Postwar Renoir: Film and the Memory of Violence by Colin Davis (review)

Colin Davis’s second book-length study of Jean Renoir picks up chronologically where his excellent earlier work on the pre-war Renoir left off. Here he engages with a post-war Renoir, and with films that are ‘subtle, searching, complex works which have been underrated and understudied’ (p. 5). His focus on the Hollywood war years and beyond, including Renoir’s international production Le Fleuve, the trilogy of ‘spectacle’ films, his work for television, and the novels of the final years proves a fascinating read. It is a very welcome, coherent study of the second — and too often judged lesser — half of Renoir’s long career. Davis sets out to prove that the common criticism of these films’ seeming silence on major political and ideological issues such as the memory of the Second World War and the Algerian War of Independence is misguided. Availing himself of trauma theory (in a broad sociohistorical sense), as well as Stanley Cavell’s contention that films ‘know’ themselves and what they are doing, Davis offers a compelling series of interpretations that portray the post-war Renoir as ‘less serene, less humanist, more political and darker’ (p. 7). These works contain silences that entertain the ideological ‘prospect of traumatic collapse’ (p. 10). The disastrous reception of La Règle du jeu made Renoir wary of future audiences; the subsequent films knowingly protect themselves from such dangers. For example, French Cancan’s showy and light-hearted surface is an indication that it knows ‘that a public can be bought only through a sacrifice of integrity’ (p. 6). Davis astutely uncovers evidence of social trauma in the films and novels while also exposing Renoir’s lack of affection for his characters and loss of connection with his audience, an unthinkable situation in the pre-war films. In a chapter on murder in L’Étang tragique, L’Homme du Sud, and Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, he tracks the insidious progression towards the manifestation of covert violence in society, while the films themselves are wise enough to deliver up deceptively happy Hollywood endings. The depiction of social violence in Le Journal d’une femme de chambre takes a more symbolic turn in another ‘unsuccessful’ Hollywood film. The fractured failure, La Femme sur la plage, with a Second World War backdrop, is both a very personal and historically anchored representation of trauma, as the main character suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. Davis contends that the film’s greatness lies in its ‘accommodation with disaster’ — there is ‘neither cure nor closure’ (p. 50), a stance that seems to characterize Renoir’s later work. The wealth of evidence in Davis’s excavations of sociohistorical trauma should put to rest any notion of a somewhat passive, universalizing, and ‘humanistic’ post-war Renoir. For example, Le Caporal épinglé and the play Carola contain occluded references to torture in the Algerian War of Independence; Le Testament du docteur Cordelier alludes to a post-fascist world consumed by the ‘ongoing traumas of decolonization’ (p. 89). This study compels us to respond not as a frivolous public or as a dismissive critic, but to engage fully with the social, political, and historical import of Renoir’s post-war œuvre.