Word: renoir
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...FIFTIES, though, a change in the nature of society commutes their deaths. During his work in America in the forties, Renoir's conception of character and social process became more idealist. The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946) outlines a society after the moral directions of its various members; The Southerner (1945) creates a natural environment whose processes of dormancy and growth Renoir identifies with the sleeping and lovemaking of his heroes. The River (1950) links every living being in the cycle of life and rebirth that fascinates its adolescent heroine. And the heroines of his next three films...
...about with an apparent anarchy whose larger order imposes melancholy on the film, since this order limits them to acting in a social farce instead of letting them express their individual passions freely. The emotions that end Elena rank with the most complex in cinema. for the film develops Renoir's thesis, that all behavior is social-theatrical convention, to its fullest...
...participation in a social spectacle; it transforms this relation into one of sorrowful class distinction. The ending of Elena forces its high-born heroine to adopt the dominant mood of her whole social surrounding, but it denies her a role within it. The inner door-frame, which in early Renoir let privileged heroes pass into the free milieu of the street, here becomes a window that locks the aristocrats into their milieu of greater individuality and privilege...
...Renoir is fully aware of all the theatrical conventions he employs-in this case, the individualist basis of melodrama. Rather than attack them, he uses them to his purposes, often subverting them comically as in Bondu, in Elena sustaining them tragically because they express the class limitations of his protagonists' behavior. The aristocrats are doomed to act in an aristocratic mode; in La Marseillaise they dance minuets while the rebels consolidate their partial victory; the characters of Regle circle as politely as the figures on the Marquis's music boxes. The masses, for their part, behave en masse...
WHERE THE theatricality of the thirties sometimes hampers Renoir's formal consistency, his works of the fifties come full circle by so formalizing the theatrical behavior of his characters that every action fits into the blocking of the totality. In his late work the floating atmosphere of Une Partie de Campagne (1936) disappears; one now sees a world as deliberately framed as any stage, quite devoid of casual camera movements and improvised bits of action...