Word: renoirs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...OPENING shot of Rules of the Game is one of Renoir's beautiful rough tracks. Starting on a technician tuning dials, it pans down left to electrical cords and follows them up across to an announcer whose voice we hear: "This is Radio Paris at Le Bourget . . ." Ae she moves into the crowd welcoming Andre Jurieu, France's latest aviation hero, the camera follows her. But the clarity of Renoir's usual tracks is gone. In the darkness of the shot only people's faces stand out; its closeness, and its high angle, let little more than the announcer...
...Game affect far more than they clarify. In each the normal rectangular order of human environments, the square corners on which houses are built, is disrupted in favor of a world filled with senseless detail. The aviator has landed complaining that the woman he loves isn't present. Renoir cuts to a radio in her room, following the announcer's voice. The room is bright and elegant, unlike the night-time of the airfield-and full of ornament. Her dressing table overflows with gleaming toilette articles. A mirror atop it reflects her maidservant twice, filling much of the frame with...
...close-up of Jurieu driving in a car, the barest amount of background road visible in the window behind him, pans across the front seat to the close-up face of his friend Octave, grimacing nervously. Renoir cuts to a distant high-angle; the car drives off the road into a ditch. Renoir cuts to a frame three-quarters filled by waving grass: it's impossible to say whether it's a low-angle shot and the characters are about to appear over its edge, or whether he's shooting a hill, or indeed where...
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...