Female agency in the films of Jean Renoir

Barry Nevin

doi:10.1177/09571558211012967

Abstract

Although Jean Renoir’s oeuvre has been extensively debated since the emergence of the politique des auteurs in the pages of Cahiers du cinéma, his representation of gender relations has sustained less discussion than his signature formal style. This article posits that Renoir’s films provide a valuable means of identifying how gender, specifically female identity, affects temporal trajectories in cinema. First, it illustrates Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of crystallisation and situates it in relation to current scholarship on gender representation in the director’s work. Second, it conducts a close analysis of the relationship between female identity and crystallisation based on the central female characters of La Règle du jeu (1939) and The Golden Coach (1952). This article ultimately argues that whether these characters belong to an upper-or lower-class stratum, they are subordinated to male power, which plays a determining role in the range of potential futures available to them.

Highlights

Renoir, Deleuze and genderJean Renoir (2005) once declared that ‘[l]es auteurs de films ou de livres étant en général des hommes, ils racontent des histoires d’hommes
While Burch and Sellier consider these films relatively complex examples of Renoir’s approach to gender relations, the broad scope of their study prevents them from performing a close textual analysis of Renoir’s mise en scène and leaves the conceptual point of conjecture raised by Deleuze open to discussion
Deleuze’s justifiably declinist view of the world of La Règle du jeu is apt from a gendered perspective if we focus on Christine: by the end of the film, despite serious intentions to elope with other men, she remains with her husband, a fate that mirrors that of her maid, Lisette (Paulette Dubost), and which evokes Deleuze’s emphasis on ‘[le] système de rimes entre maîtres et valets’ (p. 114) within the metaphorical reflections generated by Renoir’s crystalline narratives

Summary

Introduction

Deleuze and genderJean Renoir (2005) once declared that ‘[l]es auteurs de films ou de livres étant en général des hommes, ils racontent des histoires d’hommes. Each links the inextricable relationship between life and theatre with questions concerning class and etiquette, the two films differ substantially from a stylistic perspective: La Règle du jeu, as Deleuze implies, arguably marks Renoir’s most complex deployment of lateral camera mobility, composition in depth and off-screen space, all of which would later secure the film’s crucial position within André Bazin’s theories of realism; by the time Renoir was directing The Golden Coach, on the other hand, he was relying considerably more on stationary camera set-ups and Technicolor, and had become, in his own words, ‘un passionné de l’artificiel’ (Renoir, 2005: 246).

Results

Conclusion