<Archive Obituary> Jean Renoir (February 12th 1979)
Bill Schenley
Photo:
http://www.nndb.com/people/593/000045458/jr-1046a-6.jpg
FROM: The Washington Post (February 14th 1979) ~
By Gary Arnold, Staff Writer
Jean Renoir, a great artist's son who achieved greatness
himself as a motion picture director, died yesterday at the
age of 84 at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif.
Best known for "La Grande Illusion" and "The Rules of the
Game," two masterworks made in his native France in the late
1930s, Mr. Renoir had been in declining health for the past
few years.
An operation on a leg injured 60 years earlier by a German
sniper's bullet prevented Mr. Renoir from attending Academy
Award ceremonies in 1975 at which he was scheduled to
receive an honorary Oscar. Ingrid Bergman accepted on his
behalf. Mr. Renoir had been confined to a wheelchair since
the operation.
He directed several American films while in exile from
Occupied France during World War II, and returned to live in
Los Angeles in the mid-'60s, occasionally teaching courses
at the Univesity of California film school there.
Mr. Renoir was born in Paris on Sept. 15, 1894. He was the
second of three sons born to the master Impressionist
painter Pierre Auguste Renoir and his wife Aline Charigot.
The eldest son, Pierre, nine years older than Mr. Renoir,
achieved fame as an actor in French plays and films.
Pierre's son Claude has become one of the most respected
cinematographers in international filmmaking. He served as
the director of photography on a number of his uncle's films
in the 1950s.
Jean Renoir's familiar, invigorating, cherubic visage as a
child was immortalized by his father. In his memoirs, "My
Life and My Films," published in 1974, Mr. Renoir recalled
that his father took particular delight in his childish
profusion of hair:
"My father loved to paint my hair, and his fondness for the
golden ringlets which came down to my shoulders filled me
with despair. At the age of six, and in spite of my
trousers, many people mistook me for a girl... I impatiently
awaited the day when I was to enter the College de
Sainte-Croix, where the regulations required a hair style
more suited to middleclass ideals."
Mr. Renoir, also the author of a biography entitled "Renoir,
My Father," published in English translation in 1962,
reflected at length on his father's influence. In his
memoirs he described the process as indirect but profound:
"My father never talked to me about art. He could not bear
the word. If his children chose to go in for painting,
acting or music, they were free to do so, but they must
never be pushed. The urge to paint a picture must be so
powerful that it could not be resisted... Although he did
not seek to influence his children, my father did most
decidedly influence us by the magic of the pictures covering
the walls of our home...When I started to make films I went
out of my way to repudiate my fatherhs principles; but,
strangely, it is precisely in the productions where I
thought I had avoided Renoir's esthetics that his influence
is most apparent."
Mr. Renoir felt that his father's art derived from a
philosophic inclination to see "that the world is a whole,
comprised of parts which fit together, and that its
equilibrium is dependent on every piece."
This outlook is reflected in his own development of an
improvisatory working method and fluid, deep-focus style of
composition that sought to impose an ongoing illusion of
reality and intimate, although subtle, correspondence
between performers and settings.
"Everything, everything, absolutely everything, is
relative," Mr. Renoir once remarked. "We are surrounded by
relative truths, and indeed there are only relative truths;
everything depends on the circumstances, on the moment... It
is always a question of catching life, a certain aspect of
life through two moments, differing no doubt, but related to
all the same, without my wanting to establish a hierarchy
within this relationship.
"... I still belong to the old school of people who believe
in the surprise of life... I believe that cinema, and
moreover every art, is made of happy chances, in large
measure; then obviously there are people who have luck and
who find themselves channeling those happy chances more
often than others do... The auteur -- is he not the
fisherman with his line? It is not he who creates the fish,
but he knows how to catch it."
As a child Mr. Renoir was more stimulated by theatrical
melodramas than the primitive, flickering movie images to
which he was occasionally exposed. Following his schooling,
Mr. Renoir worked briefly as a journalist, then secured a
commission as a cavalry officer at the outbreak of World War
I. Wounded in combat in 1915, he began attending movies
frequently during a lengthy period of recuperation.
Encouraged by a fellow officer who had raved about the films
of Charlie Chaplin, Mr. Renoir began to conceive a passion
for filmmaking after seeing Chaplin. "Slowly the idea grew
in me," he said, "that I had to be part of this
revolution... When I started to make films my ambition was
just to be successful, I was attracted by the glamor of the
profession. Slowly, I discovered that to make films was
something much more important, and perhaps a way to discover
reality."
Following his father's death in 1919, Mr. Renoir married
Catherine Hessling, one of his father's former models. In
accordance with his father's wishes they established a
pottery studio. However, they were so enamored of movies,
and Hessling's beauty and animation seemed so exploitably
photogenic that they collaborated on two short films,
"Catherine" or "Une Vie Sans Joie" and "La Fille de 1'Eau,"
in 1924.
The latter attracted enough favorable attention to justify
the production of an elaborate adaptation of Zola's "Nana"
in 1926. It was a resounding box-office failure, in
considerable measure because audiences were baffled by
Hessling's strenuously irrepressible antics, an extreme
approach that Mr. Renoir blamed himself for imposing on her.
Over the next few years, Mr. Renoir recouped by accepting
routine commercial assignments that proved successful with
the public, notably a lively service comedy called
"Tire-au-Flanc."
Mr. Renoir began to evolve his distinctive naturalistic and
humanistic style of social observation and character
delineation with his first-sound feature, "La Chienne," made
in 1931. Although it proved an artistic turning point in his
career, the film also helped destroy his first marriage,
since his wife had been rejected for the female lead.
As Mr. Renoir recalled the circumstances, "I offered to
sacrifice myself by giving up 'La Chienne,' and she refused
the offer, hoping that I would insist. But I did not insist,
and this was the end of an adventure which should have been
pursued in happiness. The cinema was for both of us a
jealous god."
An ironic, tragicomic account of a declasse romantic
triangle that leads to murder, "La Chienne" was
distinguished by a deceptively simple, transparent style.
The luminous, uncluttered compositions and natural, undubbed
sound created an extraordinary sense of immediacy. One
seemed to apprehend the characters with a remarkably
revealing objectivity: They simply were what they were, an
authentic distillation of complicated human natures.
Mr. Renoir refined this quality of illusion in subsequent
social comedies, dramas and tragicomedies like "Boudu Saved
from Drowning," "The Crime of Monsieur Lange," "The Lower
Depths" and "La Bete Humaine." However, it's generally
agreed that he reached the pinnacle of his achievement with
"La Grande Illusion" in 1937, and "The Rules of the Game" in
1939.
Set in a German prisoner of war camp for captured French
aviators in World War I, "La Grande Illusion" drew deeply on
Mr. Renoir's wartime experiences and reflected an ardent
pacifistic desire to contradict the rampaging nationalism
and war fever of the times. Mr. Renoir's film stressed the
similarities in class and tradition that united the German
commandant, played by Erich von Stroheim, and a French
officer, played by Pierre Fresnay.
Despite being banned in Germany and Italy, "La Grande
Illusion" won an award at the Venice Film Festival and went
on to become an international success. It became the first
foreign-language film to be nominated for an Academy Award
as best movie of the year.
"The Rules of the Game," an ironic social comedy set among
idle demoralized members of the French ruling class, met
with immediate popular disfavor when it opened in Paris in
July 1939. Cut severely and then suppressed, the film did
not begin to be appreciated until it was restored and
reissued in the late 1950s.
"Rules of the Game" is now generally regarded as one of the
most influential of modern films. The film critic and
historian David Thomson has called it "the most dynamic
juxtaposition of moods and feelings that cinema has yet
achieved."
Francois Truffaut, whose work reflects Mr. Renoir's
influence perhaps more strongly than any of the other New
Wave directors, believes that "Rules of the Game" ranks with
"Citizen Kane" as an inspiration and spur to aspiring
filmmakers.
The essence of Mr. Renoir's philosophy may have been
expressed by the character he played in "Rules of the Game,"
an amiable, muddled hangeron named Octave:
"It would help me not to see anything more, not to search
anymore, for what's good, and what's bad. Because, you see,
on this earth, there is one thing which is terrible, and
that is that everyone has their own good reasons."
During his wartime exile in the United States, Mr. Renoir
worked with considerable integrity and some success on
pictures like "Swamp Water," "The Southerner" and "The Diary
of a Chambermaid," but he always felt a bit of a stranger
within the American movie industry.
He returned to Europe in 1947. He did not direct a film
until "The River," an adaptation of a Rumer Godden novel
shot in India in 1950.
His most notable European productions of the 1950s were "The
Golden Coach," which provided Anna Magnani with an acting
tour de force, and "Elena et les Hommes," a comedy that
helped revive Ingrid Bergman's career after the Rossellini
scandal. Mr. Renoir's last feature, "Le Petit Theatre de
Jean Renoir," was made for French television in 1968.
Truffaut has described Mr. Renoir astutely as "the
quintessential moviemaker of the personal. The conventional
division of films into dramas and comedies becomes
meaningless when we consider Jean Renoir's films, which are
dramatic comedies. Some filmmakers think that they should
put themselves 'in the place' of the producer, or the
public... Jean Renoir always gives us the impression that he
has put himself in the place of his characters... Renoir
does not film ideas, but men and women who have ideas, and
he does not invite us to adopt these ideas or to sort them
out no matter how quaint or illusory they may be, but simply
to respect them."
In an interview 20 years ago, Mr. Renoir was asked his
favorite among his own films, and said he had none. "The
real source of happiness," he remarked, "is the fact of
creating. Once a thing is done, well, it's done... The real
intoxication, if I may call it that, is in the act of
creation: That's what matters, whether one is creating an
apple pie, a film, a child or a painting."
Mr. Renoir's body will be flown to France where a funeral
with state honors will take place next week.
He is survived by his second wife, Dido Freire, and a son,
Alain, by his first marrage.
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Photo:
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/images/directors/03/25/renoir_building.jpg