Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 8 No. 9, March 2004
Martin O'Shaughnessy
Rethinking Renoir: A Reply to Michael Abecassis
Michael
Abecassis 'Le Petit Theatre de
Renoir: Martin O'Shaughnessy's _Jean Renoir_' _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 8
no. 8, March 2004 http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8-2004/n8abecassis Thanks to
_Film-Philosophy_ for the opportunity to respond to Michael
Abecassis's review of my book on Renoir, and for the
invitation to suggest how my thinking on Renoir might have
moved forward since I wrote my book about five years ago
now. I'll begin with the latter. I'm increasingly
fascinated -- predictably probably -- by the Renoir films of
the Popular Front era; about how they still seem to speak to
us with tremendous political urgency, and also about how the
key films -- the breathtakingly great, astonishingly
intelligent ones (_Le Crime de Monsieur Lange_, _La Grande
Illusion_, _La Regle du jeu_) -- are still ill-served by
depoliticising humanist readings, formalist accounts, or
tired but indefatigable auteurism. What particularly
interests me, and what I moved towards in the book reviewed
here without developing it sufficiently, is the complex
spatio-temporality of the films, their mise-en-scenes not
simply of social conflict within history but of competing
historical possibilities within the same, shifting story
frame. The usual film-historical, formalist celebration of
Renoir's use of deep space does a disservice to his work by
artificially separating space and time and by treating both
as essentially empty dimensions that the film moves through.
What interests me is treating space and time as co-emergent
and intrinsically inseparable products of complex narrative
processes that cannot be reduced to mise-en-scene or
montage, story space or time, but depend also on a complex
spatio-temporal web embedded in locations, cultural
references, dialogue, character dynamics, and artefacts.
What makes such an
engagement with spatio-temporality so compelling when
applied to Renoir's Popular Front films is that the period
is one of such intense historical struggle that the shape of
history itself is clearly undecidable, torn as it is between
the disorder and injustice of contemporary capitalism, the
deep historical regression of fascism, and the fragile but
real hope of a socialist alternative. The achievement of
Renoir, and of the astonishingly talented actors,
technicians, and script-writers he worked with in the later
1930s, is to have made this sense of competing possibilities
tangible on screen, thus confronting the French people with
their responsibility to shape their future and to set the
meaning of their past, later (in _La Regle du jeu_) making
them face up to their abnegation of historical
responsibility by showing a society destructively torn
between decaying repetition and the fascist temptation.
An example that may put
some flesh on these bones might be found in _La Grande
Illusion_, when the prisoners are moved from their first
easy-going prison camp to a grim, forbidding fortress. The
latter is at once a mediaeval castle and a glimpse into an
authoritarian (fascist) future. Its past-futureness
confronts the characters (and the film's spectators) with
the collapse of the established coordinates of their
history. The escape that follows, with its affirmation of
liberty and equality, is an intervention in the
spatio-temporal fabric of the story itself, a restarting of
the radical French revolutionary project stalled in the mire
of competing nationalisms and social inequalities. Renoir's
composition in deep space is simultaneously, and
breathtakingly, composition in deep time. The latter --
perhaps because we prefer not to see the possibility to give
a sense and shape to our history -- has (with the partial
exception of Deleuze) been ignored. Anyone interested in how
my book begins to develop (but not enough) this line of
thinking can read some key extracts on the excellent Renoir
website set up my Steve Masters: <http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/jeanrenoir>. There is no space here to
explain why the films might speak so powerfully to us now,
so I will simply gesture towards the shape that a more
satisfactory argument might follow. Firstly, _Le Crime de
Monsieur Lange_: the film begins in a grey courtyard, a site
of oppression, exploitation, and social separation, yet
shows how resources for an alternative social project can be
found by bringing together individual resilience, memories
of happier days, collective solidarities, the creative
imagination, and the knowledges and utopian elements
contained within popular culture. While those political
films that placed us in front of already rounded
oppositional projects may now seem hopelessly inappropriate
in the present conjuncture, _Le Crime_'s lesson in the
creative assembly of fragments seems to speak to us with an
unstilled urgency. _La Grande Illusion_ can of course be
appropriated for humanist anti-fascism or for facile
post-modern celebration of difference, but that is to empty
it of its real radicalism. Its own anti-fascism is tied
inseparably to internationalist egalitarianism and it is
this radical coming together that should still speak to us
now. Current anti-fascism can too easily turn into an alibi
of the very status quo that nourishes the fascism it
opposes. _La Regle du jeu_ for a long time seemed to me to
be too perfectly expressive of the situation of France and
Europe on the brink of war to be connected usefully to the
present. Now, I feel that it speaks to us at least as
compellingly as the other two films. The 1930s was, as I
have noted, a time when the capitalist status quo competed
with fascist regression and socialist hopes (real or
illusory). _La Regle du jeu_ shows a world where the third
possibility has been erased (the chateau location suggests
that, at a deep level, the French revolution has been lost).
Is this not substantially the world we find ourselves in
now, one suspended, following the defeat of the
twentieth-century left, somewhere between the chaotic,
tragic-comic repetition of capitalism's unequal but
apparently tolerant same, and the different authoritarian
regressions that wait in the wings? Now to the review. First,
thanks to Michael Abecassis for the generally nice things he
says and the broad picture of the book that he gives.
Second, what I might want to disagree with. If I have a
problem with the review, it is that it doesn't draw a sharp
enough line between an account of my book and the writer's
own perfectly legitimate thoughts on Renoir, so I sometimes
end up appearing to say things that I didn't say and might
in fact disagree with strongly. In order of appearance,
these are: 1. I seem to have set out
to identify the underlying continuities of Renoir's work. I
didn't. My Renoir is one of sharp discontinuities arising
both from technological shifts (the coming of sound),
industrial contexts (the shift from France to Hollywood and
back), and broader socio-historical dynamics (the rise of
fascism, the coming of war, the postwar triumph of
consumerism). I found nothing at the ideological or
stylistic level which would tie the whole output together.
But I did identify periods with strong internal coherence.
2. I don't only read
Renoir's writings as personal documents, although clearly
that aspect is there. I was more interested as seeing them
as productions of self (of a directorial public persona),
firstly in the context of the Popular Front, and later,
under the strong influence of _Cahiers du cinema_, in an
auteurist mould. I was particularly interested in
underlining (its not a radically new insight) how much later
critics used -- still use! -- Renoir's postwar writings to
rewrite his committed films and to produce continuities in
his work. 3. On individual films: I
don't think I said that _Boudu sauve des eaux_ has a near
documentary approach. What is striking about the film is the
mix of studio-shot interiors and Parisian exteriors. The
comments on _Madame Bovary_ are interesting but are not mine
-- I was more interested in the film's combination of
in-depth composition and the repeated presence of strong
framings within the frame: a cinema that had begun to
explore social dynamics through deep space but which set
those dynamics within a rigid social structure. The
astonishing excitement of the Popular Front films is when
that frame begins to shift, when characters walk out of it
and into history (but that is another story!). 4. I did try, as Abecassis
notes, to complement existing left-wing accounts of Renoir
(notably Chris Faulkner's very fine book) by adding a
consideration of nation (and gender) to my analysis of the
politics of the films. I hope I have pointed to some new
distinctions between the films, suggesting for example, how,
from the point of view of gender, _Le Crime de Monsieur
Lange_ is an astonishingly radical film, in sharp contrast
to some of the other works. But I don't think I identified
'an evolution of the backdrop message from radicalism to
nationalism'. The films are courageous political
interventions -- the political is anything but a backdrop.
But also, as I tried to argue, there is no smooth curve in
their political evolution. 5. I didn't say that the
_La Marseillaise_ lacks unity and dramatic thrust. The film
-- like much of Renoir's mature work -- has a stronger
underlying unity than meets the eye. It is working to ground
a progressive revolutionary nationalism in popular
experience while separating it out from regressive variants.
6. Abecassis bundles
different realisms together. I don't. It is, I think, vital
to separate out the committed social realism of Renoir which
shows a society in process and that can be changed, from
French poetic realism with its aestheticisation of the
social and its underlying fatalism. Renoir made one classic
poetic realist film, the astonishing _La Bete humaine_, but
that marked his loss of hope in the Popular Front. It is
very different from the rest of his output from this era.
7. The existentialist
reading of _La Regle du jeu_ is interesting, not least
because it picks up on an account of the film that was
around in France in the postwar period. This is not the way
I see the film (as what I write above clearly shows).
8. I wouldn't endorse the
Bazin/Scherer (Rohmer) account of the purification of
Renoir's style in Hollywood. I am more interested in the
shifts within the Hollywood films, the survival of a
Frontist outlook in those that looked back to France, and a
positive embrace of some regressive American mythology in
some of the others. I try to ground this analysis (which I
think opens up new ways to look at these films) in a
consideration of key conjunctural features: Renoir's exile
status, the wartime context, Hollywood's openness at this
time to a more leftist position. 9. I don't describe _Le
Carrosse d'or_ as realist! I am much more interested in the
rich interplay of light surface and dark undertone in all
these anti-realist, postwar costume dramas. 10. I agree with Abecassis
that I could have talked more about the technical aspects.
But this has already been done very well by a range of
people -- Sesonske and so on. What interests me much more
(as can be seen above) is a connection, at a deep level, of
the formal and the semantic in a way that refuses the
reductivism of formalism and tame incorporation within
standard film histories. Thanks to Michael
Abecassis for his review and to _Film-Philosophy_ for this
space. Nottingham
Trent University,
England References Faulkner, C., _The Social
Cinema of Jean Renoir_ (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1986). Sesonske, A., _Jean
Renoir: The French Films, 1924-1939_ (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1980). Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2004 Martin O'Shaughnessy,
'Rethinking Renoir: A Reply to Michael Abecassis',
_Film-Philosophy_, vol. 8 no. 9, March 2004
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8-2004/n9oshaughnessy>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
salon, and receive the journal articles via email as they
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