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Intertext and Political Margins in Jean Renoir’s Boudu Sauvé Des Eaux

Margaret C. Flinn

in The Social Architecture of French Cinema, 1929–1939

This chapter shows that architecture and cinema had a privileged bond in the theorization of film (by critics such as André Malraux and Élie Faure) and its relationship to other arts in the 1930s, ... More

This chapter shows that architecture and cinema had a privileged bond in the theorization of film (by critics such as André Malraux and Élie Faure) and its relationship to other arts in the 1930s, through the utopian political conceptions the two inspired and shared. After the examination of theoretical context, the chapter offers a reading of Jean Renoir’s Boudu sauvé des eaux that focuses on Notre-Dame de Paris as a spatial intertext, at once literary (because of Victor Hugo’s novel of the same name) and architectural. This suggests a newly politicized way to understand Renoir’s location of bodies in social spaces. The chapter places the documentary value of location footage alongside a number of other artistic representations, thus relying upon a broader notion of social document than heretofore mobilized.Less

“J’ai envie d’foutre le camp”

Kent Puckett

in Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel

If this book begins with the beginnings of the social mistake as a figure of strange social and formal importance, it ends with a meditation on the waning of the mistake’s centrality to social and ... More

If this book begins with the beginnings of the social mistake as a figure of strange social and formal importance, it ends with a meditation on the waning of the mistake’s centrality to social and narrative form. While reading Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game as a late theorization of the conditions that had made the classic realist novel possible, it argues that as a certain form of life has faded, so has the centrality of the mistakes that once nourished that life. There will always be mistakes, slips, moments of embarrassment. What The Rules of the Game shows is that as the world becomes less novelistic, so does the social mistake lose its at once constitutive and destabilizing force.Less

“Tout le monde a ses raisons”: The Problem of Impressionist Commitment in Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu

Jesse Matz

in A Modernist Cinema: Film Art from 1914 to 1941

Much about Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu could place it among the classic works of modernism, but Renoir’s film is also traditional and even conservative. This ambiguity derives from Renoir’s ... More

Much about Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu could place it among the classic works of modernism, but Renoir’s film is also traditional and even conservative. This ambiguity derives from Renoir’s impressionism. He was dedicated to an impressionist aesthetic that he inherited in part from his father, the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir—an aesthetic that also brought him artistic and ideological uncertainties. Renoir intended mainly to push film further toward full development of its own aesthetic through the fuller realization of an impressionist aesthetic, the immediacy, subjectivism, and immersiveness that had for some time seemed best able to assert film’s unique claim to artistic excellence. But the problem of impressionism—its uncertain way of resolving perceptual differences—threw him back upon older theatrical and pictorial modes. It is finally the problem of such inconsistencies that give La Règle du jeu its major claim to modernism.Less

La Grande Illusion as a Work of Art

Peter Goldie

in Ethics at the Cinema

I argue that La Grande Illusion is not just an anti-war film—although it certainly is that. It is also a film about class: it shows how class separates people of a nation from each other; and it ... More

I argue that La Grande Illusion is not just an anti-war film—although it certainly is that. It is also a film about class: it shows how class separates people of a nation from each other; and it shows how it unites people of the same class across nations. Secondly, it is a film which shows that certain capacities or characteristics of human nature can be universal or pan-cultural, but disuniting rather than uniting: the capacity for language; the capacity for group conflict; and the sheer capacity for aggression. I close with a discussion of the relation between La Grande Illusion, philosophy, and art. I suggest that this great film is best thought of as a work of art, which is simply showing us, in wonderfully fine detail, a small fragment of human life which illustrates certain aspects of human nature. That La Grande Illusion is art, and not philosophical argument, in no way detracts from its having this value.Less

Pialat and the Nouvelle Vague

Marja Warehime

in Maurice Pialat

This chapter focuses on Maurice Pialat's relationship to the Nouvelle Vague and to two major filmmakers of the 1930s and 1940s against whose work Pialat measured his own: Jean Renoir and Marcel ... More

This chapter focuses on Maurice Pialat's relationship to the Nouvelle Vague and to two major filmmakers of the 1930s and 1940s against whose work Pialat measured his own: Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné. Pialat's outburst reflects his longstanding resentment over the fact that the young directors of the Nouvelle Vague had already begun to make names for themselves in the 1960s while he was still struggling to make films. His sense that he had not been given the same opportunities as the little group of friends at Cahiers led him to reject the Nouvelle Vague and belittle its importance. He turned elsewhere to find a model for a successful career in film, looking back to the popular cinema of the 1930s and 1940s, to films by major directors such as Pagnol, Carné or Renoir and the Saturday night cinema he had loved as a child. Yet the small-budget revolution associated with the Nouvelle Vague made it increasingly difficult for any filmmaker to aspire to a career in the mould of Pagnol or Carné.Less

The Jew in Renoir’s La grande illusion

Maurice Samuels

in The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews

Chapter Five analyzes debates about the Jews between the world wars by focusing on Jean Renoir’s classic film La Grande Illusion (1937). Produced against the backdrop of the growing threat of ... More

Chapter Five analyzes debates about the Jews between the world wars by focusing on Jean Renoir’s classic film La Grande Illusion (1937). Produced against the backdrop of the growing threat of fascism, Renoir’s film depicts the bonds formed by a group of French officers, one of whom is Jewish, in a series of German prison camps during World War One. Despite its anti-fascist message, the film has puzzled critics since its release because of its abundant recourse to antisemitic stereotypes. And yet, this chapter argues that it is precisely the fact that the Jewish officer is included in the symbolic national group despite his stereotypical traits that makes the film remarkable because the brand of universalism advocated by Renoir does not exclude Jewish particularism.Less

Source Music and Cinematic Realism: Jean Renoir and the Early Poetic Realists

Hannah Lewis

in French Musical Culture and the Coming of Sound Cinema

Chapter 5 focuses on the role of diegetic music in early poetic realist films. Poetic realism, the filmmaking genre that emerged out of the politics of the mid-1930s, had its roots in transition-era ... More

Chapter 5 focuses on the role of diegetic music in early poetic realist films. Poetic realism, the filmmaking genre that emerged out of the politics of the mid-1930s, had its roots in transition-era films by filmmakers such as Jean Grémillon, Julien Duvivier, Jacques Feyder, and perhaps most notably, Jean Renoir. The soundtracks of these filmmakers tended to favor a “realistic” incorporation of music into the narrative, an aesthetic decision grounded in a broader preference for direct recording, and frequently featured popular songs and street musicians to enhance the realism of a film’s setting. But diegetic music in early poetic realist films was multivalent, revealing the emotions or thoughts of characters, providing narrative commentary, and at times going against the expectations of a scene’s mood or actions. Considering diegetic music in early poetic realist sound films shows the ways in which audiovisual realism and stylization worked hand in hand.Less

The Postwar Bubble

Wheeler Winston Dixon

in Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia

Women were among those who eagerly embraced the new world of film noir, having been cut out of the film industry since the 1920s. None did it with more style and verve than Ida Lupino, who directed ... More

Women were among those who eagerly embraced the new world of film noir, having been cut out of the film industry since the 1920s. None did it with more style and verve than Ida Lupino, who directed Not Wanted, a story of children born out of wedlock. Although there had been numerous women directors working in Los Angeles in the 1920s and 1930s, including Lois Weber, Ida May Park, Ruth Stonehouse, Cleo Madison, Dorothy Arzner, and a number of others, by 1943 women had effectively been dismissed from the director's chair. Arzner was the only woman director working in the Hollywood film industry in the early 1940s; her last film was First Comes Courage (1943). An example of noir during this period is John Brahm's Guest in the House (1944), in which the corrosive force is not greed, or the lust for money and power, but rather madness, and possessive jealousy. Other examples are Reginald LeBorg's Fall Guy (1947), D. (David) Ross Lederman's Escape from Crime (1942) and Jean Renoir's Woman on the Beach (1947).Less

Poetic Realism as Spatial Fable

Margaret C. Flinn

in The Social Architecture of French Cinema, 1929–1939

The epilogue considers the paradox of the poetic realist preoccupation with atmosphere. The characteristics of a film that spatially constitute “atmosphere” tend to engage localizing, situational ... More

The epilogue considers the paradox of the poetic realist preoccupation with atmosphere. The characteristics of a film that spatially constitute “atmosphere” tend to engage localizing, situational reality guarantors, but also the extremely ephemeral qualities of gasses—fog, smoke, etc. The thwarted spatialization accounts for the melancholy and alienation of poetic realist subjects.Less

The Crowd As New Monumentality During the Popular Front

Margaret C. Flinn

in The Social Architecture of French Cinema, 1929–1939

This chapter addresses the spectacular and massive nature of the architecture of the films themselves—that is to say, the way in which the crowd functions metaphorically as a building block of social ... More

This chapter addresses the spectacular and massive nature of the architecture of the films themselves—that is to say, the way in which the crowd functions metaphorically as a building block of social cohesion. The stories being told by leftist militant filmmaking of the Popular front are analysed as a spatialized discourse where the crowd becomes a living construction. The portrayal of the worker as individual and member of the mass is crucially cinematographic: militant films cast their spectators as extensions of the films’ worlds. Furthermore, the visual rhetoric of these films opens avenues of insight into the spatial representations and politics of more mainstream products of 1930s cinema culture, such as Julien Duvivier’s La Belle équipe.Less

Ego Love and Melodrama

Reidar Due

in Love in Motion: Erotic Relationships in Film

This chapter discusses love in film melodrama. Ivete Huppes—a Brazilian historian of melodrama in film—suggests that melodramatic films are concerned either with the undoing of past injustice or with ... More

This chapter discusses love in film melodrama. Ivete Huppes—a Brazilian historian of melodrama in film—suggests that melodramatic films are concerned either with the undoing of past injustice or with amorous self-realization. Melodrama is a combination of past and present, where the past constitutes a burden to which the present compensates with love to fill the “void” caused by past suffering, thereby opening up a new future, which is not the future of the subject's past but the future of its transformative present. Therefore, in film melodrama, love is typically an arena for the subject's redemption. An example of films with melodramatic redemption is Jean Renoir's Woman on the Beach, which depicts a man battling with a war trauma that isolates him from the company of others.Less

Silencing and Sounding the Voice in Transition-Era French Cinema

Hannah Lewis (ed.)

in Voicing the Cinema: Film Music and the Integrated Soundtrack

This essay examines two contrasting aesthetics of the voice in early 1930s French cinema and the role that music played in each. Filmed theater, or théâtre filmé, emerged from the conception that ... More

This essay examines two contrasting aesthetics of the voice in early 1930s French cinema and the role that music played in each. Filmed theater, or théâtre filmé, emerged from the conception that sound cinema was primarily a recording medium. In French theatrical adaptations, the speaking voice took precedence over all other elements of the soundtrack. The author argues, however, that in théâtre filmé, speech takes on almost musical qualities, folding music and sound effects into the voice itself. Avant-garde filmmakers took a contrasting approach, rejecting the restriction of camera movement imposed by the theatrical model and hoping to recapture some of the visual freedom characteristic of silent cinema. These filmmakers told their stories with as little spoken dialogue as possible, incorporating music prominently into their soundtracks in order to silence the speaking voice. Though the intent may have been to strip the voice of its dominance within the soundtrack, these directors’ strategic denial of the voice often granted it a much greater significance. By examining early experiments with the voice on the soundtrack in the transition years—including those by Jean Renoir, René Clair, and Jean Grémillon—the author’s analysis expands the concept of “vococentrism,” as articulated by Michel Chion and David Neumeyer, to include different models of understanding the voice in cinema beyond those found in classical Hollywood and helps shed light on competing conceptions of the voice’s role in cinema before practices became codified.Less

Epilogue: Now is the Time: Historical Perspectives on Stereo Cinema

Ray Zone

in 3-D Revolution: The History of Modern Stereoscopic Cinema

Artistic possibilities for the 3D film are discussed along with the theories of Andre Bazin and the films of Orson Welles, Jean Renoir and Norman McLaren.

Cinema produces reality

Richard Rushton

in The Reality of Film: Theories of Filmic Reality

This chapter examines Gilles Deleuze's understanding of cinema, which is fleshed out in relation to his extraordinary claim that ‘cinema produces reality’. He argues that films offer orders of ... More

This chapter examines Gilles Deleuze's understanding of cinema, which is fleshed out in relation to his extraordinary claim that ‘cinema produces reality’. He argues that films offer orders of experience that are normally hidden or unavailable in everyday life. Cinema presents new modes of perceiving and experiencing, modes which are not derivative of experiences in the ‘real’ world, and not modes that insist upon an adherence or faithfulness to the ‘real’ world. Rather, cinema produces modes of perceiving and experiencing that offer the possibility of another kind of world. Perhaps most challenging about his claim is that, in making it, Deleuze signals his intention to refrain from all forms of judgement. His discussions of films and types of films do not revolve around questions of which films are better or more valuable than others, they refuse to draw up tables of judgement which determine that some types of films are bad while others are good. Instead, he tries to uncover the significance of the system of reality that is proposed by Jean Renoir's The Golden Coach (1952).Less

‘On the Phenomenology of the Creative Process’ (Lukács 1914)

Ian Aitken

in Cinematic Realism: Lukács, Kracauer and Theories of the Filmic Real

This chapter is a close analysis of Lukács’s 1914 paper ‘On the Phenomenology of the Creative Process’, in which Lukács moves on from his earlier work Soul and Form to focus on the phenomenology of ... More

This chapter is a close analysis of Lukács’s 1914 paper ‘On the Phenomenology of the Creative Process’, in which Lukács moves on from his earlier work Soul and Form to focus on the phenomenology of artistic creation. In this paper Lukács also moves away from the Platonist emphasis that pervaded Soul and Form. The paper focuses on the creative process, the ‘ethical sphere’ and the ‘aesthetic sphere’.Less