Word: renoirs
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...eleven years ahead of its time. In a decade of pictures made in studios, it as shot entirely on location in the Midi, using local inhabitants as well as professional actors. I feels completely true to the environment and lives of immigrant French peasants. As Richard Roud puts it, "Renoir's ambition was that the public should imagine that an invisible camera had filmed various phases of a Crime passionel without the human beings involved in the action having noticed...
...Renoir frequently used locations (Boudu Sauvé des Eaux, Swamp Water) in preference to his studio sets. Even in his studio pictures (La Marseillaise, This Land is Mine) he commands a realistic acting style which is wholly faithful to the milieu depicted...
...introduced by camera investigations of the buildings: a wedding, by pans up and down the outside was of the church, only then cutting inside to show the people involved; a house wherein a shooting has just occurred is introduced by a track into the front door. This prominence that Renoir gives to the land--both dramatically (opening and closing scenes with shots of the land) and visually (making human figures a part of the total land-patten)--establishes the land as constant through his characters' changes, the factor determining their actions...
...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...