JEAN RENOIR, ONE OF THE FIRST CINEMA 'AUTEURS'

Today, The Grandma has been watchong som movies. She has chosen Jean Renoir's works, the French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author, who was born on a day like today in 1894.

Jean Renoir (15 September 1894-12 February 1979) was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author.

As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s. His films La Grande Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939) are often cited by critics as among the greatest films ever made. He was ranked by the BFI's Sight & Sound poll of critics in 2002 as the fourth greatest director of all time.

Among numerous honours accrued during his lifetime, he received a Lifetime Achievement Academy Award in 1975 for his contribution to the motion picture industry. Renoir was the son of the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and the uncle of the cinematographer Claude Renoir. He was one of the first filmmakers to be known as an auteur.

Renoir was born in the Montmartre district of Paris, France.

Renoir was largely raised by Gabrielle Renard, his nanny and his mother's cousin, with whom he developed a strong bond. Shortly before his birth, she had come to live with the Renoir family. She introduced the young boy to the Guignol puppet shows in Montmartre, which influenced his later film career. He wrote in his 1974 memoirs My Life and My Films, She taught me to see the face behind the mask and the fraud behind the flourishes. She taught me to detest the cliché. Gabrielle was also fascinated by the new early motion pictures, and when Renoir was only a few years old she took him to see his first film.

As a child, Renoir moved to the south of France with his family. He and the rest of the Renoir family were the subjects of many of his father's paintings. His father's financial success ensured that the young Renoir was educated at fashionable boarding schools, from which, as he later wrote, he frequently ran away.

At the outbreak of World War I, Renoir was serving in the French cavalry. Later, after receiving a bullet in his leg, he served as a reconnaissance pilot. His leg injury left him with a permanent limp, but allowed him to develop his interest in the cinema, since he recuperated with his leg elevated while watching films, including the works of Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith and others.

More information: The Film Stage

After the war, Renoir followed his father's suggestion and tried his hand at making ceramics, but he soon set that aside to create films. He was particularly inspired by Erich von Stroheim's work.

In 1924, Renoir directed Une Vie Sans Joie or Catherine, the first of his nine silent films, most of which starred his first wife, Catherine Hessling. She was also his father's last model. At this stage, his films did not produce a return. Renoir gradually sold paintings inherited from his father to finance them.

After Germany invaded France in May 1940, Renoir fled to the United States with Dido Freire. 

In Hollywood, Renoir had difficulty finding projects that suited him. His first American film, Swamp Water (1941), was a drama starring Dana Andrews and Walter Brennan.

He co-produced and directed an anti-Nazi film set in France, This Land Is Mine (1943), starring Maureen O'Hara and Charles Laughton. The Southerner (1945) is a film about Texas sharecroppers that is often regarded as his best American film. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Directing for this work.

Diary of a Chambermaid (1946) is an adaptation of the Octave Mirbeau novel, Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, starring Paulette Goddard and Burgess Meredith. 

 

His The Woman on the Beach (1947), starring Joan Bennett and Robert Ryan, was heavily reshot and reedited after it fared poorly among preview audiences in California.

 

Both films were poorly received; they were the last films Renoir made in America. At this time, Renoir became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

In 1949, Renoir traveled to India to shoot The River (1951), his first color film. Based on the novel of the same name by Rumer Godden, the film is both a meditation on human beings' relationship with nature and a coming of age story of three young girls in colonial India. The film won the International Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1951.

After returning to work in Europe, Renoir made a trilogy of color musical comedies on the subjects of theater, politics and commerce: Le Carrosse d'or (1953) with Anna Magnani; French Cancan (1954) with Jean Gabin and María Félix; and Eléna et les hommes (1956) with Ingrid Bergman and Jean Marais. During the same period Renoir produced Clifford Odets' play The Big Knife in Paris. He also wrote his own play, Orvet, and produced it in Paris featuring Leslie Caron.

Renoir made his next films with techniques adapted from live television. Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1959), starring Paul Meurisse and Catherine Rouvel, was filmed on the grounds of Pierre-Auguste Renoir's home in Cagnes-sur-Mer, and Le Testament du docteur Cordelier (1959), starring Jean-Louis Barrault, was made in the streets of Paris and its suburbs.

Renoir's penultimate film, Le Caporal épinglé (1962), with Jean-Pierre Cassel and Claude Brasseur, is set among French POWs during their internment in labor camps by the Nazis during World War II. The film explores the twin human needs for freedom, on the one hand, and emotional and economic security, on the other.

Renoir's last film is Le Petit théâtre de Jean Renoir, released in 1970. The film is a series of three short films made in a variety of styles. It is, in many ways, one of his most challenging, avant-garde and unconventional works.

Unable to obtain financing for his films and suffering declining health, Renoir spent his last years receiving friends at his home in Beverly Hills, and writing novels and his memoirs.

In 1975, Renoir received a lifetime Academy Award for his contribution to the motion picture industry. That same year a retrospective of his work was shown at the National Film Theatre in London. Also in 1975, the government of France elevated him to the rank of commander in the Légion d'honneur.

Jean Renoir died in Beverly Hills, California, on February 12, 1979, of a heart attack. His body was returned to France and buried beside his family in the cemetery at Essoyes, Aube, France.

More information: The Guardian

A director makes only one movie in his life.
Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again.

Jean Renoir