Word: renoirs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...LONG TIME I hesitated to bring to the screen a story of the days of the French Revolution," wrote Jean Renoir. "Such a mass of stupidities concerning that period had accumulated, the men of the times and the ideals they held had been so distorted, that I imagined I stood before some sort of heroic mummery, before howling marionettes, decked out in tinsel--and not before men. Now, in studying in Revolution, one must realize that it was made by normal, intelligent, and congenial men. The astonishing thing about these men, perhaps, is their simplicity. I hope that the public...
Every moment of Renoir's La Marseillaise shows the idiosyncracies of the men of the Revolution, the variety of their personalities. From the beginning the plot and the Revolution are advanced by the actions of specific characters. Not only on a script level, but more vitally in Renoir's formal style, so the actions of each man make the Revolution: breathtaking camera tracks sum up their actions into a single forward motion, and the characters are thereby swept into the world of the film, the historical movement that was the French Revolution...
...show people carrying out these close-shot decisions. Given he strength and singleness of their human passions, the long shots have a quality of fatality. This quality accounts for the film's feeling of determinism, of lack of choice, as the drama proceeds. The close shots, which could show Renoir's characters free and in-themselves, express a strength of character which is passion determines their actions in long shot. At the same time, all their actions (however passionate and personal) fit into the land; an finally, the land is not documented, but created by Renoir...
...theirs, he is doomed: his actions will cause his destruction. We see him in the hero of Boudu Sauve des Eaux, in the heroine of Petite Marchande d'Allumettes and of Madame Bovary, in Batala of Le Crime de M. Lange, in the aviator of La Regle du Jeu. Renoir expresses the fixity of the particular film's world stylistically, ending the film with a few shots which show the world unchanged by the death of the maverick. Thus Petite Marchande ends with flat, illusionistic images; Boudu shows Boudu and the Lestingois in their completely separate environments, one free...
...understanding of the milieu (characters and setting) has been amazing enlarged. The end of Toni repeats the first shot and it is frightening. Filled with an incredibly strong feeling of the world of film--a feeling almost of aesthetic passion--we are unable to act. This closed world, Renoir's creation, is fixed...