Word: filming
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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WHAT SUSTAINS the sequence and the film, unifying them and making them continuous, is a sense of violent personal action. Even the most confusing tracks are extremely dynamic, Renoir's cutting presents a rapid series of events whose emotional strength and content vary widely. Renoir cuts into close-up, shoving the character's half-dark faces into ours; he cuts away to hold them in long shot for extended scenes. But always his characters are acting, pushing, crying out, confused but vital...
...constant action Rules is consistent with Renoir's earlier films, constructed not on clearly patterned moral relationships but on the process of events. What unifies his works in the thirties is not the working-out of themes in a film so much as the constant detail-in-motion of social and personal life. All actions tend to equal importance as Renoir gives each character minor mannerisms and gestures to fill each moment. A surface of action gives his films a continuity of realistic events...
...among friends. Each face, as it aligned with the four white horses, was imperceptibly transfigured, lightly brushed with luminous gratitude that the man had passed without discomfort. The procession glided to the comforting music of the horses' regularly failing hoofs on the settled dust. The Sun Shines Bright. A film about the still, silent, unsentimental consolation of a great man's passing, and the reciprocity of smiles urging faces to a communion of regard. The garment of the people's gentle ruth was placed about him. The cortege trailed to higher ground. And the strife of the vanity of melancholy...
...same inventiveness gives the film a flavor unique in Ophuls. In general his heavily decorated background settings and firmly placed foreground objects delimit an empty mid-ground where his characters move. Despite his fluid camera motions this spatial plan often imposes upon his characters, notably in Letter from an Unknown Woman and Lola Montes. The introduction of La Ronde tells us that we are in a studio and, after showing us the artificiality of the lighting and sets, invites us to accept them for their beauty, for the pleasant romance of the drama and its trappings. The first episode continues...
...invites its audience to watch a divertissement. But Anton Walbrook's introduction mentions our "curiosity...people want to see all sides of life." This "curiosity" makes us follow the affairs of Ophuls' characters and sets up the final reversal when the plot comes full circle. Emotions that began the film trivial and simple, and became deeper and more important to the characters, are lost in the proliferation of incidents and characters. Our detachment imperceptibly increases as his characters grow older and more sophisticated, as their relations become games between people who know how to manage each other. We lose...