Word: renoirs
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...films of Jean Renoir, a protagonist moves through episodic scenes, his actions steadily becoming a means of intense personal expression. In climactic scenes, characters realize the nature of their commitment to life and are able to voice it: a joyous fusion of purpose and articulation. At the end of This Land Is Mine (1943), the schoolmaster (Charles Laughton) overcomes his cowardice, refuses to collaborate with the Nazis that have occupied his country, and expresses his conviction in a long speech to the townspeople. As he speaks, the light from the window gives him a presence he had lacked before...
...dance that ends the film is cross-cut with shots of solitary Danglar, not watching his triumphant opening from the nightclub but listening backstage. He doesn't need to watch the girls perform, for they are an expression of his soul; he lives through them. At the same time, Renoir makes it clear that the Cancan girls are individuals, not simply submissive to Danglar's way of life. Though we initially question the individuality of people who happily exist as part of the order of Danglar's universe. Renoir knows that commitment to life on a huge scale...
...Renoir's Jeckyll and Hyde, The Testament of Doctor Cordelier (1960) is also about a progression toward joy through the liberation inherent in total self-expression. But unlike the heroes in most Renoir films, Dr.Cordelier(Jean-Louis Barrault) goes about it incorrectly and fails dismally. Cordelier, inhibited and afraid, his sexual neuroses damaging his medical career, effects the classic Stevensonian chemical transformation and becomes hideous Monsieur Opale, a sadistic savage who cannot resist kicking the crutches out from under a cripple, or wrenching the baby from any passing mother. Predictably, Opale's appearances become progressively vicious during the first...
...never lets the celebration sink into earthiness. The movie's like a Greek myth where the protagonists are not garden-variety nymphs--they're Olympic deities. The director of photography, Claude Renoir, maintains the splendor. When Miss Fonda and McEnery make love within glass walls, he catches their undulating yellow reflection. When they make love in a grotto, he touches the French greenery with junglelike lushness. He creates out of Vadim's always bizarre locations (waterfall, soccer match, duck pond, crumbling villa, go-go costume party) a continuous paradise. The movie seems all grass and gold...
...together; in La Notte, Giovanni and Lidia decide not to separate although they know their marriage will never be successful; Red Desert ends with Giuliana's realization that she must not commit suicide even if her life is filled with neurotic unhappiness. Unlike the films of Rosselini, Hitchcock, and Renoir, which follow characters in a state of emotional or spiritual crisis through a therapeutic chain of events, Antonioni's films are rarely concerned with major personal development or change. Instead, Antonioni fully reveals the nature of his character's dilemma, and then brings that character to a kind of stasis...