WHO is he?
French film director, actor, scenarist and producer who directed over 30 feature films from the mid-twenties to 1970. Renoir worked in the silent era as well as the sound and colour eras and made fictional films, documentaries and television films. He won the International Award at the Venice Film Festival in 1951 for The River , which he made in India. He was the son of the celebrated Impressionist painter Pierre Auguste Renoir.
WHAT are his films about?
Themes
Renoir is most famous for his humanism, but it is a form of humanism that is not achieved by direct romanticisation of his protagonists. The characters in his films are often cruel, capable of violence, cowardice and ignominy, and yet, this nastiness is precisely what puts their finer hours in nobler light. As is the convention with French Poetic Realism, the characters from Renoir’s pre-war films hail from the fringes of society. The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, is gently ridiculed for its double standards. His later, light-hearted films, however, centre primarily on art and artists and explore the intersection of theatre and life.
Style
Renoir has regularly been compared to Orson Welles for his use of deep focus and cavernous spaces. Like in the American director’s pictures, significant action takes place on all planes of the image. Movement — either through the actors who are being filmed or the camera — is paramount and tracking and pan shots are commonplace. Equally characteristic are downbeat endings and the use of voiceover. Shots of natural elements and everyday life are strongly redolent of Impressionist paintings as is the vibrant use of colour in his post-war work.
WHY is he of interest?
Renoir has had a deep influence on filmmakers worldwide, including Francois Truffaut, Akira Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray, the last of whom wrote highly about the Frenchman in many of his essays. Renoir also made films in America and India, marrying the spirit of these countries with his French sensibility and continuously deepening the film tradition.
WHERE to discover him?
The Grand Illusion (1937) is the work that is instantly associated with the brand of humanism Renoir is now remembered by. Set during the Great War in the German prisoner camps, the film is doubly poignant: first for its emphasis on the human component of the war and the inherent nobility of man and also because the soon-to-come Second World War would obliterate the very possibility of such an emphasis.
Published - December 13, 2014 06:19 pm IST
