Word: renoirs
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...actors closer to the audience. His camera pans and dollies to let them move easily, instead of staying put and obliging them to play within its frame; his compositions are a series of stages on whose multiple playing-areas the actors express their personalities. The informal appearance of Renoir's films, especially those before his American period, consists in this: such clearly formal cinematic means as framing and tracking are incorporated into the playing of a scene instead of signifying the scene's import directly to the audience, as in most film...
...thirties this method created movies which are before anything else triumphs of performance. Bonda Sauve de Eaux (1932), for example, has scarcely a well-matched cut in it, for Renoir uses each new shot as an opportunity to restage his actors, according to the new relationships that have evolved among them. All that carries the drama smoothly from shot to shot is the force of their playing. Each character takes a different acting style (melodramatic heroine, slapstick clown) to an extreme; and the series of comic reversals which their conflicts of style engender becomes a social process so vivid that...
...Lange (1936) and La Marscillaise (1938) are more consistent on a directly formal level, they still depend on acting for their impact and, indeed, are still films about social acting. This becomes transparently clear in La Regle du Jeu (1939) and its kindred masterpieces of the fifties. Throughout Renoir's films all characters' actions are social in nature; scarcely a man performs an action by himself, or for himself; every act is a species of public performance. Even when Michel Simon awakens in La Chienne (1931) and goes to shave, a window behind him reveals the courtyard of his apartment...
...occasion, Cartier-Bresson has strayed from his specialty. In the late 1930s he served briefly as an assistant to the French film director Jean Renoir, and he is now finishing a half-hour television film for CBS on the American South. Video cassettes also interest Cartier-Bresson as a future medium. "One has to be aware of what's going to happen and be ahead," he says. "But at the same time,, one mustn't change one's style. The human being is still there. A baby still takes nine months to come...
...Beatles had any money in the bank according to Lennon, but "people were robbing us and living off us to the tune of £18,000 to £20,000 a week." He also confided that he considers his talents suitable for competition with the likes of Van Gogh, Renoir and Shakespeare. "That's been my hang-up you know?trying to be Shakespeare or whatever it is. Rock just happens to be the medium which I was born into...