Renoir’s Automaton, Vigo’s Puppet: Automatism and Movement inLa Règle du jeuandL’Atalante

Abstract

Jean Renoir’s 1939 film La Regle du jeu incorporates several automata as indexes of the alienated status of the class it depicts, including the orchestrion that the main protagonist Robert de La Chesnaye unveils as the ultimate piece in his collection. This focus on machines is as much an expression of the film’s eighteenth-century philosophical and aesthetic references as it is a revelation of an anachronistic relation to the machine as such, and to the form of movement it embodies. In a key scene the display of the orchestrion falters, revealing a deathly repetition that the moribund pseudo-aristocracy cannot accommodate. The opposition drawn by Lacan between automaton and tuchē in his eleventh seminar, as well as Deleuze’s intimation of the ‘crack’ in the filmic crystal that Renoir’s cinema deploys, illuminate this moment as an event of pure repetition. In contrast, Jean Vigo’s 1934 film L’Atalante depicts a human–machine relation that allows for forms of connection and innovation of a more organic nature. Across these representations of automatism and movement, the cinema of the 1930s explores patterns of alienation and of historicity, for which the theses of Walter Benjamin provide a powerful interpretative framework.