Renoir, artist of the film

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33816, 12 April 1975, Page 10

Renoir, artist of the film

My Life and My Films. By Jean Renoir. Translated by Norman Denny. Collins. 287 pp. N.Z. price $8.45. What the father was to French impressionist painting, the son is to French film-making. The son’s achievement remains, at least in New Zealand, less well-known as the father’s, but it is quite as impressive an achievement. Jean Renoir, fils, has directed nearly 40 films. One — “La Grande Illusion” — is arguably the greatest French film ever made. “My Life and My Films” is touted on the dust-jacket as an autobiography, but, as could be expected from someone who made such penetrating and often scintillating films, it is far from being an arid chronicle of the events of Renoir’s life. Even if it had been no more than that, it would still have been interesting. The times Renoir lived through, the people he knew, and the films he made were all extraordinary. “My Life and My Films” is written in a delightfully discursive style, and is studded with pithy, trenchant comments. Renoir’s Gallic sense of style and humour has survived, despite his many’ years in the United States.

The book has special interest for filmgoers. Much of what Renoir writes is inevitably about the making of some of his most celebrated films. Many of the other subjects he writes about, of more general interest, will also be of particular interest to filmgoers because they provide insight into his films. Many of Renoir’s other memorable remarks in this book should appeal to those who are only casual filmgoers. Everyone should appreciate his lovely description of a good film as “the

caress of foliage in a boat with a friend”; his strictures against commercial cinema — “the public is lazy, to indulge this laziness is to hold the key to success"; his summing up the United States as “a society of European malcontents,” and his last word on those who are enthusiastic about living in New York — “all tastes are humanly possible, including masochism.”

The appeal of the book to those without any great interest in Renoir’s work as a film-maker goes beyond the appeal which his elegant, stylish writing should exert. Much of this book should also appeal to many who will never see a Renoir film and not feel greatly deprived because of that. Renoir paims a fascinating picture, for example, of the world before 1914 in which he grew up. He describes things that will never be seen again, and remarks that while the world has changed for the better and the worse “one thing is certain, that the calm of evening has vanished from this present world, of which the keynote seems to be purposeless agitation?’ He paints an equally fascinating, but alas equally brief, picture of German!, between the wars. To some the book may be too lightweight, too frothy, altogether too French, for their liking. But there are serious undertones, which surface most obviously at the end in Renoir’s stirring reflections on nationalism. This is one of those rare books that appears at first to have only a narrow appeal but, on closer examination, proves to be worthy of much wider attention, both because of its content — a delightful blend of the trivial and the important, and of its style.