Jean Renoir

by Raymond Durgnat

Renoir is acknowledged by critics and film historians of all persuasions, from André Bazin to Pauline Kael, to be one of the towering creative figures of cinema. His career was long and varied, and poses many fascinating analytical problems--Renoir seems to have created not so much one world as dozens of them. This book is a definitive, film-by-film interpretation of Renoir's work. It covers not only the accepted masterpieces (which include Grand Illusion, Rules of the Games, Boudu Saved from Drowning, Partie de Campagne) but the entire sweep of Renoir's career, including his early avant-garde efforts, his first ventures into realism, his contributions to the Popular Front, his Hollywood films made in exile, and his postwar output.

Raymond Durgnat, one of the most intriguing English-language writers on film, brings his astonishing visual memory and his individual analytic style to bear on the entire Renoir oeuvre, recreating such little-known achievements as La Nuit du Carrefour, Le Crime de M. Lange, or political works such as La Marseillaise. Witty, articulate, encyclopedic in his knowledge of the French cultural and political scene, Durgnat gives Renoir's films the aesthetic, philosophical, and social analysis their complexity demands.

Genres: Film

442 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 1974

Reviews

[Steve Bowbrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

I knew nothing about Raymond Durgnat until very recently. This may be because I’m incurious or obtuse but also perhaps because he was a kind of pathological outsider who left every club he ever joined and upset everyone while he was there. He was dumped by Sight and Sound after he criticised the magazine’s elitism, dropped out of the Filmmakers Coop because they’d gone a bit structuralist and ultimately left Britain all together to wander the corridors of the American university system (never gaining tenure, of course). Since then I’ve learnt that he’s among the most brilliant stylists in film writing and a provocative critic of ideologies and styles. His critique of Godard (“ocular masturbation”) is brilliant and true, he was a Hitchcock sceptic (he preferred Renoir) when the cult was at its height. His demolition of auteur theory (“a moth-eaten dogma”) is definitive. You won’t find much of his stuff outside the secondhand bookshops these days but you should dig out his book about Hitchcock and the one about post-war British film, both reissued recently. I’d recommend some others but I haven’t been able to find them.

I included this book in this survey of books about film.

This one is a film-by-film survey of Renoir's work, so very handy to have with you if you're planning a Renoir marathon. He was reconciled with the BFI later in life and they published an excellent collection after his death in 2002, which is still in print.