An Auteur on Auteurs
Sep 1st, 2008 | By Rick | Category: News & Comment, Recent Cinema
Jean Renoir (left) and Carette in "Rules of the Game"
A delightful piece by a favorite director — Jean Renoir — came across my desk here at the Creek (thanks, girish!). Originally written for Cahiers du cinéma in 1952, it has bearing on what we’ve come to call the “auteur theory.” Of course, Renoir doesn’t call it that — the term wouldn’t be coined for a couple of more years — but it speaks to it just the same:
I HAVE BEEN asked about my evolution since LA REGLE DU JEU. I don’t think it is of the slightest importance.
In the first place, no one person makes a film. It is the product of teamwork. There is, naturally, one person who influences the team, and he becomes the animator, the leader, the boss, as workers say.
He goes on to say
Sometimes the writer has been the one, but mostly it has been the director. In Europe a film is, before everything else, the work of its director, and of the technical methods his personality causes him to select and employ.
This all goes to why he finds the notion of his evolution unimportant:
In this world, only results count. And my results are the product not only of my work, but of the work of actors, technicians, and laborers. That is why my evolution, by itself, cannot explain the difference between LA REGLE DU JEU and THE RIVER. It is necessary to study the evolution of all the collaborators who helped me to make these two films, and all the films I made between 1939 and 1949.
Two years later, François Truffaut would write — in the same magazine — the influential “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français” (a certain trend in French cinema) wherein he would coin the term “la politique des Auteurs.”* In this and subsequent articles, he would use Renoir as a prime example of the auteur, famously saying that he would always enjoy a Renoir, but never a film from Jean Delannoy.
My thoughts exactly.
RSS 2.0
I’d been kicking around posting something on that terrific piece but nothing ever materialize. I’m glad you gave it the spotlight.
As much as I like Renoir’s films, I get an extra kick out of watching some of the interviews on the various DVDs. Fascinating guy. He’s a huge reason I’ve fallen so hard for French cinema.
His interviews on those Criterion disks — the ones he did in a series, sitting at his desk in the 60s — are priceless. He seems totally candid, relaxed, and above all human.
I came to French cinema through the New Wave, through Truffaut and Godard, then I saw Renoir, and learned why the New-Wavers revered him.