which in its unity and rationality overshadows any sense of the ambiguous and fluctuating significance of the city found elsewhere in Renoir's film corpus.

Three Renoir films were extensively shot on location in Paris: La Chienne (1931), Boudu sauvé des eaux (1932) and Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier (1959). Although the films are from different periods in Renoir's career, the depiction of Paris across the three is consistent in a number of important respects, and gives a sense of cohesion about the consistency of the Parisian narrative at the beginning and towards the end of his career. The quality of realism is acute in these films: in different ways they each present Paris as a "lived" space: a place in which ordinary people work, live, interact, and a place in which social difference and class tensions break through to the surface. In different ways, the films reveal how anarchic elements threaten the apparent equilibrium of life in the city, but also suggest a productive quality to this anarchy which the city, in its plurality, can accommodate. These three films in particular, [End Page 93] through their appeal to anarchic impulses, serve as moral fables—in which Paris is a timeless, universal site of encounter. But they are also unambiguously Parisian tales, in which the setting and spaces of Paris are essential vehicles to explore the tension between order and disorder.

Renoir's collaboration with actor Michel Simon resulted in two of the most striking cinematic records of Paris in the early 1930s. La Chienne and Boudu sauvé des eaux were filmed on location in Montmartre (the Place Emile Goudeau and surrounding streets) and the Quai de Conti respectively, and in the surrounding suburbs of the Marne Valley in the case of Boudu. Both films innovatively blend interior/studio and exterior/ location shooting, circumventing the stylization of Paris common to the studio-based films of René Clair, to offer a quasi-documentary record of contemporary Parisian life. In La Chienne the disordered streets with their residential and commercial facades, and the windmills of northern Paris anchor the staged interiors—bedrooms, living quarters, stairways and landings—in a realism that is key to the moral impact of the narrative. Bazin notes how the use of direct sound enhances the sense of this being "a real, habitable world,"¹⁹ while the references in the dialogue to contemporary Parisian performers such as Josephine Baker and Mist-inguette further substantiate the "realness" of this Paris. The scenes with the street singers singing Eugenie Buffet's "La Serenade du pavé" (reprised by Edith Piaf as Buffet in French Cancan), develop a trope that would become popular in the early years of French sound cinema: that of a the Parisian community united through song. In Boudu on the other hand, Paris is much more clearly identifiable as such, thanks to its setting in the centre of the city rather than the dangerous backstreets. Boudu places the spectator like a tourist in the heart of Paris, allowing us to look out over the elegant lines of the Seine and its adjacent landmarks: the Pont des Arts, Notre Dame Cathedral, the Louvre museum and the booksellers along the quayside.

Bazin notes how Boudu provides both a narrative about Paris but also a document about Paris's relationship with the cinema in these years. In an analysis of the attempted suicide scene, when Boudu throws himself off the Pont des Arts, Bazin notes how the filmed footage works "in total defiance of the logic of the scene." He details how "[T]he crowd of unpaid extras gathered on the bridge and river banks was not there to witness a tragedy. They came to watch a movie being made, and they were in good humour [. . .] The film does not for a moment convince us that the crowd is interested in Boudu. Some of the spectators turn around to get a better look at the cameraman, much as in the earliest newsreels when people had not yet grown accustomed to the camera."²⁰ This depiction [End Page 94] of Paris as a place that is inhabited by real people, is something that would be widely taken up in the years of the French New Wave when film stock and equipment were sufficiently developed to enable such an approach. But in this case, and characteristically for Renoir, the citation at the heart of the scene is not photo-journalistic, but painterly; more specifically, the composition of the scene explicitly recalls two paintings by Auguste Renoir: Le Pont des Arts (1867) and Le Pont Neuf (1872), in which modern Parisians are captured dynamically as they go about their daily business.

La Chienne offers two particular strands of access to Paris for Renoir: first, in terms of the relationship of individuals to the city; and second as a place in which life is presented as a game. In the first case, what is key to the moral dimension of the film, is that Paris is a place of the collective rather than the individual, a place in which there can be no anonymity. The pimp Dédé is first seen by Legrand abusing Lulu in public, and it is the Paris crowd who will erroneously witness his "guilt" as he emerges from Lulu's apartment after her murder. Dédé's life is lived in full public view of his community—his clothes and car are outward signs of his success and power within his community—and it is in a Parisian square that he is publicly executed following his trial. Legrand's pitiful decline is also witnessed by his colleagues at the bank, but the moral outcome is different: by opting to abandon his corrupt bourgeois life, in favor of the liberty of the itinerant tramp, Legrand can walk away from the scene of the crime, and reclaim a relationship with the city on his own terms: redeeming himself as a member of his community. The tramps who eschew the temptations of the city—most significantly its women—are tacitly forgiven for their former transgressions, and acknowledged as fraternal elements of the city: "it takes all sorts to make a world"²¹ says Legrand as they walk away from their former lives.

This allegorical dénouement is borne out by the theatrical framing of the film which begins with a puppet show, and ends with the curtain descending in the form of a shop blind being lowered. A notion of community as a knowing performance in which all parties have a role is embedded in the film from the outset—this is the story of lui/him, elle/ her and l'autre/the other—in which "elle," Lulu, is a variant on the exploitative, cruel Nana. Boudu also thematizes performance, with Michel Simon's role predicated on his chaotic engagement with space. Boudu is a disruptive presence in the city, in the home and in the bourgeois social order of Paris, his untidiness and unruly behavior at odds with the elegant lines and delicate beauty of central Paris. As an itinerant figure who comes into the city from the exterior before going back to where [End Page 95] he came from, he is a temporary intruder who, in refusing to become bourgeois (through marriage to the maid) refused to become "Parisian." As N.T. Binh suggests, "it is probably the first film to put the capital and the Parisian suburbs into 'ideological' tension. The banks of the Marne are synonymous with liberty, while the city signifies oppression and slavery."²²

Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier, shot on location in Paris in 1959, is Renoir's made-for-television film version of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story. The action of the film takes place in a series of clearly identified Parisian locales: a "western suburb of Paris" (where Dr. Cordelier's house is situated), the Trocadéro area (where Dr. Séverin's offices are located), and the avenue Pigalle in Montmartre, the crime-ridden enclave where Opale (Dr. Cordelier's alter-ego) terrorizes the local community. The film brings together not just diverse geographical areas of Paris, but fundamentally different aspects of Paris that life in the city has kept apart: on the one hand "new Paris," a modern business district, full of electronics shops, and plush apartment buildings with white facades and electric elevators; on the other, "old Paris"—the bourgeois suburbs, the residences of the professional classes, a place of domestic servants, enclosed gardens and formal reception rooms; and finally "apache Paris," in the form of the cobbled and uneven Montmartre streets, with their shop fronts, stairways, and cramped boarding houses. Paris is here presented as a plural, interconnected space; a place in which the actions in one part of town have repercussions in another, and in which there is no site of sanctuary. The "dramatic continuity" that Renoir sought to achieve by using multiple cameras²³ is apparent in the way in which Opale moves around the various areas, his untidy gait informing the considerably different streets with the same sinister quality. An anarchic presence in the same way as Boudu, Opale's appropriation of different spaces enhances the menacing texture of the film. As Bergan notes, "the switches from comedy to drama, and the contrast between the rather cheap-looking studio interiors and the exteriors, shot in the streets of Paris, produce a curious feeling of displacement and schism that only adds to the strange atmosphere of the story, which is, after all, about a split personality."²⁴

One of the major challenges in evaluating the deployment of Paris as a setting in Renoir's work is accounting for the very abrupt shifts in style that mark his career. As he notes, "I swore after Nana that I wouldn't do any more literary adaptations. In the same spirit of infidelity, I abandoned my passion for natural settings, and embraced the artifice of sets."²⁵ The films of his late career bear this out, offering us a much more theatrical, artificial Paris than that depicted in the realist dramas of the 1930s. Reverting [End Page 96] to the studio, just at the moment when neo-realism was gaining currency as a modern European aesthetic, Renoir was deemed by some to have lost his political edge in his newly acquired taste for highly nostalgic costume dramas. Elena et les hommes (1956), for example, is an ostensibly political tale of politicians and coups in the early Third Republic, but the visual core of the film is Ingrid Bergman as a foreign princess in belle époque Paris, surrounded by a world of Parisian gaiety: street singers, uniformed officers, open air dance halls. In spite of the political content of the scenario, and the tacit warning of a street singer of the dangers of a city in some sort of turmoil ("Be wary of Paris"²⁶), what remains memorable about the film is the ornate mise-en-scene of costumes and props: garlands, coloured lanterns, parasols, flags. The association between these images and the painting Le Bal du Moulin de la Galette, was convincingly made in the exhibition Renoir/Renoir²⁷ when excerpts of the film were projected in proximity to the canvas. Echoes of Caillebotte are also apparent in the early scenes in which Elena looks down on Paris from the balcony of her apartment. This heavy reliance on iconography in the film's first act confirms Renoir's stated passion for artifice, and signals, along with French Cancan, a new—much more consciously celebratory—engagement with the city.

French Cancan is the emblematic Parisian film of Renoir's career, seen as marking his return back to his native France after his wartime exile in the USA. As a film set wholly in Paris, and wholly in a Paris designed and constructed for the film, it is a rich example of the productive tension Renoir exerts between celebration, authenticity and mythology. This film presents Paris as a space of emotions, a foundational space in the life of French artists generally. The subject of the film is broadly historical, and deals with the establishment of the Moulin Rouge—a venue synonymous across the world with Parisian nightlife. More specifically, the film offers a reflection on the figure of the impresario and documents the efforts of a group of performers and entrepreneurs, led by the charismatic Danglard (Jean Gabin) to open a new dance hall on the site of La Reine Blanche in Montmartre. The main attraction at the Moulin Rouge will be the cancan dance, a risqué frenzy of high-kicks, lace petticoats and undergarments. The film's celebration of Montmartre's popular entertainment industry is both affectionate and nostalgic, and seems to stem from the same sensibility that informed Renoir's biography of his father, which Durgnat describes as "impressionist [ . . . ] His fidelity to sensibility allows him to succeed in evoking a Paris he cannot himself have seen, through stories, and details, in those stories which he remembered, just as he presents and absents himself with the serene and sensible convenience [End Page 97] of a third-person narrative."²⁸ The film's central figure Nini is clearly a product of the same sensibility—part historical reality (the dancer Nini-Patte-en-l'air, who ran a dancing school frequented by "wealthy men about town"²⁹), part iconic sign (La Goulue of the Moulin Rouge), and part artistic invention: the generic staple of the showgirl aspiring to take a lead role in the company.

While the film's visual referencing of Auguste Renoir and Lautrec is immediately evident, the universe created here is richer again in its artistic frame of reference, acknowledging the work of Utrillo, Degas, Delacroix, Pissaro, and Manet among others.³⁰ Renoir's harnessing of pictorial Paris is more complex than may appear on the surface, going further than mere imitation—the condition of John Huston's Moulin Rouge according to Bazin.³¹ What Renoir's layering achieves is what Bazin terms "not the objective, realistic life of the historian, but the potential, artistic life, held prisoner in the painter's static medium." By following the vision of a number of artists, rather than specific and attributable painterly compositions, Renoir succeeds in evoking "that part of Parisian society immortalized in the Impressionist paintings of the turn of the century."³² Renoir himself challenged criticisms of the obvious artificiality of the decor as misjudged: "Realism and natural settings, reconstituted realism, deliberately artificial decor—it really matters little. I've spent my time trying out different styles. It all comes down to this: it reflects my attempts to get to an internal truth, the only kind of truth that matters to me."³³

Artificiality is a deliberate strategy in this film, and one that is reflected on internally. The Paris of French Cancan was designed by Max Douy, and such was the scale of the film that two studios were deployed for decor: the sets of the Moulin Rouge and the Reine Blanche were constructed at the Joinville Studios, while the Montmartre streets were constructed at Francoeur studios. As Douy notes of the latter set, "Contrary to the accusations of some bullish critics, who kept going on about 'cardboard,' the cobbles and steps of the Montmartre streets and stairways were made of stone."³⁴ Indeed, this decor—with its solid streets—effectively captures the sense of transformation afoot in late nineteenth-century Paris, both in the project of rebuilding on the site of a popular, but now unfashionable cabaret, and in the implied construction we see underway in the Montmartre streets: the film carefully references the modernization of the city at this time, the progressive integration of the still semi-rural district of Montmartre into the newly expanded city. But the broader effect of the film, as Renoir clearly understood, lies not in any quality of plausible imitation of Paris as it was then, but in a more emotionally charged idea [End Page 98] of Paris deriving from artistic memories. As Jill Forbes has noted of sets designed by Lazare Meerson and Alexandre Trauner, the charm of such sets is "the charm of recognition, and our pleasure as viewers derives from the fact that the physical environment is exactly how we somehow always expected it to be, that it conforms to an original we carry in our mind's eye, like a recollection of childhood, enhanced or embellished by time." Like Trauner's Boulevard du Crime in Carné's Les Enfants du Paradis film, the Paris of French Cancan "is not necessarily as it was, but as we wish to remember it having been—a reconstruction of a memory: longer, more lively, more brightly lit than in reality."³⁵

This celebratory impulse is explored in the film in terms of a mise-en-abyme that sees the lovesick Prince, whose romantic aspirations in the city of love have come to nothing, beg Nini to help him implant a "false memory of Paris" which he can cherish instead. Their night on the town in Paris is announced by a montage of Jules Chéret-style posters, and snapshots of performers famous from the Lautrec lithographs—Yvette Guilbert, Chocolat, Caudieux, May Belfort. The imitations delight in their accuracy of detail: Guilbert famed for her bawdy humour and trademark long black gloves, is stylishly captured by a young Patachou. But while the pleasure of seeing a contemporary Parisian actress impersonate her historical counterpart (herself a celebrated mimic) reinforces the desired cultural framework, this is deliberately short-lived. Durgnat notes that "Renoir shows none of these numbers in full, fading out a moment or two after we have settled down to it, thus giving the sequences the quality of memory, fragmentary and elusive."³⁶ Instead, Paris is a fast-moving, barely glimpsed melting pot of artistic moments, people and styles, a conceit that is evident from the opening moments of the film when "At a cabaret called The Chinese Screen, La Belle Abbesse performs an Egyptian belly dance, talks about her Spanish father, subsequently reveals that she was born in Montmartre, and finally appears as Empress of Russia."³⁷ French Cancan then, is evidently less the "testimonial film" it might seem to be on the surface, and more a complex reflection on the ways in which a collective memory of the city have been formulated by visual culture.

Renoir makes a further artistic contribution to this concept of cultural transmission in the song "La complainte de la Butte," composed for the film by Georges Van Perys, with lyrics by Jean Renoir himself. The melody of the ballad punctuates the film, reinforcing the key topographical signifiers of Montmartre: les escaliers/the stairways, la butte/the hill and les ailes du moulin/the windmills. By the time Cora Vaucaire sings the song at the grand opening of the Moulin Rouge (the sequence which concludes the film), the song is already evocative of the spaces of [End Page 99] Montmartre and indelibly associated with the lovers whose stories unfold there. Written in the mid-1950s, the song is a pastiche—determinedly old-fashioned in tone and form, modelled on the popular chanson of an earlier epoque: it thus takes on the quality of an implanted memory, apparently authentic, and credible as an artistic fragment of the past. The song's life as a signifier of Belle Epoque Paris was more recently confirmed in singer Rufus Wainwright's contemporary version for Baz Luhrmann's pop-art Moulin Rouge (2001), the popularity of which has given the song the enduring status of a classic Parisian air on the international stage.

As formally different as they might be, the films of the different periods of Renoir's career offer a sustained and complex reflection on Paris as a site of meaning. Renoir's oeuvre holds contradictory, yet complementary ideas of the city in tension and the seeds of this duality are present in his films from the very earliest stages of his career. Renoir is sensitive to the physical and material space of Paris, using it to ground his films in a meaningful social context. But he is equally sensitive to Paris as an abstraction; an artistic signifier that exceeds the imperatives of slavish imitation. Paris is a concrete entity for Renoir; it is also an ideal narrative space, replete with prior meaning and comprehensible at a profoundly moral level. Reality for Renoir is something "magical": "But on one condition: you must translate it. Reality may be very interesting, but a work of art must be a creation. If you copy nature without adding the influence of your own personality, it is not a work of art."³⁸ For Renoir, Paris is not so much a city, as a work of art he has always endeavoured to paint in all its many complexities, rather than its simple lines.