Jean Renoir, Orson Welles and La Règle du jeu: Landmark Cinema

July21

We’re pleased to present the work of guest writer Aiyesha McInerney: her submission on the life and times of Jean Renoir, Orson Welles and Renoir’s arguable master-stroke, 1939’s The Rules of the Game.

It would be genuinely remiss, at this late stage, to discount outright any of the films considered momentous by the foremost critical minds of the Western World, as subsequently critically or cinematically unimportant, in opposition to their accrued reputations. The re-evaluatory anti-establishment instincts that reside within most contentious critics have wrought their best and their worst on our modern understanding of the world that the cinema gifts us with, and yet, these films still stand tall.

That having been said, it would be equally negligent not to consider the possibility that many of the films elevated to the status of pantheon members are as celebrated on account of their oft-torturous histories as their content, which is not to their detriment, but ought be taken into consideration nonetheless.

When French director, writer, actor Jean Renoir died, passing away in the February of 1979, at the ripe old age of 84, Orson Welles, quite possibly the greatest cinematic iconoclast of the 20^th century, published a heartfelt obituary in the Los Angeles Times for his close, late friend, and nestled amongst its paragraphs is a claim formed from wholesale immodesty and untold generosity, namely that “Jean Renoir stands on his own: the greatest of European directors: very probably the greatest of all directors, a gigantic silhouette on the horizon of our waning century.”

High praise, indeed, from a man in full possession of a character that Andre Bazin (his article featured in Mark W. Estrin’s collection of interviews with Welles, held as part of the Conversations With Filmmakers series of texts) once described as “god-like as Jupiter…an affable tyrant, wielding a ten-inch cigar instead of a bolt of lightning…truly Orson the Magnificent…the living illustration of [the] particular biology of genius, bent on growing to the bitter end” (p. 48), and yet, fitting.

Nine years earlier, in 1970, Jean Renoir gave an interview with Renoir scholar Leo Braudy (“Renoir at Home”, published separately from Braudy’s 1972 tome, Jean Renoir: The World of his Films). When asked, in passing, Renoir posits, “The best director in our days…that’s Orson Welles. He’s a great creator. The idea of a tycoon is not the same, can’t be the same, after Citizen Kane…” (p. 8 )

Renoir and Welles led separate lives and conducted separate careers, but as the years passed discussion of one would so often provoke mention of the other within the space of the same sentence, paragraph or breath until they were all but inseparable in the critical mind: in 1958, for instance, in the same moment that Bazin remarks on Welles’ Herculean ebullience and how such a thing stands at odds with his ever-advancing age, he illustrates the phenomenon by reference to what he believes to be a similar process at work within Jean Renoir, arguing “maturity…effects a strange metamorphosis…the Jean Renoir we know would be at least half a foot taller than the Jean Renoir of the thirties. Clearly he has amplified in all senses of the word; his very bones doubled in size.” (p. 49)

Whatever they shared personally, it is undebatable that they were both craftsmen of the highest cinematic order, and participated independently in what ought to have been a singularly prescient perception of the nature of film: at its most simplistic, this can be seen to be reflected in that together they occupied, between 1972 and 1992, the top two ranks (Welles’ at 1^st and Renoir at 2^nd) of the much-respected BFI Sight and Sound Critics’ Top Ten, and the first and third, respectively, in 1962 and 2002.

Craftsmen, then, but in the eyes of their many subsequent critical defenders and, by all accounts, from within the radius of their own appreciation, ones who went largely unappreciated for far too long, at least until they were well past their respective cinematic primes, and this was a growing and always bitterly-seasoned bone of contention shared out equally between the two, and perhaps over which they most ardently bonded.

Welles summarises Renoir’s forty-year cinematic career thus, with rancour and a crisp clarity of phrase that might lead an unsuspecting reader to imagine he was speaking of his own career (true of so much of Welles’ writing), rather than that of his beloved contemporary and colleague: “Some of [his films] were commercial and even, in their time, critical failures. Some enjoyed success. None were blockbusters. Many are immortal.” Taking all of these determinations together and at face value, there is only one product of Renoir’s dedication to his calling that can be said to fit perfectly the description attained: 1939’s La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game, as I will refer to it from now on).

The Rules of the Game was Renoir’s Citizen Kane, in more ways than one; indeed, it could be said to be Europe’s Kane, but while there are technical and historical similarities and comparisons to be made, there are also important differences, in the formation of an abiding legend as much as in elements of its formal construction, though despite that it remains a useful analytical tool when discussing critical cinematic watersheds.

It is, for instance, important to note that Citizen Kane’s popular reputation was formed largely on account of the colossal war of words and wills precipitated between Orson Welles and William Randolph Hearst (the cost of which was perhaps best totaled in W.A. Swanberg’s 600-page biographical tome, “Citizen Hearst” [1961]), and though it was hidden away from public eyes in the direct aftermath of the tremendous legal battle, critically it was immediately appreciated, if not, perhaps, lauded to the degree that it eventually would be. It did, after all, win an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and was nominated for eight others.

The Rules of the Game, on the other hand, did not fare nearly so well, even relatively. Indeed, it is a film made infamous predominantly through the propagation of anecdotes regarding its popular reception (or hysterical lack thereof), up to and including purported attempts to incinerate cinemas wherein the film was showing, and it confused French critics almost as much as it did audiences, who reacted with hostility to its explicit contempt for the bourgeoisie.

In Janet Bergstrom’s article, “Jean Renoir’s Return to France”, she attributes a great deal of the critical disdain the film provoked to the fact that Renoir “changed the conception of the hero radically, in part by increasing the number of important characters so that no one of them would carry the action or the moral attitude of the film.” (p. 462) The resultant ensemble film “confused and alienated critics as well as the public.” (p. 462) Bergstrom quotes from numerous 1939 critical reviews of the film, noting the most common element, critical confusion as to where the audience’s sympathies should lie and with which characters. It was not until long after the shadow of WW2 had passed on that the film would begin to be re-evaluated, and late into the ‘50s that it would be acclaimed in Renoir’s native homeland. Truffaut, for instance, in a 1963 interview with Paul Ronder, is notably sympathetic: “Rules of the Game is one of those rare cases where a great film passed over the heads of its public… I’m convinced that sometimes a film-maker must violate his public.” (p. 10)

Still, Renoir’s “bitter disappoint at the hostile French reaction to this film he had put so much of himself into and staked so much of his future on,” (p. 460) was such that, in combination with the arrival of the Second World War on his veritable doorstep, it drove him from his first home and towards America and the American film system (and clearly, into the path of Orson Welles), a decision with which Bergstrom displays a restrained disgust, as she does with Renoir’s post-war work in general, feeling that, whatever merits one picks out, overall “it is simply a fact that the cinema, and not only French cinema, lost a lot when Renoir abandoned the direction he had pursued with so much conviction during the 1930s in France.” (p. 460)

Like Welles, Renoir’s subsequent critical decline, seen retrospectively, is such that it marks out films like 1937’s The Grand Illusion and especially Rules of the Game as almost crystalline in their encapsulation of everything that made Renoir great and, thus, everything his later work came to be seen to lack. Welles’ own personal narrative differs slightly, insofar as that Kane was Welles’ first feature-length film, leading to the propagation of a certain ‘enfant terrible’ mystique, while Renoir had amassed a formidable body of work by 1939.

Bergstrom (using numerous historical documents and comprehensively referenced technical studies) argues that Renoir’s incredibly accomplished directorial style, showcased in the long takes, deep focus and complex choreography of The Rules of the Game, was in later years compromised entirely by executives from RKO (Welles’ studio of choice) and Renoir’s “lack of confidence in his understanding of American business, the American idiom and the American public” (p. 468), arguing that Renoir was reticent, that “there were too many areas in which Renoir, still the new-comer, understandably lacked experience and deferred to the Americans.” (p. 470).

In summary, she notes, having built a strong argument from the exemplary statistically analytical work of Alexander Sesonske, “In Hollywood Renoir was no longer able to work as a writer-director within a system he understood or could influence effectively. None of his American films were as fully integrated, conceptually and technically, as his work of the 1930s.”

Thus, if Renoir’s films after The Rules of the Game were inarticulate through studio meddling and an authorial lack of confidence in the face of an unfamiliar and vaguely hostile system, then such films as he produced before the aforementioned landmark have been received by the passing of time with precious little in the way of extra patience.

Andre Bazin, in his foundational “What Is Cinema? Volume One” defines The Rules of the Game as a landmark in pure cinematic terms, saying, in the process of becoming the director and the man who could produce such a film, he “uncovered the secret of a film form that would permit everything to be said without chopping the world up into little fragments, that would reveal the hidden meanings in people and things without disturbing the unity natural to them.”

According to Stephen Tifft in his “Theatre in the Round: The Politics of Space in the Films of Jean Renoir”, the socialist politics of The Rules of the Game are implicitly and in permanence bound up in Renoir’s late ‘30s obsession with deep focus and long takes, arguing that in doing so one could “tame the disruptive tendencies of cinematic language in order to make the mediation of the imagine unobtrusive” in an effort to “reproduce…reality” (p. 329).

Tifft’s work is based in the comprehensive groundwork of Bazin, but this fact is worth less than one might imagine simply by virtue of the fact that Bazin arrived on the scene first and has staked out of all the available ground, meaning one is all but forced to stand upon his formidable shoulders. Tifft does, however, locate one of the true origins of the later Italian neorealist tradition in Renoir’s 1935 work Toni, arguing it “[establishes] a highly naturalistic mise en scene…and [uses] non-professional or local actors who came from the region and class of their characters and spoke with native accents…his later films…continue to stake out a powerful claim to realism…but this now centers…on the naturalized standing of the spectator.” (p. 331)

Bergstrom feels similarly, noting “although Renoir kept his distance from party affiliations, his films showed a strong social and political sensitivity to the inequities of class structures in France and a sympathy for the working class.” (p. 456)

Peter Harcourt concurs, arguing, “when a film-maker composes in depth, he allows the spectator to select certain features within the frame that he then can respond to. Hence the ambiguity of potential response…the film-maker who depends more upon editing, is more concerned to direct the response of the spectator.” (p. 23) This vaguely ‘democratic’ approach to formal composition resides fully in line with Renoir’s equally vague socialist, humanist politics.

There is a particularly cynical argument that routinely and inevitably raises its head when one professes a wish to discuss the idea and subsequent critical maintenance of a cinematic canon: to wit, the suggestion that the critical (as opposed, perhaps problematically, from popular appreciations, both in the moment and with an eye to retrospectivity) reputations of films like Citizen Kane and Rules of the Game are future-proofed, so to speak, by the anecdotally robust controversies (as discussed above) they evoked in the era of their assembly and exhibition, rather than by the fact that their critical and popular relevance remains a power in the world no matter how far from the origin of such monoliths we grow.

As I say, it’s a case formed from hardened cynicism and little else, assuming that critics are unable to determine for themselves the qualities of a film, formal, emotional or otherwise, or, perhaps more incredibly, that there is some conspiracy to keep truly ‘important’ films out of the public eye and to instead favour ‘safe’ films, whatever they are.

Boston University film theorist and Cassavettes scholar Ray Carney combines a particularly vitriolic form of this raison d’être with virulent anti-mainstream invective, leading to his declaring Kane, “one of the ten most over-rated American films of all time.” (”Citizen Kane on its Fiftieth Anniversary: The Greatest Movie Ever Made?”) and “[Schindler’s List] is a Hollywood producer’s self-congratulatory fantasy of how giving people a chance to work for you is doing them a big favor” (”Pulp Affliction: The Sorry State of Contemporary Film”). This is clearly his prerogative, and doubtless many possessing of a homogenous agenda will align themselves similarly.

For a defence of the films under attack to be mounted, however, is a simple matter, far simpler than one might imagine, and it’s one to be found, encapsulated in its entirety, in Peter Harcourt’s “What, Indeed, Is Cinema?”, wherein he states in no uncertain terms that “Bazin is at his best, as are all critics, when he is talking about the films that have engaged him most deeply.” (p. 28)

What more needs be said than that a critic’s engagement (indeed, an audience member’s engagement, for that matter) with a film should not be assumed to be false, no matter the intellectual or political contempt in which you hold the critical establishment that birthed them: when a film has touched and influenced so many both sentimentally and cognitively, it isn’t a ruse or grounds for derision. To continue to deploy such rhetoric in the name of questioning the fundamentals is to needlessly shake the foundations of your own house without desiring to build something more viable where the wreck might one day stand (perhaps the true purpose and calling of all self-identifying polemicists).

You can acquire the Criterion edition of Rules of the Game from Amazon.com.

Works Cited:

Bazin, Andre. What Is Cinema? (Vol 1) (What is Cinema?). New York: University of California P, 1968.

Bergstrom, Janet. “Jean Renoir’s Return to France.” Poetics Today (Duke University Press) Creativity and Exile 17 (1996): 453-89. JSTOR. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora. 24 May 2009. Keyword: renoir.

Carney, Ray. “About Ray Carney: Career Overview.” People.bu.edu — people on the Web at Boston University. Boston University. 07 June 2009 <http://people.bu.edu/rcarney/aboutrc/bio.shtml>.

Carney, Ray. “Citizen Kane on its Fiftieth Anniversary: The Greatest Movie Ever Made?” People.bu.edu — people on the Web at Boston University. Boston University. 7 June 2009 <http://people.bu.edu/rcarney/carncult/orfilms.shtml>.

Carney, Ray. “”Pulp Affliction: The Sorry State of Contemporary Film,”" The Baffler May 1996.

Harcourt, Peter. “What, Indeed, Is Cinema?” University of Texas Cinema Journal 8 (1968): 22-28. JSTOR. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora. 24 May 2009. Keyword: renoir.

Litle, Michael. “Sound Track: “The Rules of the Game”" University of Texas Cinema Journal 13 (1973): 35-44. JSTOR. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora. 24 May 2009. Keyword: renoir.

Renoir, Jean, and Leo Braudy. “Renoir at Home: Interview with Jean Renoir.” University of California Film Quarterly 50 (1996): 2-8. JSTOR. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora. 24 May 2009. Keyword: renoir.

The Rules of the Game. Dir. Jean Renoir. Perf. Nora Gregor, Paulette Dubost, Jean Renoir. DVD. Criterion, 2004.

Swanberg, W. A. Citizen Hearst A Biography of William Randolph Hearst. New York: Collier Books, 1981.

Tifft, Stephen. “Theatre in the Round: The Politics of Space in the Films of Jean Renoir.” Johns Hopkins University Theatre Journal 39 (1987): 328-46. JSTOR. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora. 24 May 2009. Keyword: renoir.

Truffaut, François, and Paul Ronder. “François Truffaut: An Interview.” University of California Film Quarterly 17 (1963): 3-13. JSTOR. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora. 24 May 2009. Keyword: renoir.

Welles, Orson, and Mark W. Estrin. Orson Welles Interviews (Conversations With Filmmakers Series). New York: University P of Mississippi, 2002.

Welles, Orson. “Jean Renoir: ‘The Greatest of All Directors’” The Los Angeles Times 18 Feb. 1979: 1-1. Orson Welles Archive. 23 Nov. 2006. 24 May 2009 <http://www.wellesnet.com/?p=120>.