Word: renoirs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...Rules is much more stylized by Renoir's quick cutting Rather than following a few characters for a long time. Renoir cuts away to some other relationship, breaking up his normal realistic exploration of spaces and events. But dramatically Rules still works as a continuous surface of events-personal events more vital and unpredictable than before. Each character's actions express him, not indirectly in mannerisms which type him, but in direct self-assertions. The rapid succession of strong personalities and events is disturbingly confusing...
...they act, without reflecting. The most assertive and idealistic of them is Andre Jurieu, the man who flew the Atlantic for a woman. It's significant for the mood and tendency of Rules that earlier in the depths of his love he talked of suicide-an act few of Renoir's characters consider...