Renoir | Coosa Creek Cinema

An Auteur on Auteurs

By Rick, on September 1st, 2008 |

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 [...]

Short Take: French Cancan

By Rick, on July 1st, 2008 |

In 1939, The Rules of the Game was such a failure with the French public that they threw chairs at the screen and set newspapers alight in the theaters. It wasn’t much more popular with critics, and in 1940, director Jean Renoir fled Paris to make films abroad. He ended up in — [...]

One More from Boudu

By Rick, on June 29th, 2008 |

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

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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 [...]

The Art of the Tracking Shot: Boudu Saved from Drowning

By Rick, on June 28th, 2008 |

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

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s1.addParam(“allowscriptaccess”,”always”);
s1.addParam(“wmode”,”opaque”);
s1.addVariable(“id”,”n1″);
s1.addVariable(“controlbar”,”bottom”);
s1.addVariable(“height”,”280″);
s1.addVariable(“playlist”,”none”);
s1.addVariable(“width”,”400″);
s1.addVariable(“autostart”,”false”);
s1.addVariable(“bufferlength”,”1″);
s1.addVariable(“displayclick”,”play”);
s1.addVariable(“icons”,”true”);
s1.addVariable(“linktarget”,”_blank”);
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s1.addVariable(“quality”,”true”);
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s1.addVariable(“aboutlink”,”http://www.longtailvideo.com/players/”);
s1.addVariable(“file”,”http://coosacreek.org/mambo/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/boudu-tracking-shot.flv”);
s1.write(“video1″);

Those who’ve read this blog before (and you know who you are!) will know that I’ve made a case for Jean Renoir being perhaps the greatest director of all time. As Peter Bogdanovich has noted, during the 1930s he made a [...]

La Bête Humaine

By Rick, on May 22nd, 2008 |

What can I say about Jean Renoir? In my humble opinion, he is perhaps the best that ever was, if you discount, Kurosawa or Fellini or Bergman or . . . ok, ok, so I’m not ready to pronounce him the greatest, but based on his output before 1940, he’d have to be [...]