“An extraordinary collection of essays that more than fulfills the aims of its editors, Alastair Phillips and Ginette Vincendeau. The essays offer exciting, original work from younger scholars as well as long-established authorities, all of which offer invaluable insights into the films, writings, and life of Jean Renoir. Receiving particular attention are questions about the singularity or multiplicity of what the editors call the many ‘Renoirs’ (French, American, Indian; even transnational), especially from the early 1930s through the early 1960s. Whether mining relatively unexplored archive materials, deploying newly current methodological approaches, interrogating one of a wide range of topics and issues, or engaging in close textual analysis, the contributors construct a tantalizing series of innovative ‘road maps’ for future researchers to pursue.”
Richard Abel, University of Michigan

“Alastair Phillips and Ginette Vincendeau have brought together essays that bring new perspectives to both the best-known and the lesser-known of Renoir’s films. Both French cinema specialists and viewers new to Renoir’s work will find much of interest in this outstanding collection.”
Judith Mayne, Ohio State University

Dubbed simply “the best director”’ by François Truffaut, Jean Renoir is a towering figure in world film history. This exhaustive survey of his work and life features a comprehensive analysis of his films from the multiple critical perspectives of the world’s leading Renoir scholars. Renoir’s career spanned four decades and four countries and included an extraordinary body of films, some of which – La Grande illusion (1937) and La Règle du jeu (1939) – are universally recognized masterpieces. Fathered by the celebrated painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the filmmaker lived through much of the twentieth century, beginning his career in the silent era and ending it in full Technicolor. His films are notable for their paradoxical combination of strong internal coherence and thematic breadth and diversity, and they provide a rich source for today’s scholars of film history and French culture.

This handbook, the largest volume on Renoir ever produced in the English language, ranges in scope from extreme close-up analysis of individual films to long-shot explorations of his aesthetics and the social and cultural contexts in which he worked. The most ambitious critical study of Renoir to date, this book will appeal to film enthusiasts as much as scholars and specialists.

Acknowledgements

Contributors

Introduction: Renoir in and out of his Time
Alastair Phillips and Ginette Vincendeau 

PART I – RENOIR IN CLOSE-UP

1.1. REASSESSING RENOIR’S AESTHETICS

1. Shooting in Deep Time: The Mise-en-scène of History in Renoir’s Films of the 1930s
Martin O’Shaughnessy

2. The Exception and the Norm: Relocating Renoir’s Sound and Music
Charles O’Brien

3. The Invention of French Talking Cinema: Language in Renoir’s Early Sound Films
Michel Marie

4. Renoir and His Actors: The Freedom of Puppets
Christophe Damour

5. Design at Work: Renoir’s Costume Dramas of the 1950s
Susan Hayward

1.2. CRITICAL FOCUS ON SELECTED FILMS
   
6. Sur un air de Charleston, Nana, La Petite marchande d’allumettes, Tire au flanc: Renoir and the Ethics of Play
Anne M. Kern

7. La Grande illusion: Sound, Silence and the Displacement of Emotion
Valerie Orpen

8. La Bête humaine: Double Murder at the Station at Le Havre
Olivier Curchod

9. La Règle du jeu: Lies, Truth and Irresolution (A Critical Roundtable)
V.F. Perkins, Chris Faulkner and Martin O’Shaughnessy

10. The River: Beneath the Surface with André Bazin
Prakash Younger

PART II – RENOIR: THE WIDER VIEW

2.1. RENOIR’S FILMMAKING AND THE ARTS

11. Seeing With His Own Eyes: Renoir and Photography
Alastair Phillips

12. Popular Songs in Renoir’s Films of the 1930s
Kelley Conway

13. Renoir and the Popular Theatre of his Time
Geneviève Sellier

14. Theatricality and Spectacle in La Règle du jeu, Le Carrosse d’or and Elena et les hommes 
Thomas Elsaesser

15. French Cancan: A Song and Dance About Women
Ginette Vincendeau

16. Social Roles/Political Responsibilities: the Evolving Figure of the Artist in Jean Renoir’s Films, 1928-1939
Charles Musser

2.2. RENOIR’S PLACE IN THE CRITICAL CANON

17. Seeing through Renoir, Seen through Bazin
Dudley Andrew

18. Henri Agel’s Cinema of Contemplation: Renoir and Philosophy
Sarah Cooper

19. Jean Renoir and the French Communist Party: the Grand Disillusion
Laurent Marie

20. ‘Better Than a Masterpiece’: Revisiting the Reception of La Règle du jeu
Claude Gauteur

21. Renoir and the French New Wave
Richard Neupert

22. Renoir Between the Public, the Professors and the Polls 
Ian Christie
 
PART III – RENOIR, A NATIONAL AND A TRANS-NATIONAL FIGURE

3.1. RENOIR, THE CHRONICLER OF FRENCH SOCIETY

23. Renoir under the Popular Front: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Paradoxes of Engagement
Brett Bowles

24. The Performance of History in La Marseillaise
Tom Brown

25. Toni, A Regional Melodrama of Failed Masculinity
Keith Reader

26. La Règle du jeu: a Document of French Everyday Life
Christopher Faulkner

27. Renoir’s Jews in Context
Maureen Turim

3.2. RENOIR, THE INTERNATIONAL FIGURE

28. Jean Renoir’s War
Julian Jackson

29. Interconnected Sites of Struggle: Re-Situating Renoir’s Career in Hollywood
Elizabeth Vitanza

30. The Southerner: Touching Relationships
Edward Gallafent

31. The Woman on the Beach: Renoir’s Dark Lady
Jean-Loup Bourget

32. Remaking Renoir in Hollywood
Lucy Mazdon

PART IV – APPENDICES

Filmography

Bibliography

Index