Like you, I do not wish this to be a posting on Jean Renoir

Like you, I am alerted to wince these days, when I encounter a passing reference to genius, for dread that the comment will be generically negligent and simply unwashed, a de facto slap in the face which is so characteristic of our post-Reagan culture. There is nothing like an arduous physical convalescence to restore one's belief in pillars - Normandy butter, scorched crusts of pungent San Francisco sourdough, slowly scrambled farm fresh eggs. I cite for you its turbulent model, the dreamer and a face that he had trusted, to signal it is safe to think of Jean Renoir.

Skinnysailors and their Bernese dog may spare us the portrait of Michel Simon from Boudu sauvé des eaux (Boudu Saved from Drowning, 1932) lest it fail to match our memory of this sweetest of Renoir's masterpieces. Hopefully, the 'clumsy' jests of Simon's scourging bête-noir of the bourgeoisie will suggest themselves in analogous mirth and warmth.

I "screened" a scrubbed facsimile of this film the other night, right here on this little laptop, completely stripped of those clicks and pops and the humane gathering with others beneath a 16mm projector of Janus reels which would so disturb the cinéaste of our time; and I must say, the perfectly buffed textures of the medium did not detract from the vividness of the underlying art. Whether new viewers will respond to Renoir's genius for modeling the clay of pure poetry in imagery, I can't guess, but they will see the work revealed more clearly than I ever did.

We don't do bouquets for guys in Virginia, confined to surgery's penalty box for weeks on end. One can get by surprisingly well on a well-stocked library of French cinema and French cuisine; and in case any reader might be fancying a new bloodstream, may I commend the endless antidotes of the Larousse Gastronomique, now in a new edition, which stood me so well through a collegiate sophomore year, when the appetites and pains of incarceration converge in classic concentration. I had ample time, just now, to ransack these sublime temptations of France in perfect peace, quite as much as Boudu trashed the household of the Lestingois, to its betterment through play.

Ultimately, the reason we don't wish this posting to be about Jean Renoir is that there is probably nothing less polite than a patient who has exploited his agonies to his advantage. I recommend the wearing of any restored sense of confidence in the loosest-fitting way, so that when clarifying butter with friends, for example, the presence of mind to make it a crisis will not have been lost. At the same time, the mention of either Renoir conjures, in its very sound, an affront of dangerous awareness, so perhaps it is just as well that our former "pleasure dome" of the cinema has been balkanised into laptop sequestrations. It doesn't mean that one may not heal, I don't suppose. 

And by the same token, to lie patiently, perfecting the invalided posture is only to cultivate a sound defense, against the canard of strengthening oneself in ostracism. It's only natural for society to object if one should be restored by enduring the very bêtise of discomfort it cannot bear to observe; and so only the most asymmetrical of tanlines can be countenanced on one's return. A disorderly T, a baggy speedo are just the things to shape the new complexion as one basks as Boudu did, in the comforts of the floor over the bed, the outdoors over the shelter. Let the hypocrisies of misery work both ways, Renoir proposes genially, and let the night be Friday if it must.

How it can be, as Renoir shows repeatedly in his cinema, that the turbulence of satire can resolve itself as the image of trust, is not a question to detain us from admiring that it is done. But, having begun with it as our model it is only seemly to conclude with statistical confidence in its proof. A handful of Friday evenings stored up in consec-utive deprivation gathers a great pressure upon the odds in favour of burnishing the night's reputation. It may even be, that the natural balance of things will usher remark on Renoir toward us, as if the blush of health might bear his signature in the margin. If nothing else, he is great for the smile.  

Boudu sauvé des eaux
Les Film Sirius, 1932
Jean Renoir, direction
Jean Renoir, screenplay
  with Albert Valentin
René Fauchois, original play
Criterion Collection, 2005©

Suppose it were Friday lxi: whose seat are we saving?

Most people associate the stages of their lives with events - it was the year Lindbergh flew the Atlantic .. The year of the Exhibition .. The year the talkies came in. But my calendar is related to friends. Every period of my life has been dominated by the figure of a friend .. 

When, after Marquitta, in which he played the part of a taxi driver, Pierre Champagne at last realised his ambition to own a Bugatti .. his first thought was to take me out for a trial spin. He drove at full speed along one of the roads through the forest of Fontainebleau. 

A car in front of us had had 

an oil leakage and left a 

slippery patch behind it. The 

Bugatti went out of control 

on this patch of oil and spun 

round, flinging us both out. 

Pierre landed on a heap of 

stones and was killed instant-

ly. I landed on a grassy bank 

and woke up to find myself in 

a van filled with game. It be-

longed to two poachers who were 

going to sell their bag in Par-

is, at Les Halles. In going out 

of their way to take me to hos-

pital they risked being arrested. 

I am profoundly grateful to them. 

Moreover, I owe them the idea 

for my stage play, Orvet.

The memoirs of Jean Renoir are as fine a companion between two covers as almost any one can know from life. Even if he were not the maker of at least two or three of the motion pictures lying forever closest to our heart, this autobiography of a creative personality's close friendships is a stunning, open-hearted staple of our kind of gentleman's library, a wonderful document on the power of the most creative influence we know. In preparing to present an entry or two on his insuperable work in the mode of Beaumarchais, The Rules of the Game, one could not fail to be drawn to comparisons with French literature on the intricate and vital moral consensuses which held together that culture's aristocracy, under the strains of the paradoxically rigid limitations its existence imposed upon the exercise of self-expression, and the agreed fictions with which it indulged their inevitable violation. Renoir has reduced that syntax to possibly the most haunting cri de coeur ever to leap forth from the dark - Gentlemen, there has been a deplorable accident.

Renoir departs from cynicism and has the power to take his characters with him. We observe his gift for acute closeness with people through any carapace of class as the solvent we feel, ourselves, in watching this movie tread its breakwater of plot development. I've been put in mind as much of Turgenev's A Sportsman's Notebook as I have, of Radiguet's Count d'Orgel's Ball, in accounting for the deeper feeling beneath the erotic desperation Renoir presents to us, as if the subcutaneous tendernesses of this film speak to greater intimacy in feudal distinctions than is possible in a mater-ialist bourgeoisie; but I think they are a personal vision.


Absorbing this movie in the dated way referenced before, with college friends (the war in southeast Asia competing for our attention on the television down the hall, and in the mail we might get from a family splintered by it), it was terribly easy to recognise improvisations of consensus for discussing our own lives, akin to those of his figures from the late Thirties. Now, cascades of flukes later, cast from one side of the spinning Bugatti of friendly fire, of HIV, of this delusional market bubble or that, instead of the other, The Rules of the Game seems timelessly prescient, substantially because Jean Renoir could be a friend.

Jean Renoir
Ma vie et mes films
op. cit.


La règle du jeu
La Nouvelle Édition Française, 1939©
John McGrath and
  Maureen Teitelbaum, translation
Andrew Sinclair, editor
Classic Film Scripts
Lorrimer Publishing, 1970©


Raymond Radiguet
Le bal du Comte d'Orgel
1924 (op. post.)
Annapaola Cancogni, translation
New York Review Books, 2005©


Ivan Turgenev
A Sportsman's Notebook
1852
Charles Hepburn and
  Natasha Hepburn, translation
Viking, 1950©

Les temps de la Colinière

            There is a
            wonderful poem, attuned to 
            the commonest thing.


            Oddly sorted schoolmates, finding 
            Renoir, reel by reel.

If each person has just 

one story to tell,

The self a Scheherezade 

postponing The End

It's the friend alone, who, 

night after night, listens,

His back to the camera,

his expression now quizzical,

Now encouraging even though,

because he has

A story himself,

he's heard it all before.

Octave: I feel like .. like disappearing down a hole.

The Marquis: And what would that achieve for you?

Octave: Well, it would help me not to see anything any more, not to search any more, for what's good, and what's bad. Because, you see, on this earth, there is one thing which is terrible, and that is that everyone has his own good reasons. ..

The Marquis: Well, I'm going to get dressed. Are you having some breakfast?

And who looks back,

Airily, is a younger self, 

heedless

Of the cost to come, of love's fatal laws

Whose permanent suffering his joy postpones.

Last cup of tea -

though I could sit here forever

Passing the life and times back and forth

Across the table with you, my ideal friend.

i    J.D. McClatchy

     An Essay on Friendship

        [on 'La règle du jeu']
        The Rest of the Way

        In memory of James Merrill

        Knopf, 1992©

     Matthias Lauridsen for van Noten

ii   Jean Renoir, director

      Jean Renoir, script

      La règle du jeu

      ORTF, 1939©

      John McGrath and Maureen Teitelbaum, translation

      Lorrimer Publishing, Ltd., 1970©

iii  An Essay on Friendship, op. cit.

      

And it is always friendly fire

Forgive me.

I would have done the same thing.

French or German .. duty is duty.

Are you in pain?

I would not have believed a bullet in the stomach could hurt so much.

I was aiming at your leg ..

More than fifty yards away, very bad light .. And then I was running ..

Please, no excuses! 

Of us two, it isn't I who should complain the most. I, I'll be finished soon, but you .. haven't finished ..

Not finished dragging out a useless existence.

For a man of the people, it's terrible to die in war. For you and me, it was a good solution.

I have missed it.

Jean Renoir, director

Jean Renoir and

  Charles Spaak, screenplay

La grande illusion

Réalisations d'Art

  Cinématographique, 1937©

Marianne Alexandre and

  Andrew Sinclair, translation

Lorrimer Publishing, Ltd., 1968©

ii  Photo Hedi Slimane

Vigo

A lady, commenting on the ‘roundelay’ posting of July 30th, drew my own attention to an interest we all evidently have in water. Dealt the favour of her perception, I felt spontaneously restored to that feeling for water which I have never seen more vividly celebrated as a flux for human relations than in the cinema of Jean Vigo, with its extravagant vitality, sense of play, sensuality, risk, erotic contingency and progressivism. This last element may sound extraneous, but I would give you the work of Leni Riefenstahl, to compare the effect of an authoritarian rapport with water - long on dominion, short on pleasure in reciprocating pressure. On the first, see Simone Weil’s magnificent Iliad, or The Poem of Force, 1945, on the second, Homer. Of course, we shall have to return to them both in this space.

For a delicate, albeit Sorbonne-educated child of two Andorran anarchists, there can be little greater happiness, one should think, than to be ranked higher for his silent movies in this impromptu "Hydraulic School" of aesthetics, than the writer of the Siegfried Idyll and Tristan. But there he is for me, and for that one word, play, as a revel in buoyancy. (For drier wit in this School, in drawing, I refer us all to the entry of July 28th at a blog likely to be well raided here, soon enough).

Here, in every sense, is where the cinema of France leapt from its blocks at last, as it was simultaneously doing with Jean Renoir - as Vigo insisted that it had to do. We’ve been saying that the cinema is in its infancy for so long that we’ve all turned into old men in the process. (Essay for Brussels journal, Sesame, 12/1932). Vigo worked, as Truffaut has documented, desperately feverishly, but gainfully so, to create images of humane relations as any orphan in the sun would burn to do - to redeem a father’s unlawful death in prison. He died of tuberculosis as completing L'Atalante.

Uncannily, too, the scenes of immersion, frolic, escapade, exertion and physical grace, flashing before one’s eyes from Taris, L’Atalante, and Zéro de Conduite - few enough, as his brief career allowed (1928-34) - put me entirely in mind, as ineluctably as to my first resort, into my second, a man whose debt to Vigo is unconcealed in If.... , his masterpiece.

I wonder what this corollary is, if not implicitly pre-natal, in poetic realism’s equal attachment to water and the act of development. Be that as it may, it’s rather a defining irony that Lindsay Anderson’s movie, which owes so much in humanist passion, surface energy, and fierce execration of the abuse of boys to François Truffaut’s Quatre Cent Coups as well as to Vigo’s Zéro, should have become famous, instead, for censorship battles over the sight of youth as they are in the shower - the very same trepidation of the Pentagon and the Senate of the United States, whose congenital corollary is chronic warfare.

As luck would have it in this amiably roiling cistern of data we call the internet, we have a clip from Anderson’s high-compression motion picture which goes quick to the core of his self-professed debt to Jean Vigo, and to the joy of every boy who ever got thrown into a lake. This clip responds to a diversity of motifs, but they are not compulsorily aggregated (or could we bear Die Meistersinger ?). One thing that cannot be said, is that it fails the test of our Hydraulic School, merely for taking place out of water. The artist imposes no inhumane exclusion or prior restraint. We are free to see as little art as we wish. At Cannes in 1969, If.... won the Grand Prix. Trashings of American youth in a watery land in Asia rose to 48,000.

But no honest rapport with water will linger in the contrary effects of phobia, ignorance, or superstition. “Insolence needs drowning worse than wildfire,” Heraclitus had said, and we all take his dictum on the fluidity of time as a settled law of Physics. There is too much to understand. Of course we’ll return to water here - Kenneth Grahame has already established it, as the sublimest antipode to the restaurant ever to be laid down beside that wild wood. Glancing back at this small image from Vigo, of Taris, “roi de l’eau,” is enough to possess Heraclitus’ defining aperçu forever, in the mode of Ivan Terestchenko’s valedictory monochrome of July 9th. 

Time is a game played beautifully by children.

The sound of healing voices

Would it not isolate the most objectionable aspect of enforced convalescence from corrective surgery, as opposed to a continu-ing ailment, to cite its languour? Authorities in these matters, who warn of depression, may be groping for a clinical term, for a truly tire-some imposition. In any case it becomes difficult to tell them apart.

It isn't so much that we wish to be doing something other than lying still but exercising, changing our dressings but limiting our bathing, adhering to drug protocols but also not relying on them. No, actually, this is pretty full-time fun. It's that our mind gathers focus on what would give it the most peace, short of an outbreak of the empiricism virus in the Tea Party. But there you are. Very sweet voices, peculiarly enough, in imagination as much as expression, come to the table first.

Very sweet voices, which can remark with delight in the rushing of water in the sunshine, the cooling of wineglasses in the flickering shade, the flexing of delicate wings to free, the flash of a tulip after a long interval of rain. These voices do exist, one enjoys being reminded, and they are fundamental to our hunger to be restored to the world.

These voices describe the essential scheme for our recovery, in mode as well as in hunger. A protract-ed persistence of acute inconvenience, we find, is better addressed with a philosophical tolerance than with impatience or disdain. It rained a long time, we are told; but somehow we knew it would come to this.

Is it not telling, that the prisoner's escape in Jean Renoir's La grande illusion is celebrated by his delight in the colour of the eyes in a child of his enemy? This is not an argument, but in that way a note of thanks to some bloggers from France. You and I, seeing this tissue, naturally appreciate its celebration of the growing of things for delight. Its artisanship responds to the uncollectibly capti-vating, and it mattered not for whose house, but for the loving eye.

As I lay reading these blogs, I was drawn back to the film I wanted to praise on the morning of my entry into hospital. In them I read nothing less than what distin-guished The 400 Blows, in the eye of contemporary film-maker Jacques Rivette, its best critic:

here and there, an almost unbearable force results from the constant use of understatement, and the refusal of eloquence, of violence, of explanation, giving each image a pulse, an inner quiver. Rivette summarises these virtues, as we all would, as simplicity, but also as genuinely French. I couldn't say, but I know where healing voices are.

François Truffaut

  and Marcel Moussy

The 400 Blows

David Denby, editor

Jacques Rivette

  Cahiers du Cinéma, #95

  May, 1959

Grove Press, 1969©

i, v        Le style et la matière

ii, vi     Valéry Lorenzo

iii, vii   Elisabeth Baysset

iv          Ivan Terestchenko

   

Saturday commute lxiii: we would, all, have said so

A thing that has unquestionably influenced my develop-

ment as a creator of films is water. I cannot conceive 

of cinema without water. .. Lying on the bottom of the 

skiff with Godefer, with the branches brushing our 

faces, I had a thrill very near to what I feel when 

watching a film which moves me deeply. I know we cannot 

go back upstream, but I am free to relive in my own fa-

shion the sensation of leaves stroking the end of my 

nose. For me that is what a good film is, the caress 

of foliage in a boat with a friend.

The "all" I have in mind were spilled out in clusters on the carpet of a college club library beneath the crackle and whir of a Pathé projector to see a bouncing box of light play images before them, that they would never forget. This was before this text was written, and they'd have said they'd known it all along, because of him.

               

              
                When you get

                to be grateful,

                you don't stop.

                The acquisition of
                gratitude is so
                different now, I
                wonder about its
                longevity, the dur-
                ability of meaning.
              
                How full is grati-
                tude now, how firm,
                how does it fare?

Jean Renoir
Ma vie et mes films
1974
Norman Denny, translation
Atheneum, 1974©


ii  Water study series, Venice
     Lionel André, April, 2012