Here, I attempt to explore the work and ideas of the greatest, and undoubtedly most accomplished filmmaker of the 20th century -
“According to Bazin, Renoir’s long takes, in depth shooting and mobile camera overrode the fragmentary effects of montage and the constraining effects of the frame to communicate the underlying unity of the real world.” (Powrie, pg 44, 2006)
Every Friday, eager filmgoers will address the multitude of trade papers that dictate which films are worth their attention. The reviewers themselves range in age and interest, and I am sure that even their geographically political beliefs influence their opinions. Personal Taste is the term that gets passed around, much like the bill and change that is given to your ticket clerk. The fate of the reader’s potential admission fee, or more importantly, the 90 minutes of their time, is ultimately arbited by someone else’s personal taste. Film theorists have taken a hard line approach to developing a stable criterion of judgment for analyzing a film’s quality since the first two decades of the 20th century. Most notably, the work of Andre Bazin (1918 – 1958) and his Cahiers Du Cinema alumni have influenced entire movements in film lore, and focused on establishing the simplest spectrum of review; “those who put their faith in image”, and alternatively, “reality”. Bazin purported that reality was the measure in which one could judge a film, wherein a film that depicts a credible representation of reality rather than artificial scenarios and images, is one of true quality. Jean Renoir’s La Regle Du Jeu (1939) introduced a new aesthetic for portraying reality in narrative and film form – This was in drastic opposition to the editing based aesthetic that dominated narrative film at the time. La Regle Du Jeu’s “faith in reality” represents an unparalleled cinematic virtue, whereas succeeding films toying with reality were not able to achieve this level of quality.
The manipulation of a familiar reality into an ordered film environment creates an alternate dimension of experience. In this fashion, even the most banal or tragic scenario can be given a narrative uniformity to the real life events they mirror. We as a modern audience are also drawn to the documentary; this medium affirms our subconscious understanding that the mise en scene in film is apocryphal, or fictive. It is crucial to first examine how contemporary audiences understand realism in film. As a technological medium, film has been able to create fantasmagoric vistas or call on long deceased actors to give an original “digital” performance for years. Photo-realism is a horizon many artists and technicians strive for when creating images from the wildest domains of the imagination. On an audience level, one is always consciously aware that these strikingly well rendered robots and dinosaurs are illusions, yet demands a realism in these figure’s elements. The skin, textures, movements, and light behaviour must mirror reality, despite the viewer subconsciously recognizing the plasticity of the events on screen. Bazin would not argue that elaborate set pieces and cgi are indicative of reality, but I would maintain that a 21st century audience’s relationship to the screen places a greater emphasis on film craft rather than subtle performance or realistic dialogue. Our social environment is one of greater diversity and artistic freedom than earlier eras of filmmaking, where (in the West predominantly) one who is able to afford a laptop, can create media. This growing ease for expression has created a heterogeneous culture, where social demographics clash constantly and “reality” as we know it is filtered through catacombs of news, advertising, and commercial media; ultimately our sense of a uniform reality in Western culture has become diminished and subjective. Because of these factors, it is difficult to assign whether Robert Downey Jr’s style is typical of a realistic performance, despite many actual subcultures enacting such quirkiness as a style. Image and reality in film media have become so drastically mixed in the new century, and as such, lose the balance that La Regle Du Jeu used to create evocative juxtapositions. This is not to say film in general is of lower quality now, quite the contrary; drama and human experience remain familiar and applicable, thus still producing the great movie classics of our time. However the evolution of Bazin’s theories have become so undiscernable in today’s films, that the majestically subtle nature established by Renoir has been transformed permanently.
Jean Renoir (1894 -1979) entered the French avantgarde movement with bluntly impressionistic projects that were driven by his fascination with evolving film form, as he explains; “One of the reasons for the impressionist revolution is the invention of tubes of paint. Before they were invented, paint was sold in little pots… they weren’t very practical. But with the tubes, you could put them in your pocket…you could go outdoors and paint there.” (Renoir,pg 180, 1990) Renoir goes on to relate that this emergence of art aesthetics in cinema should be directly tied to the development of camera technology, as he accounts in his interview anthology, Renoir On Renoir (1990). “This purely technical invention probably determined all the nontechnical stylistic discoveries of impressionism.” (Renoir, pg 180, 1990) It is clear that Renoir was an advocate of “paint”, or the materials used to create film. This appreciation of the artificial components that create the image may seem at odds with capturing the essence of reality, but Bazin reasons, “Realism can only be achieved in one way – through artifice. Every form of aesthetic must necesarily choose between what is worth preserving and what should be discarded.” (Bazin, pg 26, 1948) Renoir approached La Regle Du Jeu as a project that portrayed reality through refining and manipulating the world with the camera as opposed to conveying meaning with editing. As such, long takes are prominent, such as the gameskeeper’s profile tracking shot through the underbrush preceding the hunt. “landscapes serve no purpose on screen… what helps is that they help the actors and director immerse themselves in an atmosphere.” (Renoir,pg 196, 1990) To go further with this, Renoir does not cut to different dramatic points, but incorporates them in single shots. The acrobatic work of the camera is attractive, and above all, filmic. This is most notable in the slapstick movement through Robert de la Chesnaye’s manor, where multiple character scenes of varying tensions are elaborately visited in a staggering single shot. “In his (Renoir’s) films the search after composition in depth is, in effect, a partial replacement of montage by frequent panning shots and entrances. It is based on a respect for the continuity of dramatic space and, of course, it’s duration.” (Bazin, pg 51, 1948) Grandiose tracking shots that call attention to the camera in fact create a dimensionality to the space and a feeling of continuity, as Bazin notes. These factors heighten Regle’s feeling of reality. It is this reason I feel there is a crucial balance, where the staggeringly impressive use of the camera is artificial, yet in turn, builds a credibility and relationship to the world on the screen. We inhabit a physical space and feel the duration of time affect our perception. Renoir’s expressive camera allows us to recognize there are multiple events at play, which continue on without our spectatorship. We understand there are rooms behind closed doors.
France had always been know to produce great innovation in film despite not producing the original technological framework. French influence in regards to the film medium pushed it’s aesthetic beyond the circus attraction into a gestating new art media. “All films, from 1895 with the production of the Lumiere catalogue and that of Georges Melies‘ “Star” films, are made to be projected on screens all over the world.” (Powrie, pg xiv, 2006) Akin to the innovations in Bazin’s analyses of film reality, the Italian Neo Realist movement was keen to establish it’s mark on realism. There is a resentment that is to be found in this school of thought; “Neorealism is more an ontological position than an aesthetic one, that is why the employment of its technical attributes like a recipe do not necessarily produce it.” (Bazin, pg 66, 1951) The drive for “realism” has misplaced the respect for the “artifice” as Bazin mentioned. The slavish devotion to portraying things as they are fosters a resentment of the camera, and thus, film itself. The films produced in the movement are of supreme quality, but the ideology behind the shots exhibit the work of artists who are more disappointed by the technology than reverent. Purposely downplaying the movement of the camera and it’s framing, expresses to me that the world created is less physical and palpable than Renoir’s… De Sica’s Rome is mattes and forgotten lenses, unlike Renoir’s interrogation of his manor’s physical space and conventions. Intriguingly, it was Bazin’s adoptive writers that created the French New Wave, which in many ways rejected and modified his original principals with their own films; “Bazin gave his protege (Francoise Truffaut) a job writing film criticism at Cahiers…To gain a foothold in the bastion of French cinema, Truffaut and his New Wave colleagues had to find a way to make movies.”(Powrie,pg 83, 2006) As such, the urgent measures in which these young auteurs took to make their films produced a far less poetic nature, wherein the reality expressed is harsh, deeply obsessed with it’s own production and loses touch with the sense of complete space Regle maintained. “The French New Wave was iconoclastic and playful, such a new way of doing cinema.” (Powrie, pg 6, 2006)
I appreciate film and how it is made. I see the camera as a device to not only capture objective reality, but angle it and order it. La Regle Du Jeu stood out as a quality film to me because it was in love with it’s own form, where instead of damning the camera, it embraced it. The shots are technically expressive, but give the experience of reality more so than a cerebral recognition of reality prevalent in later film movements that were more ideological than immediately felt. I feel the quality of this film more directly because I experience it, which in effect is the truest manifestation of reality in film. Renoir was asked in Renoir On Renoir, “To get back to The Rules Of The Game: Weren’t you surprised by the poor reception it got?” Critics will continue to judge films, but Renoir created a movie that established a way to judge them.
Citations
Bazin, Andre. What Is Cinema? Vol. 1 & 2. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cook, David. A History Of Narrative Film – Fourth Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Ltd, 2004.
Powrie, Phil. The Cinema Of France. London: Wallflower Press, 2006.
Renoir, Jean. Renoir On Renoir: Interviews, Essays, and Remarks. Trans. Carol Volk. Cambridge: CUP Archive, 1990.
“Jean Renoir” Wikipedia.2009. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. 30 April 2009
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Renoir>
“Andre Bazi” Wikipedia.2009. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. 30 April 2009
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andre_Bazin>
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