Jean Renoir

Jean Renoir: Cinema's Reluctant Revolutionary

In 1939, a Paris audience threw a chair at the screen showing *The Rules of the Game* and the French government banned it soon after for being bad for morale. Twenty years later, restored from salvaged negatives, that same film began appearing on every serious list of the greatest ever made. Few careers illustrate so plainly how far ahead of its moment true originality can sit, and how long it can take the world to catch up.

A Painter's Son Who Chose a Newer Art

Jean Renoir grew up inside one of the most famous studios in France, the son of Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, surrounded from childhood by the models, light, and unhurried attention to ordinary life that filled his father's canvases. He could have spent a career justifying that inheritance on canvas. Instead, discharged from the French army after a serious leg wound in the First World War, he drifted toward the newest and least respectable art form of the century: silent film. It was, in effect, a second apprenticeship, conducted in public, in an entirely different medium, with no guarantee it would pay any better than failure.

Financing Himself, One Painting at a Time

Renoir's first directing credits appeared in 1924, and for years he underwrote his own pictures the only way available to him: by selling paintings from his father's estate. It is an origin story with an unusual moral. A man raised amid arguably the finest brushwork of his age chose instead to bankroll blurry, half-financed silent pictures nobody was asking for, effectively converting one art form's capital into another's tuition. That gamble bought him a decade of trial and error before sound pictures, and before the two films that would define him, arrived.

The War Film That Refused to Hate the Enemy

*La Grande Illusion* (1937) told the story of French prisoners of war and the German officer who holds them, and it became the first foreign-language film ever nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. What distinguished it from ordinary war pictures was its refusal of easy villainy: Renoir gave the German commandant, played by Erich von Stroheim, as much dignity and melancholy as his French captives, insisting that class and caste bound men together across national lines more tightly than uniforms divided them. Adolf Hitler's regime, sensing exactly what the film was arguing against nationalism, later declared it "Cinematic Public Enemy Number One."

The Party Nobody Wanted to Attend

Two years later Renoir went further, and the public punished him for it. *The Rules of the Game* (1939) follows a house party of aristocrats and servants through a weekend of adultery, hunting, and farce that ends in a death nobody quite intends and nobody quite mourns. Criterion Collection, which has restored and distributed the film for decades, calls it "a dazzling accomplishment, original in form and style, a comic tragedy, absurd and profound," and identifies its real subject as "a scathing critique of corrupt French society cloaked in a comedy of manners." Audiences in 1939, weeks from a war that would occupy their country, wanted no such mirror held up to them. The film was cut, then banned, then largely lost until a 1959 reconstruction revealed what Renoir had actually built: a nearly Mozart-like ensemble of moving parts, in which every character's small cruelty and self-delusion adds up to a portrait of a civilization about to destroy itself without noticing.

Exile, Hollywood, and a River in Color

The German occupation of France sent Renoir to Hollywood, where he made competent but less personal films before finding new footing abroad. In 1951 he directed *The River*, the first color feature filmed in India, a lush, unhurried study of a British family's life on the Bengal riverbank that traded Rules of the Game's satire for something closer to his father's serene attentiveness to light and daily ritual. *The Golden Coach* (1953) and *French Cancan* (1954) followed, both explicitly about performance itself — actors, dancers, and the stages that contain them — as if Renoir, late in life, wanted to make his own methods the subject rather than the mechanism.

A Style Built on Contradiction

What holds Renoir's four-decade, silent-to-color career together is not a signature shot or a recurring collaborator but a temperament: critics and historians describe it as a blend of "tenderness, irony and Gallic insouciance," a director who could mock his characters and love them in the same frame. He rejected villains almost entirely. Even his most self-important aristocrats and most compromised servants get moments of grace, because Renoir's guiding belief, stated across interviews throughout his life, was that everyone has their reasons — a line he put directly into *The Rules of the Game* and effectively into every film after it.

Why Jean Is Called a Genius

Calling Renoir a genius rests less on any single technical innovation than on a rare capacity to hold incompatible truths in one shot without flattening either — comedy beside tragedy, sympathy beside satire, formal control beside apparent looseness. The British Film Institute's 2002 critics' poll ranked him the fourth-greatest director in cinema history, and directors as different as François Truffaut, Robert Altman, and Martin Scorsese have named him a direct influence, crediting him with essentially inventing the humanist, ensemble-driven style that later became known as auteur cinema. The honest counter-case deserves stating plainly: Renoir was not a visual innovator on the order of Eisenstein or Welles, his Hollywood decade produced work even admirers consider minor, and *The Rules of the Game*'s genius was recognized only in hindsight, after a public failure and two decades of near-obscurity. What survives is less a claim of technical wizardry than a director whose ethical imagination — his refusal to let any character, however foolish or cruel, become simply a target — proved more durable than the audiences who first rejected it.

Legacy

Renoir directed until 1969 and wrote and gave interviews until his death in Beverly Hills in 1979, having received an honorary Academy Award in 1974 and been made a Commander of the Legion of Honor the following year. He is buried, fittingly, near the family he never fully left behind, in the French village where his father painted. The two sons of that household — one with a brush, one with a camera — ended up teaching the same lesson in different mediums: look closely enough at ordinary life, and it stops being ordinary.

Achievements

• Commander of the Legion of Honour
• Academy Awards
• Worked as film director, actor and screenwriter