Jean Renoir

El cineasta Jean Renoir (París, 15 de septiembre de 1894 -Beverly Hills, 12 de febrero de 1979) fue hijo y vivió activamente los tiempos de metamorfosis que caracterizaron las postrimerías del siglo XIX y los inicios del XX. En este sentido, su obra es célebre por ser un elocuente testigo de un sentir común que se sabía y arrojaba voluntariamente a un proceso de quiebra y de reconfiguración.

Studies of pre-existing music in narrative cinema often focus on a
single film, composer or director. The approach here adopts a wider
perspective, placing a specific musical repertoire – baroque music – in
the context of its reception to explore its mobilisation in post-war
cinema. It shows how various revivals have shaped musical fashion, and
how cinema has drawn on resultant popularity and in turn contributed
to it. Close analyses of various films raise issues of baroque musical style
and form to question why eighteenth-century music remains an
exception to dominant film-music discourses. Account is taken of
changing modern performance practice and its manifestation in
cinema, particularly in the biopic. This question of the re-imagining of
baroque repertoire leads to consideration of pastiches and parodies to
which cinema has been particularly drawn, and subsequently to the role
that neo-baroque music has played in more recent films.

El presente artículo recorre diferentes proyectos específicos elaborados para la televisión por cineastas trabajando en la órbita de alguna de sus fuentes de origen: teatro en Renoir, novela realista en Pialat, televisualidad en Lynch, y oralidad en Welles. Los específicos de la duración, la repetición o la serialidad, más otras coordenadas afines a la televisión como la simultaneidad, la intimidad y el alcance popular del medio, han convertido a la televisión en un territorio de infinitas posibilidades a explorar a partir de asumir una cierta pobreza de la imagen, esbozada ya en los trabajos televisivos de esos cuatro cineastas.

Desde su aparición en 1971, 'El mundo visto' de Stanley Cavell ha marcado una pauta en los estudios sobre cine al elevarlo a la altura de la filosofía y ha supuesto un desafío para la propia filosofía de Cavell, enfrentada al escándalo del escepticismo con la mirada de un experimentador cinemático.

Rarely has an event defined a national era so significantly as did the case of the falsely accused and imprisoned French/Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus in 1894.  Shadows of the dark influence of anti-Semitism fueled pre-war French national identity, disgracing the army and dividing the National Assembly.  What was a domestic issue for France the 1890s erupted into international scandal when Émile Zola published his open letter to President Faure in L’Aurore in 1898 condemning the miscarriage of justice by the Army and politicians. Resolved in 1906 with Dreyfus’ exoneration and restoration to rank, those eight years of public debate deeply divided France before and throughout the Great War.
Early French and later international filmmakers, sought to narrate the breakdown of French state and civil society through a national lens and against the social and political imprint left by the Affair.  Such prospective forms the interconnected structures of three unique yet distinctly different discourses on the traditional war film: Abel Gance’s sweeping epic J’Accuse (1919), Jean Renoir’s emotive La Grande Illusion (1937) and decades later, Stanley Kubrick’s ethical dilemma Paths of Glory (1957).
In the dialogues that Gance, Renoir and Kubrick strived to initiate through their films, each would agree with sentiments expressed by former French President Chirac during the centennial commemorations of Dreyfus’ vindication in 2006.  Chirac praised Dreyfus’ rehabilitation as a rejection of anti-Semitism and a victory for human rights, concluding that the fight against the dark forces of intolerance is never definitively won.  We must remain vigilant.

O texto irá abordar o conceito de mise-en-scène, conforme desenvolvido na França nos anos 50, realçando sua dimensão para a análise do cinema realista. Será abordado artigo de Jacques Aumont sobre direção de ator e espaço cênico em Jean Renoir e Jacques Rivette. Como contraponto, abordaremos o pensamento do crítico Michel Mourlet, buscando determinar sua atração, na proposta de mise-en-scène, pelo ponto cego da imagem cinematográfica que carrega intensidade.

Whether infiltrating philosophy, media studies, literature, culture, or politics, psychoanalytic theory leaves no academic stone unturned. Although considered passé by the sciences, and sophistic from the vantage of analytic philosophy, psychoanalysis continually provokes, prods, and presents a thorn in the side of many academic disciplines. Despite having been partially eclipsed by the legacies inherited from Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, psychoanalysis has gained traction in recent decades under the auspices of Slavoj Žižek, Joan Copjec, and Alain Badiou, and can be thought of as undergoing yet another renaissance today; although luminaries of the American philosophical tradition such as Noam Chomsky have long maintained that Jacques Lacan was, "an amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan," psychoanalytic theory -the Lacanian vein in particular -is perhaps more influential today than ever before. Todd McGowan's Psychoanalytic 1 Film Theory and "The Rules of the Game" offers a refreshing counterpoint to these and other hasty dismissals of psychoanalytic theory, providing a much-needed catalogue of the crucial concepts of psychoanalytic thought and their application to the study of film.

В статье производится обзор и анализ экранизаций пьесы М. Горького «На дне» в мировом кинематографе. Описывается история попыток самого писателя поставить пьесу в кино в 1920-е гг., а также анализируются художественные особенности киносценария М. Горького «По пути на дно» и использование мотивов этого сценария в последующих опытах кинематографа. Рассматриваются экранные версии пьесы, созданные в России и Советском Союзе, в Германии, Франции, Венгрии, Японии и Китае от начала ХХ в. до 2000-х гг. В статье охарактеризованы фильмы А.О. Дранкова, П.И. Чардынина, А. Деэши, М. Мурата, Ж. Ренуара, Х. Цуолина, А. Куросава, Ю.Ю. Карасика, В.К. Котта. Обращение к разным по художественной задаче и эстетической реализации кинофильмам позволяет выделить универсальные компоненты пьесы, увидеть, как происходила трансформация сюжета, проблематики, мотивной структуры пьесы в интерпретации режиссеров разных стран и эпох. В статье прослеживается, каким образом авторская экранизация может способствовать расширению и углублению смыслов литературного произведения для читателей и зрителей других поколений и культур. В приложении приводится наиболее полная фильмография экранизаций пьесы М. Горького «На дне».

In this paper, I will try to demonstrate, through the analysis of several films realized between 1920 and 2000 and of a few significant essays from important film theorists, that a phenomenology of movement and space tacitly appears in films, as cinema is the art of motion on screen -and so of intersubjectivity par excellence. Moreover, I shall try to show that an ontological conception of the chiasm between the Visible and the Invisible (Merleau-Ponty) and of the world as that "something else" that is simultaneously present and absent in every apparition (Patočka), in cinema corresponds to the "présence in absentia" (Bergala) of the off-screen on the screen, that is to say to the opening up of off-screen space by means of eyeline match and by characters exiting and entering the frame. I will finally claim that the use of sequence shot (or long take), of depth of field and of specific camera movements allows to preserve the continuity of reality, and gives the impression that the film is a perceptual experience that happens within reality's space-time continuum.

Confronté à des questions relatives à l’organisation de la production  cinématographique puis à la nécessité de fuir la France, le cinéaste Jean Renoir a repris à son compte, en privé mais aussi en public, les pires stéréotypes antisémites. Comment cet homme éduqué, qui a fait partie comme compagnon de route du PCF de l’aventure du Front Populaire et qui a par ailleurs promu toute sa vie des opinions internationalistes, sociales et humanistes a pu se compromettre à un moment crucial de l’histoire, de septembre 1939 à décembre 1940 ? Et surtout : comment mettre en perspective cette attitude avec le philosémitisme affiché par La Grande Illusion et La Règle du jeu ?

This article is part of a broader research project on the reception of Helen of Troy in cinema. Here, I present an analysis Elena et les hommes, also known by the English title Paris Does Strange Things, directed by Jean Renoir. Released in 1956, during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), the film fictionalizes an episode in the life of French General Georges Boulanger (1837-1891), making him one of the suitors of a beautiful Polish princess named Elena Sorokovska. I argue that the French director constructed his protagonist by transplanting to the screen literary material related to the version of Helen of Troy found in Euripides' Helen, a work that is also often interpreted as presenting a pacifist perspective.

Volume: Reception Estudies/Nuntius Antiquus. https://periodicos.ufmg.br/index.php/nuntius_antiquus/issue/view/1794

Esta pesquisa investiga o cinema realizado por Alberto Cavalcanti, sua herança e a presença de traços conceituais e estéticos de sua obra na cinematografia italiana do pós-guerra. Existem duas características centrais que indicam similaridades entre o cinema realizado por Cavalcanti e o Neorrealismo: a priori, os aspectos sociais e poéticos intensos de seu trabalho, principalmente em sua fase francesa, em filmes como Rien que les heures (1926) e, mais tarde, mais explicitamente no cinema documental inglês em filmes como Coalface (1935). E a posteriori, o fato de Cavalcanti romper com as fronteiras entre documentário e ficção, desde de Rien que les heures e , sobretudo, na sua fase na General Post Office Film Unit. A partir dessas premissas, será possível afirmar a existência das raízes do cinema moderno, historicamente creditadas ao Neorrealismo Italiano.

The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la putain,1973) is a landmark film in french cinema history. Jean Eustache's lengthy and verbose masterpiece reflects post-1968 turmoil, most of all the feminism impetus. However, Alexandre, the main male character, seems to ignore the rise of the MLF (the French Women's Lib) and the debates regarding birth control and abortion. Ruthlessly torn between two women, Marie and Véronika, he would rather return to Marcel Proust 'irregularities of the earth' sophisticated dandyism than commit himself to debates and controversies about women's rights. But this willful blindness doesn't sound hollow at all : it is the very sign that the survival of male chauvinism is the central topic of the film and its time.

The interest of the Spanish speaking readers on the writings of philosopher Stanley Cavell has been generally belated. This is evidenced by the years –more than forty– that have passed until a Spanish translation of his most influential book on film has been published: ‘The World Viewed’ (El mundo visto), originally published in 1971 and enlarged, with significant additions, eight years later. The recent passing of Cavell in June 2018 appears in this context as a reproach against the delay and, in any case, as an invitation to revisit one of his fundamental books. But before raising the hand in favor of ‘The World Viewed’, it is compulsory to warn the reader that he is facing a book that may be deemed original for many reasons. A great part of this originality lies in its condition of being a founding oeuvre: the debt of Cavell’s reflections to thinkers of film such as André Bazin, James Agee or Robert Warshow, among others, does not prevent us from considering his book as the opening of a conversation –concerning the possibility of thinking and writing about films “with the same seriousness that any work of art deserves”– which lasts to this day. In this sense, this book invokes an already existing conversation but, above all, invites us to start a new one.

But he was the greatest innovator too. He wanted systematically to use his hands and his feet as if every single hand, every single foot and every single finger were all independent and separate instruments. He tried all possibilities: feet alone for the organ, left hand alone for the piano, right hand only for the piano, and of course the full organ and the two hands on the piano. This gives a music that is necessarily multi-rhythmic, multi-phonic and many other explosions of the sort. His music then is cubist since it looks at one musical objects from all possible angles and brings together without merging them these various angles we are supposed to hear together, at once, and yet all separate. This is what I call cubist music, a lot beyond impressionistic music though his music is superbly and impressively expressive.

1- CHARLES VALENTIN ALKAN – ALBERT FRANTZ – GRANDE SONATE, LES QUATRES ÂGES – TROIS GRANDES ETUDES
GRANDE SONATE – LES QUATRE ÂGES
TROIS GRANDES ÉTUDES

2- CHARLES VALENTIN ALKAN – ESQUISSES – LAURENT MARTIN

3- CHARLES VALENTIN ALKAN – PRELUDES – LAURENT MARTIN

4- CHARLES VALENTIN ALKAN – VINCENZO MALTEMPO – GRANDE SONATE « LES QUATRE AGES », SYMPHONIE POUR PIANO SOLO, TROIS GRANDES ETUDES (NUMERO 3)

5- CHARLES VAN LENTIN ALKAN – MARC ANDRÉ HAMELIN – CONCERTO FOR SOLO PIANO – TROISIÈME RECUEIL DE CHANTS

6- CHARLES VALENTIN ALKAN – ORGAN WORKS/MUSIC VOLUME 1 – KEVIN BOWYER – ORGAN OF BLACKBURN CATHEDRAL

7- CHARLES VALENTIN ALKAN – ORGAN WORKS/MUSIC VOLUME 2 – KEVIN BOWYER – ORGAN OF BLACKBURN CATHEDRAL

8- CHARLES VALENTIN ALKAN (1813-1888) – THE RAILWAY, PRELUDES, ETUDES, ESQUISSES AND OTHERS – LAURENT MARTIN – BERNARD RINGEISSEN

La guerra es una regularidad histórica, una constante de la experiencia general de la humanidad, y su sendero luenguísimo, como muestran la batalla de los arqueros y los piquetes de ejecución neolíticos, pintados en los abrigos la cueva Remigia y de Les Dogues en el Maestrazgo (España) hacia finales del V milenio a. C., probablemente las representaciones de violencia intraespecífica humana más antiguas e inequívocas de la historia natural del homo sapiens...

The focus of my research is the “secret perdu” or “lost secret” of François Truffaut’s cinema, to wit, the means by which Truffaut engaged with silent cinema and how it greatly influenced his oeuvre. This study is important since no other in existence focuses solely on this area of research and it provides an addition to the relatively small canon of academic literature on Truffaut in English. My research methods included: sourcing affirmative writing on Truffaut and silent cinema; isolating key words related to silent cinema, and further investigating their meaning to Truffaut and his work; and finally, watching a diverse range of visual material concerning Truffaut and silent cinema. My findings indicate that the success of Truffaut in his personal quest for “le secret perdu” was predicated on the help of a range of people who shared his passion for the silent era. Finally, it remains to be said that no single definition of le secret perdu exists, or, rather, if it ever did, it has gone to the grave with Truffaut. This leads me to suggest that we should be talking about secret(s) perdu(s) (plural), and that, ultimately, this subject remains open for further exploration.

In addition to his cinematographic activities, Jean Renoir was a very prolific and versatile writer, having authored several novels and plays, as well as many articles and autobiographical texts. To this collection of writings one can add his correspondence, which developed during Renoir's exile in the United States during World War II.  This correspondence is readily used as a documentary resource that helps to shed light on the life and career of the filmmaker, but seldom has it been considered in its own right.  It is essential to consider a letter not only as a document but as a discourse, a text.  If on the one hand Renoir's letters reveal information about the making of certain films, the rhetoric at work could help reinterpret the history of cinematographic genesis.
What is at stake in this correspondence turns out to be less genetic than autobiographical. Renoir uses letters to relate the identity upheaval born out of a situation of exile and to demonstrate his artistic identity.  In doing so he shatters the myth of the Author, created in the fifties and to which he had himself publicly contributed.  On an epistolary level, Renoir sees himself as an honest man, in the way it was understood in the classical period.  He uses letters as a way to prove his sociability through the mastery of the art of pleasing. His desire to please incites him to experiment with stances likely to generate his correspondent's assent.  Before using letters as a biographical resource, the reader must put back into perspective this rhetoric of the honest man according to Renoir.

Siento una suerte de camaradería, aunque ya existía el color, en nuestras películas familiares, en esta cinta con un maravilloso blanco y negro, con el chico, a quien acompañamos al aula, podría estar unos cursos por encima de mí, que entonces cursaba quinto de primaria, en el colegio de los Benedictinos de Medellín tan lejos del París, que magistralmente nos va mostrando, en su primer largometraje, con un plano inicial, que nos ubica en una calle cualquiera no precisamente de una ciudad cualquiera, con ese gran emblema de la Ciudad-Luz, la Tour Eiffel al fondo, como punto de fuga central, hacia donde se va nuestra mirada, con una perspectiva estupenda, donde de entrada sabemos, por primera vez, el nombre del actor juvenil: Jean-Pierre Léaud, como protagonista de Los cuatrocientos golpes, en el papel de Antoine Doinel, que lo consagraría, mientras en sus escenarios, Truffaut nos va mostrando un París sencillo y cotidiano, que gira en torno de la gran torre, con un paseo de cámara lento, pero con un fondo musical bellísimo, para, al fin Truffaut ponernos en escena bajo esa maravilla del París industrial, construida por el ingeniero Eiffel e irnos alejando, por un jardín más amable, que las calles, que recorrimos antes.

). Años de búsquedas y extravíos, de sueños colosales y profundos autocuestionamientos. El de Bertolucci es un cine que vive en los reflejos del cine mismo, en el diálogo entre la macrohistoria y las innumerables corrientes de la microhistoria, entre el fastuoso pragmatismo narrativo propio del espectáculo popular (el que llena la mente y los ojos, ya sea de ascendencia verdiana, pucciniana o exquisitamente hollywoodiense) y la noble tradición, abarrotada de sólidas tensiones hermenéuticas, de la modernidad europea. Bertolucci construye grandes relatos para luego cuestionarlos en su misma esencia, fragmentarlos, romperlos en mil pedazos, desautorizarlos en sus frágiles pretensiones de coherencia, interrogarlos desde la distancia. Cine que habla de cine, incluso cuando, como en la «trilogia dell'altrove», la narración -y con ella un destacamento de imponentes maquinarias productivas-parece haberse convertido en un tótem rígido e incuestionable. Con Belleza robada, el regreso de Bertolucci a Italia se produce bajo el magisterio de Jean Renoir (y del binomio Robert Bresson-Jean Cocteau, citados por Jean Marais -otra presencia excepcionalmente significativaen un homenaje enmascarado a

Man kann die These vertreten, dass mit André Bazins Auseinandersetzung mit Jean Renoir eine neue Phase der theoretischen Auseinandersetzung mit dem Film Konkretion gewinnt, nämlich die Phase, in der anstelle der Frage nach der Medienspezifik die Frage nach Autorschaft und Stil in den Vordergrund tritt. Für die klassische Filmtheorie ist ein „filmischer“ Film einer, der dem Medium entspricht, der dessen spezifische Möglichkeiten zum Tragen bringt, aber auch seine Beschränkungen respektiert und produktiv macht. Für Eisenstein etwa ist die Montage das Wesen der Filmkunst. Wenn ein Film die Einstellung als „Zelle“ behandelt, aus deren Aufeinandertreffen mit einer anderen „Zelle“ sich ein stilistischer und semantischer Konflikt ergibt, aus dem ein übergeordnetes Konzept entsteht, dann ist er filmisch, d.h. dem Medium gerecht. Für Kracauer wiederum ist ein „filmischer“ Film einer, der die äußere Wirklichkeit errettet, der darauf verzichtet, ganz Kunstwerk sein zu wollen und seine Gegenstände nach Maßgabe ihrer Affinität mit dem Medium auswählt. Für Bazin hingegen ist der Schlüssel zu dem, was verdient „filmisch“ genannt zu werden, der Stil eines Regisseurs, der in seinem Werk zur Entfaltung, was das Kino ausmacht (Regisseurinnen kommen in seinem Kanon nicht vor; das Wesen des Films bleibt so gesehen eine Männersache). Wie für Henri Langlois, den Gründer der Cinémathèque française, der sein Sammlungspolitik nach diesem Prinzip ausrichtete, ist „Kino“ nicht eine Institution oder ein Medium mit spezifischen Potentialen und Limitationen, sondern ein Ensemble von Werken, die jeweils eigene Facetten von dem realisieren, was Film sein kann. Die kunstphilosophische Frage nach der Spezifik des Mediums lässt sich nicht in Absehung von der Frage nach Autorschaft und Stil beantworten.
Dieser Perspektiven- und nicht zu sagen Paradigmenwechsel, der in Bazins Auseinandersetzung mit Renoir Gestalt gewinnt, hat erhebliche, wenn auch nicht zwingend von Bazin so intendierte Konsequenzen: Er schafft eine wichtige Grundlage für die Etablierung der Filmwissenschaft. Der Nachweis der Existenz kanonischer Autoren und Werke und die Koppelung der ursprünglichen Frage der Filmtheorie nach der Medienspezifik des Films an die Analyse eines solchen Kanons macht die theoretische und kritische Auseinandersetzung mit dem Film kompatibel mit den leitenden Annahmen der Nationalphilologien und ermöglicht damit die Eingliederung der Filmwissenschaft in den Fächerkanon der Universität.

Conversion to sound at the close of the 1920s ushered in a decadelong period of French film production that standard accounts by Alan Williams and Colin Crisp cast as all but unparalleled in aesthetic impact and thematic scope. Despite chronic underfunding and structural disarray in an industry that never fully rebounded after the Great War, French audiences enjoyed a robust domestic culture of stars, screenwriters, and directors whose concern for richly detailed narratives and moody "atmospherics" (Andrew) laid the foundations for the classic French cinema. Key to an understanding of this period that saw René Clair, Jean Renoir, and Julien Duvivier rise to international prominence alongside-or as part of-a robust, left-of-center documentary practice, argues Margaret C. Flinn in this cogent, well researched study, is the relationship between film and its sister art, architecture. Bringing into tension the urban poetry of Sous les toits de Paris, Boudu sauvé des eaux or L'Atalante, and several documentary depictions of the builder's craft, Flinn aims to disclose an "architecture of social being" (2) proper to France's "Hollow Years" (Eugen Weber, qtd. in Flinn 3). The author describes this "social architecture" as an interaction between cinema's "literal construction of place" through shooting on sets or on location, on the one hand, and the "metaphorical ways" in which film form constructs its narrative contents and representations on the other (2). As arts that are produced collectively and experienced collectively, cinema and architecture would present analogous fields for critical reflection on incipient "social truths" (9) underlying the socio-political imaginary. Rather than recount film history in broad strokes, the author privileges clustered close readings, the better to ascertain shared "locational" qualities through which realist fictions and documentaries acquired cultural currency with audiences of the day. That public was itself increasingly concentrated in, and shaped by, urban centers. One consequence, though perhaps not a necessary one, is that The Social Architecture of French Cinema deals almost exclusively with filmic representations of the city, most prominently the places and spaces of Paris. This limitation, Flinn contends, reflects a "locational bias" (3) noted by Crisp: just minutes away from the studios lay a "dense repository of historical sites" (5) whose readability was all but a given. This held not only for monuments like Notre-Dame de Paris or the Eiffel Tower but also for the eponymous marginal space of Georges Lacombe's La Zone (1929) or the suburban watering hole (gu

We think of The Golden Coach as director Jean Renoir’s film, but an interview with the film’s producer, Prince Francesco Alliata, coordinated with documents from Renoir’s archives at UCLA and in Paris and with French bank records for international co-productions, open new vistas, including a prehistory involving Roberto Rossellini, Ingrid Bergman, Anna Magnani and Luchino Visconti, the creative implementation of regulations for French-Italian co-productions in the post-WWII era, the complications of mounting a production using Technicolor when the nearest Technicolor lab was eight hours away by airplane in London, and visionary financial planning that led to making two sure-fire swashbucklers with the same sets and crew to keep the production financially viable.  I was looking for an answer to my long-standing question:  why was it that the first film Jean Renoir made in Europe after WWII – a French-Italian co-production – was shot in Italy and not in France?

Não sei como desenhar o menino. Sei que é impossível desenhá -lo a carvão, pois até o bico de pena mancha o papel para além da finíssima linha de extrema atualidade em que ele vive. Um dia o domesticaremos em humano, e poderemos desenhá -lo.

M. Lange, up to the point of this entr’acte had carefully constructed a diegetic space under established principles of ‘panopticism’. The apparatus had arranged its position as ‘overseer’ of the diegetic space, locating both a central pivot for inspection (the centre of the courtyard) as well as constructing the relationship between ‘cells’ and between the cells and this central pivot (rooms in the court). The rupture in spatial logic through the direct address may seem haphazard or confusing, but I would like to suggest that it is a testament to the forward-thinking and highly-intuitive Jean Renoir as a stylistic master. In fact, the direct address is employed aptly in recognition of a critical limitation in Benthamite conceptions of panopticism – with elements of mobility present, the gazer must also become the gazed-upon in controlling and constructing the space.

This is part of our special feature on European Culture and the Moving Image. Vsevolod Pudovkin's The End of St. Petersburg (1927) and Jean Renoir's La Marseillaise (1938) are beautifully filmed and timeless stories that continue to hold the attention of the viewer almost a century after they were made. They also offer credible interpretations of two great European Revolutions: Russia in 1917 and France in 1789-1794. In doing so, the films illustrate some of the momentous developments of their own time, including the emergence of the Communist model of modernization, the rise of fascism, and the shifting of the European revolutionary tradition from France to Russia. Incorporating universalist master narratives from a European perspective, these films provide a persuasive take on Europe's history of revolutions. The films Considered side-by-side, Petersburg and Marseillaise have much to say about how the revolutionary process evolved from local grievance into global models. Interestingly, it is not clear that the directors Pudovkin and Renoir were especially aware of the other's work. The End of St. Petersburg was released during the tenth anniversary celebration of the October

Read at the conference “Film as Film Today: On the Criticism and Theory
of V. F. Perkins,” Warwick University, September 4-5, 2018.

"While reading the various tributes to V. F. Perkins' life and work collected on Warwick's website, I was especially struck by a line in Adrian Martin's.... [which] reaffirmed what I had long felt to be a central aspect of all Perkins' writing: the unspoken concept of fictional character. What a character is, remains to be seen; yet the work it performs is in some ways clear and obvious. Characters give to film a certain moral force. We look at a scene not of hominids but characters, who live and love and act out their passions. And more: for the force of a character gives shape to its story, justifies what happens as the result of human action. It even helps to organize the details of an image, from the pertinence of backgrounds to the aptness of a framing. In this paper I wish to use Perkins' work as an occasion for rethinking the concept of character: a concept so commonly used by us all as to seem not a concept, but a datum or given."

email: sethwatter@gmail.com

Ich hatte seit langem ein innerliches Interesse an Jean Renoir, vielleicht kam es aus der Liebe zu Nouvelle Vague ich weiß schon nicht mehr. Komischerweise ist es aber so geschehen, dass ich nur einen Film von ihm gesehen habe, " Die große Illusion ". Ich wusste auch schon seit 15 Jahren, dass es bei Jean Renoir den Film " Das Frühstück im Grünen " gibt – meine damalige Freundin sagte mir manchmal, dass ich dem Hauptheld ähnlich bin. Ich habe es mir gemerkt. Ich wusste auch, dass " Das Frühstück im Grünen " nach einem Gemälde von Eduard Manet genannt wurde und diese Frage, warum der Film nach dem Gemälde genannt ist, hat mich seit langem berührt. Als ich die Beschreibung des Seminars gelesen habe, das erste, was mir eingefallen ist, war diese Frage. Dieses Essay war für mich eine gute Gelegenheit, auf diese Frage zu antworten versuchen und auch mir die Filme anzuschauen und etwas zu lesen, was ich seit sehr langem wollte. Der erste Gedanke kommt aus dem Sujet und liegt auf der Oberfläche. Wie ein Jazz-Musiker improvisiert Jean Renoir über das Thema, das ebenfalls dem Gemälde Manets zugrunde liegt und das Manet seinerseits auch von seinen Vorgängern übernommen hat. Dieses Thema kann man als " Zurück zur Natur " formulieren, obwohl die Idee des Sujets eher sinnlich als gedanklich ergreifbar ist. Zwei Männer und zwei Frauen im Wald, die Männer und eine Frau sitzen im Vordergrund und unterhalten sich, die Frau ist ganz nackt, die Männer sind hingegen völlig angezogen. Die zweite Frau in Unterkleidung steht etwas weiter bis zum Knie in einem Bach. Männer und Frauen auf dem Land. Ein spürbares Gefühl der Intimität und des Friedens. Das Sujet des Gemäldes Manets kann man oft in den Gemälden von früheren Meistern treffen, wie zum Beispiel in " Ländliches Konzert " von Giorgione / Tizian oder später von Watteau. Im Zentrum des Sujets des Films von Jean Renoir liegt auch ein Frühstück auf dem Land, das sich mit einer Liebesaffäre zwischen den Hauptprotagonisten – einem von allem Lebendigen und Natürlichen geschlossenen Professor und einem lebhaften Mädchen vom Land – endet. Dieses Kontakt, diese Affäre passiert nicht von sich selbst, sondern durch die Einmischung von einem Satyr, der als eine doppelte Figur von Mensch und Ziegenbock im Film realisiert ist, und führt zur dramatischen Veränderung des Lebens vom Professor. Alle Komponenten der Geschichte: die befreiende Natur, Liebesaffäre,

Le regard-caméra est souvent considéré comme tout à la fois un « point d'incandescence » qui ouvre au seul hors-champ qui ne peut devenir champ, à savoir la salle qui fait face à l'écran, et la « transgression d'un interdit » dans la mesure où il porte atteinte au bon fonctionnement de la représentation en renvoyant à l'énonciation du film. Pourtant il est possible de dépasser cette logique d'infraction / effraction en adoptant une perspective non plus énonciative, mais plastique : si l'on considère que le quatrième mur est transparent, ne doit-on pas plutôt affirmer que le regard-caméra vient, non pas le trouer, mais l'obstruer, l'empêcher d'être transparent en mettant en évidence négativement la surface plane de l'image ? Nous tenterons de résoudre cette ambiguïté à partir d'exemples puisés dans l'oeuvre de Renoir. Si Partie de campagne contient assurément l'un des plus célèbres regards-caméra, on remarque que cette figure est présente tout au long de sa carrière, des badauds de Boudu sauvé des eaux jusqu'au regard intentionnellement frontal de Renoir lui-même comme présentateur de deux de ses films les plus tardifs. Si cette figure est récurrente, c'est parce que dans la continuité d'un théâtre brechtien qui cherche à abattre le quatrième mur, elle semble permettre à Renoir d'inviter à la réflexion. Mais comment évoquer par le langage de l'analyse l'opacification de l'espace de l'image par le regard-caméra renoirien ? Doit-on l'élucider en y voyant la marque du désir de filmage de Renoir ou tenter de restituer l'opacité en elle-même, sans céder à la tentation herméneutique, en se contentant de relever la silencieuse intensité de l’énergie qui affleure dans le regard-caméra ? N’est-il pas possible de dépasser l’opacité pour déceler dans le regard-caméra de personnages désenchantés une fiction d’image, un moyen tout à la fois de fantasmer et désenchanter l’image elle-même ?sans céder à la tentation herméneutique, en se contentant de relever la silencieuse intensité de l’énergie qui affleure dans le regard-caméra ? N’est-il pas possible de dépasser l’opacité pour déceler dans le regard-caméra de personnages désenchantés une fiction d’image, un moyen tout à la fois de fantasmer et désenchanter l’image elle-même ?sans céder à la tentation herméneutique, en se contentant de relever la silencieuse intensité de l’énergie qui affleure dans le regard-caméra ? N’est-il pas possible de dépasser l’opacité pour déceler dans le regard-caméra de personnages désenchantés une fiction d’image, un moyen tout à la fois de fantasmer et désenchanter l’image elle-même ?