Thinking filming thinking filming

Abstract

There are two forms of creative practice: (a) Formal perfection, which poses itself as the negation of the contradictory nature of the human world; (b) formal contradiction, which articulates the contradictions of the human world. Very rarely something attempts both. This is the case with Jean Renoir’s La Regle du jeu (1939), which is formally perfect but which, to invert Coleridge’s definition, also contains in itself the reason which it should be otherwise rather than so. The tuche or blind spot articulating these modes is the shot of the frog croaking in a ditch just before the climactic murder. Like the deliberate inclusion of imperfections in the arabesques adorning certain mosques, this tuche is an admission that perfection belongs to an order other than the human - in Renoir’s case, to the order of nature, as among the mosque builders to the order of God. But Renoir’s tuche is only the formal articulation of an imperfection which runs throughout the film. This imperfection is the result of the attempt to give a realist account of an unreal condition: the class structure of the château. (Published: 2 December 2009) Citation: Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, Vol. 1, 2009. DOI: 10.3402/jac.v1i0.2122