“He is the greatest of directors. He justifies cinema.”-David Thomson
“Where does theater begin? Where does life end?”-Anna Magnani in The Golden Coach
September 15 was the 100th anniversary of Jean Renoir's birth, and we celebrate with a major retrospective of his films, including rare prints from archives in France and the U.S.
In France, the Renoir centenary was celebrated by a retrospective mounted by the Cinémathèque Française, by an exhibition at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival, and by a special issue of Cahiers du cinéma in which contemporary filmmakers looked at each of Renoir's films and reviewed them anew. What amazes is the freshness of these responses to films made between 1924 and 1971. Renoir continues to stimulate, to surprise. According to Cahiers, he remains “le patron du cinéma français...There is a little bit of Renoir that sleeps in all of us.”
It was not always thus. Only with Grand Illusion, in 1937, did Renoir achieve international acclaim, and that was already the peak of his finest period. Even then, Rules of the Game, today considered by many to be the best film ever made, met with disfavor in a country heading toward fascism. With the war, Renoir came to the United States (and Hollywood), eventually to become a naturalized citizen and make a second home in Los Angeles.
The Cahiers du cinéma critics of the fifties, who would become the filmmakers of the nouvelle vague in the sixties, saw in Jean Renoir not a patron but a soul mate; not a “father,” perhaps, but a brother, whose work was sparked by an individual creative genius and was thus singularly set apart from the “well-made films” of the thirties and forties that the New Wave rejected. As late as 1971, François Truffaut wrote, “Renoir's work has always been guided by a philosophy of life which expresses itself with the aid of something much like a trade secret: sympathy. It is thanks to this sympathy that Renoir has succeeded in creating the most alive films in the history of the cinema, films which still breathe forty years after they were made.”
The second son of the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jean Renoir said of his father's work, “It was a cry of love for the world where he was living-he didn't believe he was creating anything but was copying, copying things he loved.” Like his father, Jean Renoir was infatuated with reality-not realism, but reality, with its many layers, and its magic. “I'm trying to discover people,” he said of his own endeavor. Renoir's films are not loved because they are perfect, but precisely because they are not. And because they reveal so much about the process of being alive, there is a sense of improvisation to his craft, and always a sense of hope. Thus could Truffaut write about the tragicomic Rules of the Game, “For an instant we think to ourselves, ‘I'll come back tomorrow and see if it all turns out the same way.'”
