Jean Renoir

Film Director

  • Born: September 15, 1894
  • Birthplace: Paris, France
  • Died: February 12, 1979
  • Place of death: Los Angeles, California

French film director

Considered by many to be the world’s greatest film director, Renoir explored his characters’ relations to society and nature and their humanity during his forty-five-year career.

Areas of achievement Film, theater and entertainment

Early Life

Jean Renoir (zhahn rehn-wahr) was born to the Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Aline Charigot, a dressmaker’s assistant. His parents were married in 1890, although the couple’s first child, Pierre, had been born in 1885. Among the many artist friends of the elder Renoir who visited his country house at Essoyes were Edgar Degas and Claude Monet. Renoir later described growing up amid an extended family of artists, models, art dealers, relatives, and their children as the happiest time of his life. By 1901, his immediate family included his younger brother, Claude.

Beginning in 1903, the Renoirs lived much of the year at Les Collettes, a villa in Cagnes-sur-Mer near Nice, where Jean attended school. He was always a poor, restless student, and his parents hoped he would eventually find some career working with his hands. In 1913, after finishing his studies in philosophy at the Nice extension of the University of Aix-en-Provence, Renoir joined the cavalry, hoping to become an officer. He was a sergeant when World War I broke out, and after being kicked by a horse, he transferred, over his parents’ objections, to the infantry as a sublieutenant. In April, 1915, his thighbone was fractured by a bullet. Since Renoir’s wound left him with a slight limp, he was unable to return to the infantry. With time on his hands, he began going to films and soon became addicted, seeing as many as twenty-five American movies a week. He persuaded his father (his mother died in 1915), confined to a wheelchair, to buy a projector so that they could watch Charlie Chaplin films together.

In 1917, Renoir fell in love at first sight with Andrée Heurschling, one of his father’s models. Pierre-Auguste Renoir died in December, 1919, and Jean married Andrée on January 24, 1920. After working in ceramics with his brother Claude at Cagnes-sur-Mer for a while, Renoir moved to Paris in 1921, had a kiln built, and started a pottery enterprise. Ceramics did not fulfull Renoir’s need to create, and the inheritance from his father afforded him the freedom to take his time deciding what to do with his life. His only child, Alain, was born in 1922. By 1923, he had decided to make films.

Life’s Work

Through his brother Pierre, who had become an actor, Renoir met Albert Dieudonné, later the star of Abel Gance’s Napoléon (1927), who wanted the wealthy young man to finance a film for him. Renoir wrote Une Vie sans joie (1924; A Joyless Life), and Dieudonné directed and costarred, against her will, with Renoir’s wife, now known as Catherine Hessling. Renoir and Dieudonné quarreled over the melodrama, leading to the latter’s reediting the film and rereleasing it in 1927 as Catherine. Not discouraged by this experience, Renoir immediately directed his first film, beginning his lifelong custom of filling the cast and crew with his friends, making the experience of filming a friendly collaboration. (Renoir would direct thirty-six films, writing or cowriting twenty-eight of them.) Through such early works as La Fille de l’eau (1924), he learned the techniques of filmmaking, taking great pleasure, as an artisan, in creating scale models of landscapes and streets.

Inspired by the force of the director’s personality in Erich von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives (1922), Renoir made the most expensive French film up to 1926, adapting Nana from the novel by Émile Zola. The stylization of Nana, especially in Catherine Hessling’s pantomime-like performance, indicated Renoir’s originality and maturing talent, but, as with several later films, its quality was not recognized in France at the time. His next film, Charleston (1927), a dance fantasy shot in four days, also failed at the box office. The release of La Petite Marchande d’allumettes (1928; The Little Match Girl), from the story by his beloved Hans Christian Andersen, was delayed by a plagiarism suit brought by two writers who had created a stage version of the story. In the interim, talking pictures arrived, and Renoir was forced to add a bad sound track. After making two commissioned silent films, he played opposite his wife in two films directed by his friend Alberto Cavalcanti. Because he loved actors so much, Renoir believed he should try acting. He and Catherine separated in 1930.

Unlike many French directors, Renoir welcomed the advent of sound as offering new possibilities to the art of the cinema. He directed On purge bébé (1931), based on a Georges Feydeau farce, just to prove he could make a sound film quickly and cheaply. He deliberately chose a less commercial project as his next effort. The producers were so shocked by La Chienne (1931) that they drove him from the studio and called the police to keep him out. When they were unable to reedit the film, Renoir was allowed to restore his version. This early example of film noir, now considered one of Renoir’s masterpieces, was another commercial failure.

La Nuit du carrefour (1932), an adaptation of a Georges Simenon novel, with Pierre Renoir as Inspector Maigret, was also a failure. Renoir considered it such a mess that even he did not understand it. Among his assistants on this film were his brother Claude and Jacques Becker, later a prominent director himself, whose sense of order helped compensate for Renoir’s more informal approach to his work. In explaining his seemingly haphazard methods, Renoir said, “[Y]ou discover the content of a film in the process of making it.” He followed with another masterpiece, Boudu sauvé des eaux (1932; Boudu Saved from Drowning), in which he continued the use of deep-focus cinematography, a technique he helped pioneer. Such films, with their fluid, seemingly improvisational styles, led the French cinema away from an overreliance on dialogue.

Despite such artistic successes, Renoir continued having difficulty with the practical side of filmmaking. Because Madame Bovary (1934), his adaptation of Gustave Flaubert’s novel, was more than three hours long, the distributors shortened it into a largely incoherent state. Once again, the director recovered with a notable achievement, Toni (1934), the first of several films focusing on the individual’s relation to society. His friendship with the Groupe Octobre, writers and artists with communist leanings, influenced Le Crime de M. Lange (1936; The Crime of Monsieur Lange), in which workers form a cooperative to save a failing business.

Renoir combined his concern with society and his passion for nature in Une Partie de campagne (1946; A Day in the Country). The 1936 filming went more chaotically than usual, Renoir’s usual happy family of collaborators turned against one other, and the director abandoned the film before it was completed. After World War II, Marguerite Renoir reedited it from the uncut negative saved by Henri Langlois, director of the Cinémathèque Française, and the film was finally released in 1946. (Marguerite Mathieu lived with Renoir from 1935 to 1940 and used his name even though they never married.) Despite all the problems, this bittersweet film is one of Renoir’s most charming.

After Les Bas-Fonds (1936; The Lower Depths) got a lukewarm reception, the director made one of his most lasting achievements, La Grande Illusion (1937; Grand Illusion). Censors altered Renoir’s version, and, while critics were enthusiastic about it, the public, anticipating another war, was disturbed by its pacifist message. The film was better received in the United States, running for twenty-six weeks at a New York theater. Using an uncut negative found in Munich by the American army, Renoir finally restored it to his original intentions in 1958.

After La Marseillaise (1938), his interpretation of the French Revolution, and La Běte humaine (1938; The Human Beast), another Zola adaptation, Renoir created La Règle du jeu (1939; The Rules of the Game), considered by many to be his finest film. It was made in typical Renoir fashion with the director and his collaborators writing the dialogue and choosing the locations as they needed them. Once the film was made, Renoir had to overcome editing problems and legal difficulties to arrive at his 113-minute cut. Distributors trimmed The Rules of the Game to eighty-five minutes, and it was eventually banned by the Vichy government as demoralizing and by the Nazi occupiers. The original negative was destroyed when the Allies bombed the Boulogne studios, but Renoir’s version was restored in 1956 from more than two hundred cans of film and bits of sound track. Because of the film’s reputation as one of the greatest ever made, the public perception of Renoir the person is as he appears here in his most notable acting performance. Tall, plump, energetic, with thinning reddish-blond hair, a perpetual gleam in his eye, and a gravelly voice, Renoir has been likened by critic Andrew Sarris to a dancing bear.

In 1939, France, fearing that Italy would side with Germany in the coming war, sent Renoir on an artistic diplomatic mission to Rome to teach a course in directing and make a film of Giacomo Puccini’s opera Tosca. When Italy entered the war in June, 1940, he returned to Paris, leaving Tosca to be finished by Carl Koch, who had worked with Renoir on two earlier films. In February, 1941, Renoir sought refuge from the war by going to the United States accompanied by Dido Freire, script girl for The Rules of the Game and niece of Alberto Cavalcanti. They were married February 6, 1944, without realizing that his divorce from Catherine was legal only in America. Renoir had a villa built in Beverly Hills near the home of his cousin Gabrielle and her husband, the American painter Conrad Slade.

Beginning at Twentieth Century-Fox, Renoir the improviser had difficulty working in the highly structured Hollywood studio system. He surprised the Fox executives by rejecting their scripts dealing with French or European history, choosing instead a screenplay set in Georgia, and shocked them by choosing to film Swamp Water (1941) in the Okefenokee Swamp instead of on a Hollywood soundstage. He missed, however, working with his family of collaborators and later said his five American films “don’t even come close to any ideal I have for my work” because of the studios’ reluctance to take chances. He made only The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946) with his typical approach.

Instead of returning to France after this bitter experience, Renoir chose to make another English-language film, The River (1951), an adaptation of a Rumer Godden novel set in India. His first color film, with his nephew Claude, Pierre’s son, as cinematographer, The River is one of his most beautifully lyrical works. After going to Italy for another visually striking film, Le Carrosse d’or (1953; The Golden Coach), Renoir finally returned to France, directing his play Orvet (1955) in Paris. He continued experimenting with color in his first French film in sixteen years, French Cancan (1955), but his poetic lyricism proved unfashionable in an age of cinematic realism. French critics attacked him for being more sentimental than he had been before the war. His next four films were also badly received, seemingly showing a loss of his former surety of tone and lightness of touch.

In 1960, he taught a theater course at the University of California, Berkeley, where his son was a professor of medieval literature. He published his first novel, Les Cahiers du Capitaine Georges (the notebooks of Captain Georges), in 1966 and wrote a biography of his father. His final cinematic work, Le Petit Théâtre de Jean Renoir (The Little Theatre of Jean Renoir), consisting of four short films, each introduced by Renoir, was released in 1970. He claimed he directed as much with his legs as with his head, and the pain from his old wound would no longer allow him to make films. He received a special Academy Award in 1975 and the French Legion of Honor in 1977 and spent his last decade writing his memoirs and three more novels.

Renoir became a naturalized American citizen in 1946 while maintaining his French citizenship. He lived in both Beverly Hills and Paris thereafter and died of a heart attack in Los Angeles on February 12, 1979. He was buried at Essoyes.

Significance

During the 1930’s, Jean Renoir was considered one of the major French directors, along with Marcel Carné, René Clair, Jacques Feyder, and Julien Duvivier, although his work was believed to lack the polish and moral certainty of his rivals’ work. By the 1950’s, the auteur critics, including such future directors as Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, and François Truffaut, paved the way for recognizing Renoir’s genius. Truffaut, later speaking for his fellow New Wave directors, called Renoir “the father of us all.” As films such as Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game were rereleased, filmgoers had the opportunity to see his best work as he intended it to be seen. Renoir’s causal techniques and groping after tenuous truths appealed to the New Wave and to sophisticated audiences. For the most part, however, critics agree only that his films of the 1930’s are masterpieces. The critical consensus is that while his movies after 1939 are interesting in the context of his entire output and are striking in places, they are inferior to his earlier work, often self-indulgent and aimless.

In addition to his effect on the New Wave directors, Renoir influenced the future directors who worked as his assistants, including such diverse talents as Luchino Visconti, Robert Aldrich, and Satyajit Ray. Those who have called him the greatest film director include Renoir’s own idol, Chaplin. For critic Pierre Leprohon, Renoir is the true poet of the cinema, adhering to no theories, imitating no one, creating his art out of his experiences, his love of an imperfect world.

Bibliography

Bazin, André. Jean Renoir. Edited by François Truffaut. Translated by W. W. Halsey II and William H. Simon. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973. Affectionate analysis of Renoir’s work by the critic most responsible for the reevaluation of his career. May have become the definitive study had Bazin not died before completing it.

Braudy, Leo. Jean Renoir: The World of His Films. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972. Focuses on the contrasts in Renoir’s films between theatricality and naturalism, improvisation and order, social commitment and aesthetic detachment. Good balance between considering Renoir as a craftsman and as a humanist. Includes a good brief summary of his life.

Durgnat, Raymond. Jean Renoir. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. Lengthy critical biography. Gives considerable background about the making of the films. Summarizes what other critics have said about Renoir. Perhaps the best all-round study of the director.

Leprohon, Pierre. Jean Renoir. Translated by Brigid Elson. New York: Crown, 1971. Excellent biographical sketch with excerpts from interviews with Renoir and commentaries by critics and friends.

O’Shaughnessy, Martin. Jean Renoir. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2000. Provides an analysis of all of Renoir’s sound films, including those made in Hollywood.

Renoir, Jean. My Life and My Films. Translated by Norman Denny. New York: Atheneum, 1974. The director recalls the people and events associated with the making of his films. Discusses the influence on his work of Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, and Erich von Stroheim. Not that specific about the details of his life. Good for conveying Renoir’s personality.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Renoir: My Father. Translated by Randolph Weaver and Dorothy Weaver. Boston: Little, Brown, 1962. This memoir of his father is an excellent source of details about the director’s childhood, some supplied by his cousin Gabrielle. Aids in understanding the father’s influence on the son as artist and man.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Renoir on Renoir: Interviews, Essays, and Remarks. Translated by Carol Volk. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Collection of his comments on his work.

Sesouske, Alexander. Jean Renoir: The French Films, 1924-1939. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. This study of the first half of the director’s career provides accounts of the making of the films. Good analysis of Renoir’s visual style. Written with the director’s cooperation, it may be too reverential.

Singer, Irving. Three Philosophical Filmmakers: Hitchcock, Welles, and Renoir. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. Singer describes how Renoir’s entire body of work was a means for the director to contact and communicate with his audience.

1901-1940: 1937-1939: Renoir’s Films Explore Social and Political Themes.

1941-1970: 1956-1960: French New Wave Ushers in a New Era of Cinema.