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Jean Renoir |
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Director / Screenwriter /
Actor / Producer |
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1894 - 1979 |
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Born September 15,
Paris, France |
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Key
Production Countries: France, USA |
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Key Genres: Drama,
Comedy Drama, Romantic Drama,
Comedy of Manners, Crime Drama, Psychological Drama, War Drama,
Period Film, Romance, Melodrama, Short Film |
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Key
Collaborators: Marguerite
Renoir (Editor), Joseph
Kosma (Composer), Eugene Lourie (Production Designer), Claude
Renoir (Cinematographer/Producer), Jean Bachelet (Cinematographer),
Julien Carette (Leading Character Player), Jenny Helia (Character
Player), Jean Gabin (Leading Player), Pierre Renoir (Leading Player), Pierre Braunberger (Producer) |
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Highly
Recommended: La
Chienne (1931)*,
Partie de campagne
(1936)*, The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936)*,
La Bête humaine (1938)*, Rules of the Game (1939)*, The River (1951)* |
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Recommended: Charleston Parade (1927), Boudu
Saved from Drowning (1932)*, La Grande illusion (1937)*, This Land is Mine (1943), The Southerner
(1945), The Golden Coach (1952)*, French Cancan (1955)*,
The Testament of Dr.
Cordelier (1959), The Elusive Corporal (1962) |
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Worth a Look: The
Little Match Girl (1928), La Nuit du carrefour (1932), Madame Bovary
(1934), Toni (1935)*, La Marseillaise (1938), Diary of a Chambermaid
(1945), The Woman on the Beach (1947)#, Paris Does Strange Things
(1956), Picnic on the Grass (1959) |
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* Listed in TSPDT's
1,000 Greatest Films
section; #
Listed in TSPDT's
250 Quintessential Noir Films
section. |
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Links:
[
Amazon
] [
IMDB ] [
TCMDB ] [
All-Movie
Guide ] [
Senses
of Cinema: Great Directors ] [
Film Reference ]
[
Renoir
Biography ] [
Strictly
Film School ] [
Bright Lights
Film Journal Article ] [
Wikipedia ] [
Films de France
Profile ] [
Classic Film and Television
Home Page ] [
jeanRenoir.com ] [
Boston Phoenix Article (1998) ] [
GreenCine Article (2007)
] [
EuroScreenwriters Article (From 1979) ] |
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Books: [
Jean
Renoir (Bazin) ] [
Jean
Renoir (French Film Directors) ] [
My
Life and My Films ] [
Jean
Renoir: Projections of Paradise ] [
Jean
Renoir: Interviews ] [
Renoir on Renoir: Interviews, Essays, and Remarks
] [
Jean Renoir: The Complete Films ] |
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"Renoir's
ouevre stands as a monument and a model of
cinematography. By summoning the conditions of illusion and
artifice of film, it rises out of the massive production of
poetic realism of the 1930s in France. He develops a style that
is the very tenor of a vehicle studying social contradiction.
The films implicitly theorize the limits that cinema confronts
in any narrative or documentary depiction of our world." -
Tom
Conley (International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers,
1991)
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"Renoir
asks us to see the variety and muddle of life without settling
for one interpretation. He is the greatest of all directors; he
justifies cinema. But he shrugs off the weight of
"masterpieces" or "definitive statements".
The impossibility of grasping final solutions or perfect works
is his "rule"." -
David
Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2002)
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"His
signature is discernible in the generous, unsentimental
humanity, the assured evocation of milieu, an awareness of the
transience of life and love, and a subtle realism whose
deceptive simplicity is derived from unobtrusive artifice: deep
focus, long takes, complex camera movements, elegant framing,
and a wealth of telling incidental detail...He was
unquestionably a master of cinema; the apparent effortlessness
of his art only confirms his genius." -
Geoff
Andrew (The Director's Vision, 1999) |
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"The world's greatest
film-maker." -
François Truffaut |
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"One of the great directors, Renoir combined a humanist view of
the world with the use of deep focus shots, which enabled
everything in a frame to be seen with clarity, thus enlarging
the possibilities for action in each shot. This gave his films a
richness of emotion and style few can match." -
William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978) |
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"A
director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it
into pieces and makes it again." -
Jean Renoir |
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Please
note that the rating given for this director (see top-right) is based
only on the films we have seen (listed above). Films by this director
that we haven't seen include Whirlpool of Fate (1925), Nana (1926), The
Lower Depths (1936), Swamp Water (1941), and The Little Theatre of Jean
Renoir (1969). |
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