The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (348 page)

As if inextricably affected by that upbringing, Jean married his father’s last model, Catherine Hessling, and was then led to cinema by his desire to photograph her. And out of Auguste’s history of subtly organizing his household so that it was forever prompting him to paint, so Jean’s films are often logical and uncomplicated pretexts for filming people and places that he knew. Perhaps his greatest innovation as a director was in the way of naturalism: building up a little story around, say, Michel Simon, prepared always to bend the plot material to the impulse of actors, the exigencies of situation and mood.

La Chienne, Boudu
, and
Toni
are all insignificant little melodramas, given an unexpected vigor and depth by a sense of momentary occasion in the filming, influenced in part by Abel Gance (as witness the window scenes in
La Roue
and
Partie de Campagne
). The congealing melodramatic cliché of American and German cinema was broken by Renoir’s saying to himself: Boudu throws himself into
this
river on this day and is seen by Lestingois on the other side of
that
street. To embrace the crucial moment, Renoir withdrew his camera from the expressive close-ups of melodrama and showed the events. By doing so, he discarded all the rigidities of genre and allowed his characters to seem like figures in a theatre of life.

Theatricality always fascinated Renoir: he accepted very obvious plots and encouraged flamboyant acting, especially performances of the whole body. What produced the glorious tension of his films was the naturalism of the cinematography, so that during the 1930s there is not an adventure in natural light, camera movement, depth of focus, real location, or the blending of interior and exterior that Renoir did not make.

The Renoir retrospective at London’s National Film Theatre in 1962 amounted to the clearest revelation of the nature of cinema that I have ever had. Again, joy for the medium should not hide Renoir’s melancholy. Nor should we be swayed by his attempt to immerse himself in the populist spirit:
Lange, La Vie Est à Nous
, and
La Marseillaise
(especially) have great things, but the collaborative message is not as convincing as the clear gulfs between friends that are reasserted in
La Grande Illusion
and
La Règle du Jeu
. The heartbreaking spatial relationship between Fresnay and von Stroheim in which duty has to destroy friendship, and the demented fusion of farce and tragedy in
La Règle
, are unrivaled commentaries on the irresolvable confusion of life.

Nor should we underrate Renoir’s own presence in
La Règle
as another victim of that Cupid who has wings so that he may fly away again.
La Règle
is still the most dynamic juxtaposition of moods and feelings that cinema has achieved. Thus the shoot is a slaughter in which we do not lose sympathy for the killers. All of the leading characters are felt from moment to moment as being possessed of nobility and foolishness, wisdom and meanness. And as the château is filmed in such depth, with so many briefly revealed perspectives, we see how helplessly people try to hold on to their own nature, almost urging on tragedy as a way of imposing a solution from outside. Renoir is a master at suggesting the frightening flux in a man’s mind as he has to decide between one course or another, and at showing how action is sometimes taken haphazardly simply to evade that abyss.

La Règle
is a comedy of manners, a romantic melodrama, an invasion of life by theatre, but also a nod backwards toward
L’Age d’Or
, Buñuel’s scathing view of society made nine years before. The links are sly but provocative. There is Gaston Modot in both, as a man obsessed by a woman; in
La Règle
he is a gamekeeper, the casual assassin of
L’Age d’Or;
there is a social gathering crazily interrupted, and Renoir’s Octave remembers a conductor, perhaps the one in
L’Age d’Or
who was unbearably moved by Wagner and staggered away through the garden?

Renoir in America is still misunderstood. In one sense, he was clearly lost, bewildered by American production and shy of urban America. But that led to two masterpieces.
The Southerner
is his first excursion into gentle epic, the first poetic generalization of people, the first unflawed resort to a philosophy of endurance. Incidentally, it shows up the dishonesty of so much American “rural” cinema and suggests that Renoir might have been the man to film Faulkner.
The Diary of a Chambermaid
, however, is his darkest film, a harrowing miniature of evil that manages still to be airy, gay, and to be lifted by the prettiness of Paulette Goddard. It returns to the rather whimsical notion of a world that might be shared one day, but it is darkened by Francis Lederer’s villain. Too easy to say that all Renoir’s people have their own reasons, when Lederer stands as a reasonable but utterly malign figure.

Renoir was not a rationalist but an emotionalist. Better to say that all his characters have their own feelings, and it is that shared experience that brings them physically together but that keeps them apart—what
La Règle du Jeu
refers to as “the exchange of two fantasies and the coming together of two epidermises.” That is the true severity of Renoir, the recognition of physical need and emotional incompatibility. Here too, Renoir has helped to define cinema, preeminently the form that shows the confrontation of human exteriors but that leaves the interiors to our imagination.

The reason to rejoice in his work is in the way Renoir came to terms with that truth. After the war, he seems to have faltered and it was five years before he filmed again.
The River
is seldom seen and still referred to critically with great reservations. As if modest actors could sap a film that took so warm a view of people. The river is a potent image for Renoir—remember
Boudu
and
Partie de Campagne
—but, in India, Renoir learned its value as a mystical symbol, of continuity in the face of all local, human tragedy.
The River
is not too interested in people as individuals—which is to show how far Renoir had come from the 1930s—but in their relationship with time and the regenerating creativity of nature. From that eminence, Renoir went on to two films that show life and love as theatrical performances. Again, only distance allows the pain to be observed calmly.
French Cancan
never conceals the hurt that Danglars brings to women, but never doubts the pleasures that his work offers the world. Chronic self-expression is its subject, as it is for Anna Magnani in
The Golden Coach
, and as it has always shown in Renoir’s sympathy for actors, whether Michel Simon’s Boudu or Barrault’s extraordinary Opal/Cordelier. Renoir’s cinema, too, is infectious, and a dictionary should note its supreme influence, most notably on Truffaut and Godard, but still active for anyone who wishes to see.

Renoir asks us to see the variety and muddle of life without settling for one interpretation. He is the greatest of 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.” In
Renoir, My Father
, and in his own autobiography,
My Life and My Films
, Jean clearly adopts his father’s wish to float on life like a cork. That same stream carries Boudu away to freedom, wrinkles with pain at the end of
Partie de Campagne
, overflows and endangers precarious existence in
The Southerner
, and is meaning itself in
The River:

The river runs, the round world spins
Dawn and lamplight, midnight, noon.
Sun follows day, night stars and moon.
The day ends, the end begins.

Alain Resnais
, b. Vannes, France, 1922
1948:
Van Gogh
(d). 1950:
Gauguin
(d);
Guernica
(d). 1953:
Les Statues Meurent Aussi
(codirected with Chris Marker) (d). 1955:
Nuit et Brouillard
(d). 1956:
Toute la Mémoire du Monde
(d). 1957:
Le Mystère de l’Atelier Quinze
(codirected with Marker) (s);
Le Chant du Styrène
(d). 1959:
Hiroshima, Mon Amour
. 1961:
L’Année Dernière à Marienbad/Last Year at Marienbad
. 1963:
Muriel
. 1966:
La Guerre Est Finie
. 1967:
Loin du Vietnam
(codirected with Jean-Luc Godard, Joris Ivens, William Klein, and Claude Lelouch). 1968:
Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime
. 1974:
Stavisky
. 1977:
Providence
. 1980:
Mon Oncle d’Amérique
. 1983:
La Vie Est un Roman
. 1984:
L’Amour à Mort
. 1986:
Mèlo
. 1989:
Je Veux Rentre à la Maison
. 1993:
Smoking; No Smoking
. 1997:
On Connaît la Chanson/Same Old Song
. 2003:
Pas sur la Bouche
. 2006:
Coeurs
. 2009:
Les Herbes Folles
.

Resnais has made seventeen feature films in fifty years, and has confessed sometimes to wondering where a next picture might come from. Is this sparseness the result of an uncompromisingly difficult artistic personality, or does Resnais pursue complexity at the expense of self-expression? It is all very well to claim that Resnais is dedicated to the immense subjects of time and memory, and then adopt his rather pusillanimous defenses of his own films. Those same topics loom very large in, say,
Citizen Kane, Lola Montès
, and
Vertigo
, all of which are rather more humanly engaging than
Muriel
. And when asking whether screen events are real or imaginary, I prefer the erotic wit of
Belle de Jour
to the enervating High Vogue solemnity of
Marienbad
. In short, I have the feeling that Resnais’s seriousness is more elevated than his use of film, and that he has shown himself unable to make a communicative contact with audiences.

That failure is hard to reconcile with his origins, but I would still point to it as one of the several contradictions in his career. Resnais is sometimes presented as a movie-mad child. In his early teens he is reported to have made two 8mm films, one a schoolboy version of
Fantomas
. And in a fascinating interview with Richard Roud he referred to the primitive longing for moving images:

I never dreamed of being a film director when I was young, but when I saw the first Ginger Rogers/Fred Astaire dance numbers (or maybe it was even before, with Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler), I suddenly had a strong, even violent, desire to make films. Those dance numbers had a kind of sensual movement which really took hold of me, and I remember thinking I would like to make films which had the same effect upon people, that I wondered if I could find the equivalent of that exhilaration.

Roud gamely asserted that Resnais’s films did partake of that exhilaration, but one has only to think of the swooping camera of Demy to feel the weight of consideration on Resnais’s traveling shots and to recall his stress on talk.

Resnais originally wanted to be an actor, and he joined IDHEC as a would-be editor, partly to retain contact with the world of actors. He left IDHEC without completing a course and for the first few years after the war made films privately. That suggests independent means and an isolationist mentality. The private works include two fiction films, one of which—
Schema d’une Identification
(45)—had Gérard Philipe in its cast. But the bulk of these films were “visits to” painters, made, Resnais admits, to meet them: thus there are documentaries on Hans Hartung, Max Ernst, Felix Labisse, Lucien Coutard, and others.

These studies of painting pushed him into professional work with a study of Van Gogh, followed by documentaries on Gauguin and Picasso’s
Guernica
. All of these seem to me conventional celebrations of painting. But in the 1950s, Resnais began to produce some intriguing documentaries, most of which were derived from vigorous, literary scripts. The best of these are
Nuit et Brouillard
and
Toute la Mémoire du Monde
, which, I would argue, are among his most compelling films. Their impersonality seems truly a reflection of Resnais and something required by the material. It might be difficult to make a dull film of Auschwitz, but much harder to produce one as judicious as
Nuit et Brouillard
.

Time, clearly, is the structure of that film, while in
Toute la Mémoire
—a film about the Bibliothèque Nationale—Resnais grasped the surrealist futility of archives and made the library a Borges-like image of our obsession with memory. It is worth noting that his grand camera style was inaugurated in these films, and that it worked more happily with landscapes, rows of huts, and bookshelves than in the features where people are all too often posed semblances of human personality, alienated by the awesome puzzles of time and space.

Herein may lie the real direction of Resnais’s intelligence. He has always professed a liking for science fiction, and the cool, methodical enquiry of those two documentaries does have a futuristic quality, like that of a machine unable to respond to narrative or character but immensely intelligent.
Je T’Aime
is his most uncompromising piece of science fiction, enough to make
Marienbad
look equally futuristic, and to remind us that science fiction is often borne on curiously sparse artistic sensibilities: thus Jules Verne is imaginative, but a characterless writer. I would suggest that Resnais’s features have not overcome that sort of imbalance and that his efforts to produce warmth and anecdote have usually pushed him into an oddly cold fever reminiscent of women’s-picture material. All of his features treat romance with a surprising banality, while the most romantic—
La Guerre Est Finie
—looks like an attempt to escape his own nature.