Re-Framing Renoir: Introduction

Abstract

Re-Framing Renoir:Introduction Katherine Golsan (bio) 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...