GreenCine Daily (Free subscription) | 28/09/2008
"For this issue Offscreen casts its eyes on French cinema, both new and old." Featuring editor Donato Totaro on Inside (A l'intérieur) and a "Rebirth of French Horror"; Daniel Garrett on Jean Renoir: Interviews and The Rules of the...
Edward Copeland on Film (Free subscription) | 13/09/2008
By Edward Copeland It is fairly routine for directors to make two (or more) classics in a row, but it still amazes when they do and Jean Renoir did just that the year before he released his masterpiece The Rules of the Game when he directed the World War I drama Grand Illusion. The film opened in the U.S. 70 years ago today and while it's a common occurrence today, Grand Illusion was the first foreign...
Something Old, Nothing New (Free subscription) | 09/09/2008
Don't have time for a long post on this subject, but I was watching Grand Illusion again yesterday, and I noticed that while Jean Renoir pulls off some great technical feats in this movie, he doesn't always save his big camera flourishes for the biggest scenes. Many of the "big" scenes -- the escape, the death of Boildieu -- are shot fairly simply; they're not technically weak, but the camera setups...
Dialogic (Free subscription) | 29/08/2008
I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING by Jean Renoir Films in Review (Originally Published in Cahiers du Cinema 1952) I HAVE BEEN asked about my evolution since LA REGLE DU JEU. I don’t think it is of the slightest importance. In the first place, no one person makes a film. It is the product of teamwork. There is, naturally, one person who influences the team, and he becomes the animator, the leader, the boss, as...
Variety.com (Free subscription) | 09/08/2008
Film Reviews: Echoes of Jean Renoir and Robert Altman ring through the wings of "Sunny Spells," a captivating backstage dramedy set during France's annual Avignon Theater Festival.
Contactmusic Ltd (Free subscription) | 08/08/2008
In Jean Renoir's 1936 Popular Front comedy-drama The Crime of M. Lange, an unsavory publisher takes it on the lam and
Tativille (Free subscription) | 08/08/2008
There are moments in the history of the arts when apparent cataclysm yields sterling results. One such instance is the break-up of the greatest band of the 1980s, The Smiths , after just four LP's. Sprouting from what seemed to be a cultural calamity, Morrissey's solo career may not stand up to The Smith's corpus song-for-song and album-for-album - not even The Beatles arguably can match The Smiths...
Times Online (Free subscription) | 07/08/2008
According to Guillermo Del Toro, the Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir told his son – Jean Renoir, the film-maker – that a truly gifted artist should try to paint the same tree over and over again. “He said that the artist should never move on; he should just go back obsessively,” Del Toro says. “I really believe that you finish your life and no matter what you did or didn’t do, you ended...
Self-Styled Siren (Free subscription) | 23/07/2008
This past weekend the Siren saw a great film: Jean Renoir's Le Crime de Monsieur Lange . Jacques Prévert's witty script is an absolute marvel of construction that compresses a large number of fully drawn characters into a complex narrative, and does so in (get this) 80 minutes. (As John McElwee observed this week in his fine review of the film of the moment , "current films too often start with a bang...
3quarksdaily (Free subscription) | 23/06/2008
Justin E. H. Smith There is a scene from Jean Renoir's magnificient 1939 film, La regle du jeu, in which the members of a decadent French nobility, looking for ways to pass the time at a country estate, decide to...
LIBERTAS (Free subscription) | 05/06/2008
9:45am PST - Southerner, The (1945) - A sharecropper fights the elements to start his own farm. Cast: Zachary Scott, Betty Field, Beulah Bondi. Dir: Jean Renoir. BW-91 mins, TV-G In 1945 Zachary Scott played both the greasy, pencil thin-mustachioed heel in Mildred Pierce and the stoic, simple sharecropper struggling to carve a life for himself and family in [...]
The Politicker (Free subscription) | 27/05/2008
Listing his favorite directors for me one time—among them John Ford and Howard Hawks—Orson Welles concluded: “… And Jean Renoir! I’ve loved him most of all. …” In the 1950s, the Young Turks of the French New Wave—Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Chabrol, etc.—acclaimed Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock but reserved the highest place in their pantheon for Jean Renoir: They called him “the father of the New Wave.”...
Bright Lights After Dark (Free subscription) | 11/05/2008
Issue 60 of Bright Lights Film Journal just went live. from the editor Our bad! features foyer Who Do You Love? Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game Reconsidered Was Le Grande Jean too soft on the aristos? Twenty-One Years in the Midday Sun: Revisiting Roger Ebert's Cannes Here's lookin' at you, Roger articles antechamber What's Your Function? How Movies Are Made You mean you've tried panicking? One...
Cambridge Forecast Group Blog (Free subscription) | 25/04/2008
Figure 1: Cutting jute, West Bengal, c.1900, photograph, 19.4 x 13.4 cm, photographer unknown Figure 2: Loading jute from wharf into export steamer, Calcutta, c.1900, photograph, 18.6 x 13.7 cm, photographer unknown Jean Renoir’s 1951 movie, The River (see first image, above), tells its story through three girls [...]
The New York Observer (Free subscription) | 08/04/2008
Sometime in the late 1960’s, I asked Jean Renoir what he thought of Ernst Lubitsch. He raised his eyebrows and said, enthusiastically, “Lubitsch!? But he invented the modern Hollywood.” By “modern Hollywood,” Renoir meant American movies from about 1924 to the start of the ’60s. Before Lubitsch’s arrival to California from Germany in 1922 (to make a Mary Pickford vehicle called Rosita ), Hollywood...
