In Which We Bathe In The Shadows Of The Masters

The Great Jean Renoir

by ALEX CARNEVALE

There is a special and essential cachet attached to unfinished books. Despite their incomplete nature, the tomes naturally have an affinity with puzzles or codes, and because of this the texts themselves are often subject to more than one reading. Also because they are not whole, other individuals feel more assertive about adding or subtracting writing from the original, under the supposition that they are putting together the work the way the author imagined. It is this way with Andre Bazin's seemingly innocent 1971 appreciation of his favorite filmmaker, Jean Renoir.

Even Truffaut's introduction to the volume he edited completely obfuscates the book itself. He writes,

No one should expect me to introduce this book with caution, detachment or equanimity. Andre Bazin and Jean Renoir have meant too much for me to be able to speak of them dispassionately. Thus it is quite natural that I should feel that Jean Renoir by Andre Bazin is the best book on the cinema, written by best critic, about the best director.

Andre Bazin, whose health deteriorated year after year, found the strength to look at films and to comment on them until his last day. The day before his death he wrote one of his best essays — the long analysis of The Crime of M. Lange — having watched the film on television from his bed.

Renoir's work excited Bazin more than any other. He was working on this study of his favorite director when he died. His fragmentary manuscript has been reconstructed and completed by his friends with the assistance of his wife, Janine Bazin.

I am responsible for the final organization of the work, for its division into ten chapters approximating the chronological development of Renoir's work. Obviously Bazin would have done it differently if he had had time. I think he intended to devote a chapter to the themes treated by Renoir, another to his work with actors, another to the adaptation of novels.

In one of his last letters, Bazin wrote me, "I am circling around Renoir by reading the life of Augustus, the novels of Zola: La Bete Humaine and Nana, Maupassant... I will eventually have to approach him more directly but I am now at a point where I know either too much or not enough. Too much to be satisfied with approximations, not yet enough to fill in all the variables of his equations."

I am not far from thinking that the work of Jean Renoir is the work of an infallible filmmaker. To be less extravagant, I will say that Renoir's work has always been guided by a philosophy of life which expresses itself with the aid of something much like a trade secret: sympathy.

Before Bazin's book even begins, Jean Renoir weighs in with a foreword of his own:

The more I travel through life, the more I am convinced that masks are proliferating. I have difficulty finding a woman whose face looks as it really is. Our age is a triumph of make-up. And not only for faces, but more important, for the mind as well.

The modern world is founded on the ever increasing production of material goods. One must keep producing or die. But this process is like the labor of Sisyphus. Forgetting Lavoisier's dictum, "In nature nothing is created, nothing is lost; everything is transformed," we convince ourselves that our earthly machines will succeed in catching up with eternity. But to maintain the level of production on which our daily bread depends, we must ever renew and expand our enterprises.

It turns out that Renoir does not know Bazin very well, other than by his little French beret. He struggles with the same problem the author of Jean Renoir has — knowing too much or too little about his subject. For the final version of Jean Renoir is as much an obliteration of its subject as a celebration.

Almost every section of Jean Renoir contains the same blandishment about the director. Each section begins, "Renoir is the greatest living French director" or "Renoir is unmatched" in such-and-such field. This kind of repetition would be the first accessory sacrificed if the author had been alive to revise his work; here they serve as eerie reminders that the admiration is rehearsed.

The second part of Jean Renoir amounts to lame defenses of The River and Paris Does Strange Things, two films that for various reasons seem to have offended Bazin's sense of the cinema in some way. He waves aside his own objections and Truffaut replaces them, in the book's third section, with Renoir's own autobiographical reminiscences of his days as a young, inexperienced directors, film treatments, and interviews.

Renoir writes, What I know is that I am beginning to understand how one should work. I know that I am French and that I must work in an absolutely national vein. I know also that in doing this, and only in doing this, can I reach people from other nations and act for international understanding.

I know that the American cinema will collapse because it is no longer American. I know too that we must not spurn the foreigners who come to us with their knowledge and talent; we must absorb them. It is a practice which has served us rather well from Leonardo da Vinci all the way to Picasso. I believe that the cinema is not so much an industry as people would have us believe and that the fat men with their money, their graphs, and green felt tables are going to fall on their faces.

Jean Renoir never made another film after Jean Renoir was published. No one would give him the money.

The best part of Jean Renoir is the book's filmography, an appendix in which Renoir's various projects are taken up by a variety of critics and directors. (Truffaut himself writes the majority of them.) These short discussions of the films innovated the concept of a "recap," for they prove that simply describing a cinematic plot reveals vast differences in character and perception. This is most evident in Truffaut's rundown of The Rules of the Game:

The nine principal characters of The Rules of the Game have a sentimental problem to resolve, and since the film shows them on the eve of a crisis, we will see them behave at their worst. The only sincere person — the pilot Andre Jurieu — awkward in an unfamiliar milieu, unleashes a tragicomedy in which he is the only victim, precisely because he has not followed the rules of the game.

Ludicrous skeletons, the characters of The Rules of the Game, viewed at a critical moment in their decay, forsake the farandole ("It's nice but it's a little old-fashioned") for a danse macabre which assaults the senses. For the ostensible purpose of a party, they are led to disguise themselves, which is to say, to take off their masks. The shadows of the masters and servants mingle and merge in an image of a sybaritic life style which cannot last: man is imperfect, he is a born liar, and besides, "If love is endowed with wings, is it not to flutter?" The Rules of the Game is a profoundly pessimistic film, a bitter and prophetic carnival in which friendship itself is exposed as just another empty game.

The word game is used over 200 times in Truffaut's two page description.

At some point in any hagiography, the idolatry itself becomes absurd. In Jean Renoir, there is no evidence of insincerity on the part of Jean Renoir's admirers. No doubt he was their very favorite, the person whose artistic work can be credited in part for giving birth to their own, whether it be new movies or essay-length film criticism. But there is also a movement just as strong away from what Renoir has accomplished; it equates to the difference between the sympathy they admire in Renoir and true empathy.

Admiration, especially the deeply ingrained kind, eventually distances the ardor from its subject. The act of writing a book in celebration of their cinematic hero feels like filing him away in history. None of their work would exist without Renoir, Bazin & Godard & Truffaut find themselves admitting, and having said this, they have finished with the man, eight years before he died in Beverly Hills. As Eric Rohmer puts it in his review of Renoir's Madame Bovary, "the roads that lead to art and truth are different, and it is the point where they cross which has always fascinated Renoir. Each perspective is true, each is false. They complement one another."   

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"Oxygen" - Marie Fisker & Kira Skov (mp3)

"I Lost Something In The Hills" - Marie Fisker & Kira Skov (mp3)

In Which We Explore Roman Polanski's Soft Spot

This week we look back at the films of Roman Polanski.

Script

by ROMAN POLANSKI

Back in the days when I was at film school — I think it's different today — we made two silent films of two or three minutes each during the first year. In the third year we made a documentary, and in the fourth a fiction film. Through year film we made our diploma project, the length of which was between 300 and 600 metres. Aside from those requirements, we also worked on other films, for example my own short Two Men and a Wardrobe.

Before I made Two Men and a Wardrobe I'd already made The Bike but it was never finished because the lab accidentally sent a reel of the negative to Moscow where the Youth Festival was taking place, and it was never seen again. The film was in color, and I think it would have been quite good. I did make another film in color, When Angels Fall, which was my diploma film.

Although it was never my intention, Two Men and a Wardrobe is rather symbolic. Two men come out of the sea carrying a wardrobe and walk into town. People can't stand the sight of them traipsing around with this thing, especially when they go into cafes or try to get onto a tram. They stick out and because of this provoke hatred wherever they go. I wanted to show the unpleasant things going on in town around the two of them, all these crimes that no one does anything about because everyone's focused on these two strangers. No one says anything to the murderer of the boys who kill the cat, but at the same time they can't tolerate this bizarre trio of two and the wardrobe who end up just walking back into the ocean.

Of course, that's my version. Every audience member will presumably come up with something completely different. But it's a film, not an article in a political journal or newspaper imbued with an ideology or philosophy.

The Fat and the Lean is the story of a man enslaved. The idea is simply that of someone being tormenting and made to endure harsher and harsher suffering, and who is eventually happy to return to his original hardships. It's similar to the story of the man who bangs his head against the wall. When asked why, he explains, "Because it feels so good when I stop."

I don't have any preferences for shooting on location - it depends on the story. I'm inspired by what I find on film sets. With The Fat and the Lean, for example, it was important that the man escaped into a flat landscape because then we can see that the place he's running away from — the town, this oasis — is so far away. The story couldn't take place in a house where all he would have to do is open and close the door.

I need a situation or characters in order to write a screenplay. The most important thing, whether it's cinema or theater, where someone is playing a part (abstract films don't count), is character. The character, even if it's a dog, is always at the center of the story. Dramatic situations are quickly forgotten but characters remain. A good film is always about its characters, whether we're watching Charles Chaplin, James Dean or James Stewart. For a novel, the writer finds an interesting character he wants to describe and only then creates the story around this person.

with Robert Evans

Apparently some authors — and this applies to painters, too — don't know what they're going to do before they start. They just do it. The results can be astounding, but that's not my way of working. For my short films I always outlined the editing very accurately by making storyboards of each shot, though this never stopped me from changing things at the last minute.

Why not make use of whatever arises on location? I didn't plan each shot with as much care for Knife in the Water because it would have been too time-consuming and I couldn't be bothered. Also because it's just not possible to have control over absolutely everything. The story takes place on a tiny yacht and the situations between the characters are limited. I had to approach it much more in terms of improvisation, and it helped to make only basic sketches of the shots.

Not using direct sound in my short films was never a financial consideration. There are some films where music works better than everyday noises. To include every single sound means a film becomes realistic and concrete, leaving nothing to the imagination. It's not a good idea to include both music and sound effects — you have to choose between them. My short films are not at all realistic so I wanted music in them. I asked a musician whom I've known for a long time to compose something that would express the feelings behind the images. If I'd got rid of the music, I would have added only sound effects and the audience would have wondered why the characters never spoke out loud. But if I'd written dialogue, the story would have become uninteresting. When something is expressed too clearly, it can fall flat.

Cinema isn't like chemistry where you can predict that ten grams of one substance, when combined with five grams of another, will give a particular result. With cinema, I do as I please. When I started at film school everyone had their own theories, but today this is precisely what I mistrust more than anything else. You can't make films with theories, except for things like Last Year in Marienbad which is far too serious for me.

Everything in this life has a comic quality on the surface and a tragic quality underneath. Comic episodes often hide supposedly serious incidents. It's the kind of thing that happens at a funeral or even in a concentration camp. I think that in spite of their great suffering, the prisoners laughed from time to time because of these moments of comedy. There's a lot of literature in this vein.

Personally, I can't stand overly serious films Kaneto Shindo's 1961 film The Naked Island. Besides, they aren't very good films. Life like this just doesn't exist, just as you'd never encounter the kinds of situations you see in Last Year at Marienbad.

I worked as an actor — not as an assistant — for Andrzej Wajda, and I think I've been influenced by him. I worked with Andrzej Munk because we were friends and he asked me, but we had different ideas about cinema. Though I'm more like Wajda and I like his work very much, you can hardly say that I imitate him. My films are quite different from his, though his Ashes and Diamonds is my favorite film. Among Polish talents who are unknown here in France is Wojciech Has who made a film called The Art of Loving.

I'm fairly dismissive of the French nouvelle vague directors because they've made so many third rate films that I can't stand. But what's wonderful is that as a movement, it's completely changed French — and maybe even global — film production. I feel that films like Breathless and all the Francois Truffaut films are works of art.

I'm also very fond of American cinema, directors like Orson Welles and Elia Kazan, and films like Baby Doll, A Face in the Crowd, and Viva Zapata!. I wouldn't say I have a favorite director — I like some of a director's films and not others. I also have a soft spot for American silent comedies which I don't think you could call burlesque.

Repulsion

To my mind, Chaplin's films are very realistic. Look at the walk-on actors — they're so natural. I also like Buster Keaton and The World of Harold Lloyd which has instances of pure genius, like when he climbs like an alpinist over a man who's trying to extract his own tooth. Those are things that you dream and read about as a child. A real man climbing over a man twice his height — it's hilarious! You know, I don't laugh very often at the cinema. If I see something I like, I usually just laugh silently. But that Harold Lloyd film had me rolling in fits of laughter.

I have access to everything I need when I'm filming in Poland. Censorship really isn't an issue there. It's only relevant once a film is finished, but is rarely enforced. In order to make a film, a script has to be shown to a commission whose members meet once or twice a week. Each member receives the script two or three weeks before the meeting where they decide if the film can be made. There are eight production groups in Poland and I'm a member of the Kamera Group. When I have an idea, I submit it to my group leader. If he likes it, he'll ask me to develop it into a script that can be presented to the commission. If the commission rejects it, I'm not able to make the film. The commission deals only with feature films — for shorts it's different because they're less expensive and fewer people are involved. My teacher was responsible for my work and gave his approval for the two or three films I made at the Lodz Film Academy. For Mammals I worked with an independent production group that made shorts and that was able to make certain decision without consulting the authorities.

In Poland I've been accused of "individualistic pessimism." Maybe this has something to do with my personality because I'm a mischievous person. But I can't say that every single critic is against me because most of them have helped a lot. Though critics are important in Poland, it's not like here in France where they can influence audiences and seriously affect a film's reception. At home the authorities support the critics, and a film director — or the group to which he belongs — would encounter serious problems, if for example, his film was labeled as reactionary by one or more official newspapers which are the mouthpieces of the party. But it never happens.

May 1963

with Francesca Annis

From a radio interview with Philip Short:

POLANSKI: When I wrote at the start of my autobiography, "For as far back as I can remember, the line between fantasy and reality has been hopelessly blurred," what I meant was I simply didn't have any concept of where the limits of what's possible are. This helped me in my childhood, my youth and even lately to achieve certain aims and goals that I wouldn't be able to reach without the conviction that everything is possible.

Q: There are people who would say that you brought your troubles on yourself.

POLANSKI: Well, I think that's total nonsense. Of course, to a certain extent you are responsible for your style of life, the life you are leading. You have a choice of the amplitude of the events that happen - the higher you get, the harder you fall. I understand there's a gentleman in England who decided to spend the rest of his life in bed. Not because he's ill, it was just his decision. Such people have very little risk of being run over by a car. So if you see it likes this, then yes, I am responsible, because maybe I live a fuller life than other people.

Q: You came to the West, you went to Hollywood, you married and your wife was murdered. How did you cope when that happened? Quite suddenly, out of the blue, everything that you valued was taken away.

POLANSKI: One doesn't know how one copes with things like that. At the moment one just has to make a decision: to go on living or end it all. I know that in writing this book I had great difficulty in recalling those moments. I had no difficulty at all in remembering all kinds of details from my childhood, but wherever I really suffered grief — in particular, this tragedy — I understand now that my mind just tends to reject certain things, to forget them completely. That probably helps me to live with it afterwards.

1984

"Silver Time Machine" - Death in Vegas (mp3)

"Medication" - Death in Vegas (mp3)

"Your Loft My Acid" - Death in Vegas (mp3)

"Black Hole" - Death in Vegas (mp3)

with Walter Matthau on the set of "Pirates"