One More from Boudu
Jun 29th, 2008 | By Rick | Category: Great Clips, Jean RenoirGet the Flash Player to see this player.
Here’s one more clip from Jean Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932). Unlike the indoor tracking shot from yesterday’s post, it’s a pan (i.e., the camera remains still and rotates around its vertical axis). It takes place near the beginning of the movie as the homeless Boudu wanders aimlessly along the Left Bank, in front of the used book sellers that line the Seine even today.
The shot’s documentary look was novel for the day. Coupled with Michel Simon’s one-of-a-kind performance, it gives it an absolutely authentic feel. Boudu is there yet not there, as detached from the booksellers’ world as would be a Martian. It serves to illustrate the idea of class-separation that is one of the film’s themes; Boudu, the marginal, the outcast, wandering in the very heart of intellectual, bourgeois Paris. Note the extremely foreshortened, 2-dimensional space produced by the camera’s telephoto lens. It enhances the painterly compositions Renoir learned from his Impressionist father.
Enjoy!
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So I see from this that you’re “evaluating” some new software. I wonder what wonderful, generous, giving humanitarian put you on the path to this new found world of video posting?
Great clips, both of them, and what a rush I get from simple tracking shots (the first clip in the previous post). I don’t think many filmmakers understand today (and I’m not trying to be an old fart complaining about “those movies they make today”, I really don’t think they understand) that simple movement, unrushed can heighten the tension, suspense, emotion, etc of any given scene. It doesn’t need to be a flash cut or one of those “let’s move the camera in on the actor at 137 mph and cgi zoom through their eye-sockets and out the back of their head.”
Erwin Panofsky wrote of how the movement of space in film was its greatest visual advantage, one that couldn’t be replicated by theatre or painting. A moment at which the actor goes from long shot to close-up, or the camera pans or tracks along a room looking out at two windows as they appear to shift from position. Yet when I see flash cuts and speed zooms it feels like someone telling a chef that the great advantage his filet mignon has over other chef’s filets is his bernaise sauce so he decides from now on he will serve up a bite-size portion of filet in a bowl of bernaise sauce. Well, yeah the sauce is great but I want the meat to be the dominant part of the entree and the sauce to complement it. And I really, truly do not feel that many filmmakers today get that, sadly. Movement complements the ideas up there on the screen. It complements that action, the characters and the story but it isn’t nor should it be the action, the characters or the story.
Jonathan, I am like a kid in a candy shop with this new toy. I’m using it to design a seminar in how to read film, so some of those clips might show up here at the Creek now and again.
I’m really interested in how things like shot composition, camera movement, etc., communicates the themes of a particular work. There was nobody better at it than Renoir, and few his equal. He would not understand the quick-cuts and zooms that you mention. For him, his deep focus shots, where action takes place on multiple planes, were leisurely affairs, he wanted you to take your time, to let stuff sink in. In the first clip, that haunting flute music signals a respite from the “action” at several places in the film, so we can think about what we’ve seen, like an entre act from theater (in which Renoir was equally at home).
These elements of style work on you quietly, you may not “get” consciously that the tracking shot in the previous conveys class structure, or that the telephoto shoves Boudu up against the intellectual apparatus of the booksellers, until you think about it, or have it pointed out, but they operate on you subconsciously nevertheless. It’s one reason you can go back to a film like Boudu again and again.
And done.
Well I’m truly hooked now, won’t be long until I consume all I can of Renoir.
I really hope you do put a video up from your seminar, I feel like I learn loads here from just reading the posts but a visual representation would be great.
Another great post. Thanks.
Ib, I think a clip speaks a thousand words, and now that you can have good quality clips — better than the crappy you-tube clips, anyway — to illustrate your points, it’s a real plus. It shows the advantages of this digital medium over print; no matter how evocative a critic’s description is, you can’t embed a video in a newspaper, at least not yet.
you can’t embed a video in a newspaper
Well I can but I’m not saying how. Not to you Rick Olson, you’ll just steal it.
Damn! Busted!
How ’bout sharing the secret of that cold fusion thingy you’ve been working on?
Great clip.
Simply watching Michael Simon walk down the sidewalk, it’s immediately evident how endlessly watchable he was. Of course, credit goes out to Renoir for shooting such a plain moment with such heart.
I love that guy, and I love this movie. Thanks for writing on it. You’ve made me want to put it on.
I agree, Fox . . . Simon’s work here is quite simply stunning; he creates a character that is unique in cinema. I think it’s a hallmark of Renoir’s genius that he could take two immensely popular actors — Simon and Jean Gabin — and produce such remarkable work.