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'Jean Renoir by Andre Bazin is the best book on the cinema, written by the best critic, about the best director. . . If this beautiful book is unfinished, consider it unfinished in the manner of A Day in the Country, which is to say this it is sufficient to itself and, even in its fragmentary state, the finest portrait of Jean Renoir ever written.' --- Francois Truffaut
List of contents
* Introduction by Franois Truffaut * Andr Bazins Little Beret by Jean Renoir Part One * The Silent Films * The First Talking Films * The Era of the Popular Front * The War Approaches * The French Renoir * Renoir in Hollywood * Renoir Returns * A Pure Masterpiece: The River * Renoir and the Theater * Renoirs Third Period Part Two * Memories by Jean Renoir * The First Version of The Crime of M. Lange * An Early Treatment of Grand Illusion * Before The Rules of the Game: An Interview with Jean Renoir * An Early Scenario for The Rules of the Game
About the author
André Bazin (1918-1958) was a film critic for Le Parisien Libéré, the founder and editor of Cahiers du Cinéma, and director of cultural services at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématiques. Considered a father figure by the filmmakers of the ”new wave” of French cinema, he wrote dozens of important theoretical and critical essays on film, which are collected in the two volumes of What Is Cinema?
Summary
This classic in the literature of cinema represents the convergence of the three leading figures of French film: Jean Renoir, universally considered the greatest French director; André Bazin, the outstanding French film critic and theorist; and François Truffaut, the pioneer of la nouvelle vague. Bazin left this examination of Renoir's films unfinished when he died in 1958; Truffaut collected and edited the essays, and added a comprehensive filmography in which Bazin, Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, and other Cahiers du Cinéma regulars comment on the films. Here are brilliant insights into the whole of Renoir's oeuvre, from the avant-garde fantasy of La Petite Marchande d'Allumettes, through the epic humanism of Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game, to the quiet grace of The River and the profound theatricality of The Golden Coach. Bazin shows why Renoir is the critical figure in the development of cinema since the silent era, and how he went beyond montage to give the art new expressive potential. Renoir's work constitutes one of the most fully and beautifully elaborated visions in contemporary art, and nowhere is this humanistic vision better illuminated than in this book.
