"My Life and My Films", Jean Renoir

Jean Renoir, son of Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, is considered one of the greatest filmmakers in film history, a master in the use of depth of field (that would inspire Orson Welles, though he would use it in a more egocentric perspective and by establishing different hierarchies of power between his characters, unlike Renoir who used it to concentrate various actions on small individual stages), the search for both a sonic and visual realism, and whose work is particularly marked by the humanism and life that inhabits his characters. The most well-known phrase of his filmic career is spoken by himself, playing the character Octave in La Règle du Jeu (1939), "You see, in this world, there is an awful thing, and that is that everyone has his reasons." , leaving explicit the sympathy for the different characters with conflicting points of view and their pertinent idiosyncrasies that is present in his films. His cinema is so marked by his personality that Andrew Sarris wrote on the entry dedicated to the French filmmaker in his The American Cinema: “Renoir's career is a river of personal expression. The waters may vary here and there in turbulence and depth, but the flow of personality is consistently directed to its final outlet in the sea of ​​life.”

He started his career in the silent films era because he just wanted to make his wife, Catherine Hessling, a movie star. With her, he made films related to the French Impressionism movement, La Fille d´eau and La petite marchande d'allumettes, as well as the naturalist mega-production Nana. After their separation, Renoir continued to pursue his filmic career in the sonorous, and in the 1930s he signed films considered precursors of the American noir genre (La Chienne, that would later be remade by Fritz Lang under the name Scarlet Street, a seminal noir film) and the Italian neorealism (Toni). It is still in the 1930s that he directed two films that can easily be found in “greatest ever” lists: La Grande Illusion and La Règle du Jeu. Other films that seem to us of equal artistic merit are the atavistic tragedy, visually rigorous La Bête Humaine, the poignant and highly refined Partie de Campagne, and that lesson of cinema in camera movements, blocking and masterful use of the depth of field that is Le Crime du Monsieur Lange.

Due to the Occupation of France, Renoir emigrated to America where he had a career in Hollywood not always peaceful. In international co-productions he made two of his best films, The River and La Carrosse d'Or, the first considered by Scorsese, along with The Red Shoes, as the most beautiful color film ever made, “a film without a real story that is all about the rhythm of existence, the cycles of birth and death and regeneration, and the transitory beauty of the world”, the second considered by Truffaut the most noble of all films. When he returned to France, he was idolized by the Cahiers du Cinéma critics, becoming one of the most important references to the Nouvelle Vague generation who would eventually pay tribute in the films of Truffaut, Godard, Rivette or Rohmer.

My Life and My Films is his autobiography where he describes his private and professional life since childhood, method of work, reflections on Art, and encounters with other important cinematographic figures such as Griffith, Ford, Zanuck, Becker, among many others.

Excerpts:

“One enjoys a story because one is in sympathy with the story-teller. The same tale, told by someone else, would be of no interest. André Gide has summed it up in a very few words: ‘In art all that matters is the form.’”

“In the theatre there is only one way of involving the audience, and that is by finding language worthy of the occasion. But in a film, thanks to the close-up, so much explicitness is unnecessary. The texture of the skin, the glow in the eyes, the moisture of the mouth – all these can say more than any number of words.”

“[On La Grand Illusion] My chief aim was the one which I have been pursuing ever since I started to make films – to express the common humanity of men.”

“(…) what is interesting about an adaptation is not its resemblance to the original work but the way in which the film-maker reacts to the original work, and if his reaction produces results seeming to have no connection with the original work, what does it matter? We don’t admire a painting for its fidelity to the model: all we want is for the model to stimulate the painter’s imagination.”

Link to the complete book in PDF:

https://mega.nz/#!UfR3EALI!wHfIv2BYOCQyhnn1y01nJWI60-7LuxpIABisHzmonFY

A special thanks to Inês Lourenço.