Scenes of Love and Murder: Renoir, Film, and Philosophy

Abstract

SCENES OF LOVE AND MURDER: RENOIR, FILM, AND PHILOSOPHY By Colin Davis. London: Wallflower Press, 2009, 139 pp. Reviewed by Adam Rosadiuk Colin Davis' agile interpretative essays on the films of Jean Renoir collected in Scenes of Love and Murder: Renoir, HIm, and Philosophy stumble, suddenly, with a series of clunky philosophical allegories. Analyzing a key scene from Renoir's 1931 masterpiece La Chienne, Davis describes the shutting off of lights as being equivalent to the moment of Cartesian doubt, and the putting on of a dressing gown as alluding, perhaps, to the dressing gown worn by Descartes as he prepared for the ordeal of hyperbolic doubt. These concrete equations between mise-en-scene and philosophy, and the exegesis of meaning far beyond the intentions of the filmmaker, are the result of a tension that both structures these essays and risks pulling them apart. Scenes of Love and Murder is an odd and compelling work. Neither an aggressive act of experimental hermeneutics, nor a completely satisfying affirmation of eternal artistic genius, it has a considerable amount to say about the films of Jean Renoir, and perhaps even more to say about contemporary auteur studies. Davis wants to talk about Renoir's films as doing philosophical work, and after criticizing a similar attempt by Irving Singer to deal with Renoir the auteur, he identifies three film-philosophers of note who may be helpful: Deleuze, Eizek, and Cavell. Davis finds much to admire in the first two, but rejects their approaches as too concerned with concepts and not concerned enough with cinema. Stanley Cavell, Davis argues, discovers an approach to thinking about and through cinema that leaves cinema itself intact as a phenomenon. It is an approach that does better justice to our experience of the medium as a medium of entertainment, art, instruction and philosophy, he argues. At the same time, though, he acknowledges that the artist is still essential for at least one key reason: it is the figure of Renoir that allows us to link a number of films together. And, indeed, for Davis, the philosophy of Renoir requires a number of films, in the aggregate, in order to be revealed. What is at stake in Davis' approach is a flexible, fluid, agile critical position achieved through the pondering of potentially relevant philosophical concepts (e.g. friendship, sacrifice, scepticism) and tested against the logic of Renoir's text. For Davis, to speak of Renoir's contribution to the changing face of philosophy, and to talk about Renoir's philosophy, is to describe the unique (but not autonomous) philosophical critical stance that Renoir's films enable - not necessarily the content of that philosophy. By separating the form of philosophy from its content, Davis is arguing that the film-philosopher does much more than use narrative films to illustrate philosophical concepts. The film-philosopher wants to discover through cinematic style the conditions by which philosophical concepts can be expressed by cinema and how these concepts are then reformed by cinematic expression. Film-philosophy becomes a way of thinking about how philosophical concepts are represented cinematically, and what happens to our understanding of such concepts (and to cinema itself) when these concepts are translated into a medium as elusive and mysterious as cinema. This is why it makes sense to talk about Renoir's films together, as an oeuvre, and about their contribution to knowledge: it is in the manoeuvres of an artistic sensibility responding over time to shifting knowledge that true philosophical work is done. It is a sensitivity to the strategies of dealing with philosophical knowledge, and less the philosophical theories themselves, that will reward the philosophically sensitive critic. An aesthetic state of philosophical readiness emerges in the end. Davis writes, [Renoir's] films of the 1930s are working towards not so much knowledge as the prospect of dwelling alongside something or someone unknown, poignantly experienced as an enigma not to be resolved. …