The Loss of Community: Six European Directors

Abstract

If it is worthwhile to attempt exhaustive close-up examinations of the work of leading film directors, there must be further value in attempting some comparisons, however tentative and personal these may be. My special concern with Eisenstein, Renoir, Bergman, Buniuel, Fellini, and Godard has now led me to ask: What, finally, is the lasting effect each director has upon us-what is the world-view that emerges from his collected works? Directors like Jean Renoir and Federico Fellini deliberately set out to please us, perhaps even to charm us into accepting the reality of their respective worlds. Others, like Ingmar Bergman and Jean-Luc Godard in their later works, seem almost to insult us. They appear to want to hurt us, as if to force upon us the reality of their respective worlds. Renoir and Fellini are both traditionalists, as indeed is Luis Buiiuel in another way. Renoir's work is obviously rooted in the past. His values are those of his father, those, indeed, of another and (it would appear) more beautiful age. He has brought to his film-making ideas of graciousness, of the supreme value of friendship, of gentleness, of an easy elegance, of the unalterable beauty of nature-ideas which sit oddly within films about murder and injustice as in La Chienne or about prison camps in the second world war as in Le Caporal Epingld. But these ideas are beautiful nevertheless. They are redolent of the leisured courtesy of certain aspects of the past and are very much a part of the atmosphere that we take away from Renoir's films. Yet, if his films are filled with beauty, they are also filled with sadness-as if in tacit realization that such beauty as he wants to believe in has less and less recognition in the contemporary world. These qualities find their occasional echo nowadays in the work of Frangois Truffaut, who is in many ways Renoir's cinematic heir. Fellini's traditions are different. They are less social and more interior. There is no sense of any hankering for the historical past in a Fellini film, but there is the sense of a man looking backwards, away from the responsibilities of a fully adult world, as if children have the answer. Up until Satyricon, any sense of an historical past could be located most specifically in his feeling for ritual, for religious processions and for many of the more