Here at Rialto Channel the Sunday Rialto Directors night over the last year has shown the works of French New Wave artists Truffaut, Godard and Chabrol. If you’ve been wondering when you’ll be able see the best of Jean Renoir, the “father of the New Wave” - the answer is this month.
Here at Rialto Channel the Sunday Rialto Directors night over the last year has shown the works of French New Wave artists Truffaut, Godard and Chabrol. If you’ve been wondering when you’ll be able see the best of Jean Renoir, the “father of the New Wave” - the answer is this month.
Renoir, the son of impressionist painter Auguste Renoir, is regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. He began his career during the silent era in 1920s France where he made 44 films, before leaving for Los Angeles in 1940 where he continued to influence his peers and generations to come with his distinctive style.
As described by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, Renoir was one of “the first great ‘auteurs’, a cinematic master whose distinctive style always contained a concern for human issues and a reverence for natural beauty”. In a 2008 tribute to Renoir, film critic and historian Peter Bogdanovich made the observation, “Of all the great filmmakers, Renoir is most the humanist poet, the one director who only made pictures about people - not stereotypes, not archetypes, not myths, but real human beings.”
Bogdanovich continued, “No matter which Renoir film - a seemingly ultra-realistic piece like the railroad workers of La Bête Humaine, or an aggressively stylized musical-comedy about show business like French Cancan - the people feel fresh and authentic; they have lived somewhere.”
You can experience this when we premiere Jean Renoir films every Sunday evening at 8.30pm this month, including La Bête Humaine (Sunday 11th August), The Rules of the Game (Sunday 18th August) and French Cancan (Sunday 25th August). The highlight of the month though must be La Grande Illusion re-playing on Friday 9th August.
Released in 1937, La Grande Illusion is a meditation on the collapse of the old order of European civilization. Set during WWI, three officers from different backgrounds are captured by the Germans and do their best to head back to the front.
The film stared Jean Gabin, Erich von Stoheim, Pierre Fresnay and Marcel Dalio, and went on to win Best Foreign Film (New York Film Critics Circle Awards), Best Foreign Film (National Board of Review 1939), Best Overall Artistic Contribution (Venice Biennale 1938) and was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars in 1939.
The US President even had an opinion, Franklin Roosevelt said "every democratic person should see this film”. Released on the eve of WWII, La Grande Illusion was banned in Berlin, Italy and Belgium and, when the Germans occupied, France. Regarded as “Cinematic Public Enemy Number One” by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, the original negative was seized and, according to Roger Ebert in his book The Great Movies, thought destroyed in an Allied air raid in 1942.
Other prints still existed and Renior in 1960 was able to assemble a ‘restored’ version of his film, but it turned out the original hadn’t been destroyed. A Nazi officer and film archivist based in Paris had already sent the original print to Berlin, where it was captured by the Russians and sent to Moscow where it was archived. It wasn’t until the mid-1960s when Russian and Toulouse based archives began exchanging titles that La Grande Illusion was discovered, and it was not properly identified for a further 30 years.
La Grande Illusion was Renoir’s first big international hit, and is found on many ‘best of’ lists. Its influence is also apparent in films such as The Great Escape and Casablanca. When director John Ford saw the film he was so enamored he asked Darryl Zanuck, the head of Twentieth Century-Fox, to buy the film so he could remake it in English. Zanuck’s reply - “Forget it, Jack. You’ll just ruin it.”