Jean Renoir, Filmmaker
View of Montmartre neighborhood in Paris, France. Image credit: Navin75, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The outbreak of World War I severely impacted the French film industry by diverting personnel and resources to wartime efforts but set the stage for the emergence of one of the most influential filmmakers in history: Jean Renoir. While confined to bed recuperating from a combat injury to his leg, Renoir immersed himself in a variety of films and developed an affinity for those of Charlie Chaplin. The middle of three sons of renowned painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and his wife Aline, Jean Renoir was no stranger to the arts. After the war ended, Jean began making films to support his first wife’s acting ambitions and went on to dedicate his professional life to cinema for over fifty years. Not only was his work recognized with a lifetime Academy Award, Renoir launched the directing careers of several of his crew while his work influenced countless other movie directors.
Photo of painting Gabrielle Renard and infant son, Jean (1895-1896) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, France. Image credit: Wikicommons, public domain.
Jean Renoir was born in 1894 and spent his childhood in the Montmartre district of northern Paris, where his father and fellow painters drew inspiration for their art. He was mostly raised by Gabrielle Renard, a young relative of his mother’s who came to live with the Renoir family. She regularly took Jean to Guignol puppet shows in Montmartre and to the productions that introduced evolving film technology to the Parisian public. Her encouragement for reading stories and imaginative play left their mark on Jean. Auguste often painted members of his household and was able to provide a comfortable life for them. Post-war, Jean dabbled in ceramics and made nine silent films starring his wife, Catherine Hessling, funding the productions with the sales of his father’s artwork.
These efforts gave him moviemaking experience that garnered success for several of his sound films in the 1930s, ranging from comedies such as Boudu sauvé des eaux (Boudu Saved from Drowning) to an adaptation of the novel Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. In 1937, Renoir’s film La Grande Illusion was released to great commercial success despite being banned in Germany and Italy and became the first foreign language film to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. This story of French prisoners during the Great War regularly appears on lists of the greatest films of all time, reflecting on the evolution of relationships across social classes and nationalities and the death knell for the unity of the interconnected European upper class.
Two years later, Renoir’s ensemble film, La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game), confounded critics and audiences alike. He purposely wrote a script without a clear main character and left much of the dialogue for the actors to improvise so that the film would ‘star’ the attitudes and actions of an upper-class gathering and the servants at a country house, oblivious to the looming dark clouds elsewhere. La Règle du Jeu was initially seen as immoral and then banned by the French government. Part of Renoir’s genius was his ability to subtly depict “society dancing on a volcano” rather than openly accusing those in power of a failure to recognize and effectively deal with growing instability in their devotion to respecting the rules of their social environment.
Jean Renoir in 1959. Image credit: Brazilian National Archives, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Renoir moved to the United States in 1940 after the Nazi invasion of France and tried to pursue filmmaking in Hollywood, receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Director for his 1945 film, The Southerner. He became a U.S. citizen several years later but left California to shoot his first color film, The River, in India and then returned to Europe where he resumed filmmaking as well as producing works for theater. In 1962, Renoir published a biography titled Renoir, My Father, reminiscing on his father’s life and work, and released his final full-length film, Le Caporal épinglé (The Elusive Corporal). He wrote screenplays and published his own memoir, My Life and My Films, in 1974. Renoir spent his final years in California and passed from a heart attack at the age of 84 in 1979.
Numerous directors of a variety of nationalities refer to Jean Renoir as a major inspiration for their own work. Not only did Renoir impact filmmaking as a means of conveying the range of perspectives in life, he did so in a subtle way with empathy for his characters, who came across as real people instead of actors playing roles. None other than Orson Welles referred to Renoir as ‘The Greatest of All Directors’.
Jeu de français
While it can be difficult for a child to emerge from the shadow of a famous and accomplished parent, Jean Renoir did so in a different genre from his father and showed the artistic talent that ran through the family.
Look for (mostly) French words pertaining to Jean Renoir and his life in the word search below.
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