Jean Renoir was a prolific filmmaker who left an indelible mark on cinema.
As a director, he blended realism and fantasy in groundbreaking films such as Grand Illusion, La Grande Illusion. Throughout his career, he continued to explore the possibilities of film and cinematography. His films are filled with complex characters and settings that often blur the line between our reality and fiction.
Renoir’s films were critically acclaimed, and his influence on cinema can still be seen today. Many filmmakers have been inspired by his unique vision and style. His wisdom is timeless, and he continues to inspire new generations of filmmakers.
In this article, we look at the life and work of Jean Renoir through the wisdom of his films. We invite you to explore how Renoir’s films challenge us to think differently about our world and how we perceive it.
Jean Renoir’s Early Life and...
As a director, he blended realism and fantasy in groundbreaking films such as Grand Illusion, La Grande Illusion. Throughout his career, he continued to explore the possibilities of film and cinematography. His films are filled with complex characters and settings that often blur the line between our reality and fiction.
Renoir’s films were critically acclaimed, and his influence on cinema can still be seen today. Many filmmakers have been inspired by his unique vision and style. His wisdom is timeless, and he continues to inspire new generations of filmmakers.
In this article, we look at the life and work of Jean Renoir through the wisdom of his films. We invite you to explore how Renoir’s films challenge us to think differently about our world and how we perceive it.
Jean Renoir’s Early Life and...
- 3/27/2023
- by Movies Martin Cid Magazine
- Martin Cid Magazine - Movies
Mubi is showing the Werner Herzog retrospective L'absolu, le sublime et la vérité from May 18 - December 22, 2017 in France.After accepting the Le Carrosse d'Or award from the Directors' Fortnight in Cannes, we had the chance to sit down with the master for an expansive conversation concerning his recent works, the ongoing evolution of cinema, and the apocalypse.Special thanks to Ben Simington.
- 6/16/2017
- MUBI
Above: French grande for Volcano (William Dierterle, Italy, 1950). A few weeks ago, I featured the posters of Anna Karina; now it’s the turn of that other legendary Anna... La Magnani or “La Lupa”, the she-wolf, as she was known. Magnani is currently being fêted at Lincoln Center in an all-celluloid retrospective showing 24 of her films that runs through June 1 before traveling to Chicago, San Francisco, Houston and Columbus.Magnani became a star with her powerhouse performance in Rossellini’s Rome, Open City in 1945, and the indelible image of her chasing down the Nazi soldiers who have taken her resistance-hero husband, is one that seems to have informed her persona throughout her career. No sex-kitten, Magnani was the personification of the great actress, and in her posters she is almost always emoting. She is rarely shown smiling (look at her scowling at Ingrid Bergman—in real life she had good...
- 5/21/2016
- MUBI
The River
Written by Rumer Godden and Jean Renoir
Directed by Jean Renoir
France/India/USA, 1951
As the camera looks down upon an ornamental design created from rice powder and water, the narrator (voiced by June Hillman), who speaks throughout the film, welcomes us to the world of The River. This is Bengal, “where the story really happened,” and this is Harriet speaking, reflecting back on her life at a very confusing and significant time. For all intents and purposes, The River is primarily her story. And in this, the film is an intimately personal cinematic memoir. But The River is also something else. In its depiction of the “river people” who inhabit this region of India, the film also takes on an ethnographic appeal, capturing the “flavor” of the setting and its inhabitants.
Guiding this journey is the great French director Jean Renoir, fresh off a tumultuous sojourn in Hollywood,...
Written by Rumer Godden and Jean Renoir
Directed by Jean Renoir
France/India/USA, 1951
As the camera looks down upon an ornamental design created from rice powder and water, the narrator (voiced by June Hillman), who speaks throughout the film, welcomes us to the world of The River. This is Bengal, “where the story really happened,” and this is Harriet speaking, reflecting back on her life at a very confusing and significant time. For all intents and purposes, The River is primarily her story. And in this, the film is an intimately personal cinematic memoir. But The River is also something else. In its depiction of the “river people” who inhabit this region of India, the film also takes on an ethnographic appeal, capturing the “flavor” of the setting and its inhabitants.
Guiding this journey is the great French director Jean Renoir, fresh off a tumultuous sojourn in Hollywood,...
- 5/6/2015
- by Jeremy Carr
- SoundOnSight
Criterion repackages Jean Renoir’s 1951 classic The River for Blu-ray, one of the master filmmaker’s several titles in the collection (fans may recall that Renoir’s Grand Illusion was the very first Criterion title). A title significant in many respects, being the first Technicolor film in India and Renoir’s first color feature, it’s simplistic beauty has gone on to influence future generations of filmmakers, including its prominently vocal champion Martin Scorsese. It also served as a launching pad for Satyajit Ray, who worked as an assistant on the film, and who would go on to create his own stunning debut four years later with the first chapter of his Apu trilogy, Pather Panchali (1955).
We experience the childhood of Harriet (Patricia Walters) in retrospect, her off-screen adult voice recounting one particular stretch of time while growing up in India with her mother (Nora Swinburne) and father (Esmond Knight...
We experience the childhood of Harriet (Patricia Walters) in retrospect, her off-screen adult voice recounting one particular stretch of time while growing up in India with her mother (Nora Swinburne) and father (Esmond Knight...
- 4/21/2015
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
Miracolo!: Monicelli’s Exuberant, Digitally Restored Classic
There hasn’t been a performer that’s come close to equaling the vibrant energy of Italian actress Anna Magnani, that furious powerhouse that graced some of the best works of Rossellini, Visconti, Pasolini, and Renoir and swept her way through English language cinema, winning an Oscar for 1955’s The Rose Tattoo. It’s with great pleasure to discover that Mario Monicelli’s forgotten classic The Passionate Thief was digitally restored last year, playing at the 2014 Telluride Film Festival before being treated to a limited theatrical run this Spring at select theaters. Starring Magnani with her frequent stage collaborator, famed comedian Toto, and a nubile Ben Gazzara, the trio wanders through Rome’s streets one lackluster New Year’s Eve as they stumble through a series of escapades.
Based on short stories by famed author Alberto Moravia (The Conformist; Two Women; Contempt...
There hasn’t been a performer that’s come close to equaling the vibrant energy of Italian actress Anna Magnani, that furious powerhouse that graced some of the best works of Rossellini, Visconti, Pasolini, and Renoir and swept her way through English language cinema, winning an Oscar for 1955’s The Rose Tattoo. It’s with great pleasure to discover that Mario Monicelli’s forgotten classic The Passionate Thief was digitally restored last year, playing at the 2014 Telluride Film Festival before being treated to a limited theatrical run this Spring at select theaters. Starring Magnani with her frequent stage collaborator, famed comedian Toto, and a nubile Ben Gazzara, the trio wanders through Rome’s streets one lackluster New Year’s Eve as they stumble through a series of escapades.
Based on short stories by famed author Alberto Moravia (The Conformist; Two Women; Contempt...
- 4/14/2015
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
Translators introduction: This article by Mireille Latil Le Dantec, the first of two parts, was originally published in issue 40 of Cinématographe, September 1978. The previous issue of the magazine had included a dossier on "La qualité française" and a book of a never-shot script by Jean Grémillon (Le Printemps de la Liberté or The Spring of Freedom) had recently been published. The time was ripe for a re-evaluation of Grémillon's films and a resuscitation of his undervalued career. As this re-evaluation appears to still be happening nearly 40 years later—Grémillon's films have only recently seen DVD releases and a 35mm retrospective begins this week at Museum of the Moving Image in Queens—this article and its follow-up gives us an important view of a French perspective on Grémillon's work by a very perceptive critic doing the initial heavy-lifting in bringing the proper attention to the filmmaker's work.
Filmmaker maudit?...
Filmmaker maudit?...
- 11/30/2014
- by Ted Fendt
- MUBI
Senses of Cinema has published their 2013 World Poll, with nearly 140 entries, many by Notebook contributors: Celluloid Liberation Front Ted Fendt Daniel Kasman Boris Nelepo Michael Pattison David Phelps & myself As part of a "Year in Review" piece, Various To Be (Cont'd) contributors offer their thoughts on what stood out to them in 2013. For the A.V. Club, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky pays tribute to Run Run Shaw. Louis C.K. is planning to release his 1998 directorial debut Tomorrow Night (C.K. and Steve Carell are pictured on set above) online. Cinephilia and Beyond has assembled various conversations with filmmakers from The Walker Art Center’s Regis Dialogue.
Above: Dp/30's outstanding interview with Martin Scorsese. More Marty, "A Letter to my Daughter" (I can't help but include the entire piece):
"Dearest Francesca,
I’m writing this letter to you about the future. I’m looking at it through the lens of my world.
Above: Dp/30's outstanding interview with Martin Scorsese. More Marty, "A Letter to my Daughter" (I can't help but include the entire piece):
"Dearest Francesca,
I’m writing this letter to you about the future. I’m looking at it through the lens of my world.
- 1/8/2014
- by Adam Cook
- MUBI
Dear Danny,
Funny you mention Casanova and Dracula, because that could easily be one way to describe the legitimately uncanny Under the Skin. Another would be Species directed by the Antonioni of Red Desert. From the opening shots—a staring retina emerges from a wandering dark orb, the cosmic unto the visceral—there’s a sense of ineffable dread making the images vibrate. It’s an otherworldly film, but the locations are scraggly, overcast, wintry, a Scotland very much like that of Ken Loach. Against this naturalism lies the most extreme stylization, patches of abstract blackness literally swallowing up young men as they march towards the beckoning heroine, a body-harvesting creature that happens to look exactly like Scarlett Johansson. Just as a human body can be evacuated of everything but its skin (one of several remarkable visions), so is an alien skin gradually filled with… what? Horror? Longing? Compassion? The...
Funny you mention Casanova and Dracula, because that could easily be one way to describe the legitimately uncanny Under the Skin. Another would be Species directed by the Antonioni of Red Desert. From the opening shots—a staring retina emerges from a wandering dark orb, the cosmic unto the visceral—there’s a sense of ineffable dread making the images vibrate. It’s an otherworldly film, but the locations are scraggly, overcast, wintry, a Scotland very much like that of Ken Loach. Against this naturalism lies the most extreme stylization, patches of abstract blackness literally swallowing up young men as they march towards the beckoning heroine, a body-harvesting creature that happens to look exactly like Scarlett Johansson. Just as a human body can be evacuated of everything but its skin (one of several remarkable visions), so is an alien skin gradually filled with… what? Horror? Longing? Compassion? The...
- 9/13/2013
- by Fernando F. Croce
- MUBI
I recently watched a short documentary by Andrea Marks called Freedom on the Fence. Made in 2009, and only 40 minutes long, it is a nice introduction to the world of Polish movie posters which concisely explains the particular set of circumstances that gave rise to the incredible flowering of creativity that was the Polish poster of the 1950s and 60s. An audio interview with Henryk Tomaszewski, the father of the modern Polish poster, explains how the systematic destruction of Warsaw by the retreating Nazis in 1945, which left 80% of the city in ruins, gave rise to a landscape of rubble and fences which basically created an open-air art gallery for posters.
At the same time, at the end of the war, there was a six year backlog of American and other foreign cinema that was waiting to be seen in Poland. Tomaszewski remembers being told by the woman in charge of film...
At the same time, at the end of the war, there was a six year backlog of American and other foreign cinema that was waiting to be seen in Poland. Tomaszewski remembers being told by the woman in charge of film...
- 7/5/2012
- MUBI
I’ve finally made it to the grand master of the bravura sequence, or, more specifically, of the ending bravura sequence, King Vidor.
It isn’t surprising that a producer as knowledgeable as Selznick often ran to the services of the two major champions of “slice of cake” cinema and strong sequences, Hitchcock (Rebecca, Spellbound, Notorious, The Paradine Case) and Vidor (Bird of Paradise, Duel in the Sun, Light’s Diamond Jubilee, even Ruby Gentry), who, without a doubt, made the best films for Selznick.
Love Never Dies, Wild Oranges, Hallelujah, Our Daily Bread, Comrade X, Duel in the Sun, The Fountainhead, Ruby Gentry and their terrific denouements once made me write that Vidor was a director of film endings. No doubt I was exaggerating, but it isn’t for nothing that he hesitated for a long time between several different endings for The Crowd. I was also exaggerating because...
It isn’t surprising that a producer as knowledgeable as Selznick often ran to the services of the two major champions of “slice of cake” cinema and strong sequences, Hitchcock (Rebecca, Spellbound, Notorious, The Paradine Case) and Vidor (Bird of Paradise, Duel in the Sun, Light’s Diamond Jubilee, even Ruby Gentry), who, without a doubt, made the best films for Selznick.
Love Never Dies, Wild Oranges, Hallelujah, Our Daily Bread, Comrade X, Duel in the Sun, The Fountainhead, Ruby Gentry and their terrific denouements once made me write that Vidor was a director of film endings. No doubt I was exaggerating, but it isn’t for nothing that he hesitated for a long time between several different endings for The Crowd. I was also exaggerating because...
- 12/12/2011
- MUBI
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