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Jean Renoir: The Art of Ambivalence
| Article
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12695 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1994 |
2,794 Words |
| Author
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Lloyd Eby
Lloyd Eby has worked in film and video since 1970 and has
published articles on the interaction of film and religion.
With René Berger, he coedited the book Art
and Technology (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1986).
He is assistant senior editor in the Currents in Modern
Thought
section of The World & I. |
Nineteen ninety-four is the centennial of the birth of Jean Renoir, regarded by nearly all film critics and cinéastes as one of the greatest film directors ever and by some as the greatest of all. Certainly his influence on film--as well as drama and art--has been vast, affecting many of his contemporaries and almost every subsequent filmmaker.
Jean Renoir came with a notable pedigree: He was born on September 15, 1894, at the Ch‰teau des Brouillards in the Montmartre section of Paris, the second child of the then fifty-three-year-old Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and his wife, Aline, then thirty-five, who had first entered Auguste's life as a painting model.
The young Jean grew up under the sway of his father's artwork and friends. By far the strongest effect on Jean, however--and it was to remain so lifelong--was that of Gabrielle Renard, his mother's cousin, who entered the Renoir household at the age of fifteen, shortly before Jean's birth, to help care for mother and child. Gabrielle remained and became Jean's nurse, mother-surrogate, confidante, and comrade. Gabrielle, too, became a model for the elder Renoir. Jean Renoir ends his insightful autobiography, My Life and My Films, written when he was near eighty, with a tribute to her, fifteen years after her death:
"Certainly it was she who influenced me most of all. To her I owe Guginol and the Thé‰tre Montmartre. She taught me to realize that the very unreality of those entertainments was a reason for examining real life. She taught me to see the face behind the mask, and the fraud behind the flourishes. She taught me to detest the
... (1954 of 17043 Characters)
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