Scenes of Love and Murder: Renoir, Film and Philosophy (review)

The two canonical views of perhaps the greatest of French film-makers construct him as, on the one hand, the cinematic auteur par excellence and, on the other, the supreme exponent of pre-Second War cinéma engagé. The great merit of Colin Davis's elegantly written and provocative study is that it goes beyond these approaches without dismissing or disregarding them, in —appropriately for a work whose remit and grounding are explicitly philosophical —a kind of Aufhebung which finds in the work of one not generally regarded as a conceptual film-maker (unlike Godard or even Abel Gance) nothing less than a reflection on and of the constitutive unreliability and undecidability of cinema itself. The view of Renoir as jovial humanist is surely given its coup de grâce by the fact that there are, as Davis reminds us, a considerable number of murders in his work —indeed all the major 1930s films bar Une partie de campagne feature at least one violent death, a strike-rate almost on a par with that of his apparent opposite Hitchcock, with whom suggestive comparisons are here made. Davis's intertextual breviary draws not only on the 'usual suspects' Žižek and Deleuze, but also on Stanley Cavell's 'philosophical hermeneutics of film' (p. 17) and even, apropos La Grande Illusion, Aristotle's ethics of friendship as revisited by Derrida. This might seem to portend a downplaying of mise-en-scène and a deployment of films as exemplars to illustrate philosophical arguments —something which Davis not unfairly points out underpins much of Deleuze's Cinéma —but in fact his visual analyses are pertinent and incisive, as with the analysis of doorways and framing in La Chienne or that of La Règle du jeu's omnipresent theatricality and the consistent inconsistency of the perspectives it thereby offers the spectator. There are moments of possible imprecision in some points of detail; thus, to describe Batala in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange as the eponymous hero's 'model' perhaps imputes a degree too much self-consciousness to Lange, for whom Batala is rather frère ennemi or even Big Other, while to see woman-as-subject as foreclosed from La Marseillaise bizarrely omits any consideration of the inspiring speech given by a Republican fishwife to the Marseille Republican Convention, denouncing the killing of her lover —for me one of the highspots of the film. Overall, however, the book represents both a major contribution to the interrogation of the relationship between philosophy and film and a significant addition to work on an œuvre wherein the uncanny looms at least as large as the humanistic or the committed which it unremittingly shadows. The elegant presentation, good selection of illustrations, and handy guide to Renoir's 1930s films presented as an appendix will make this a valuable text for undergraduate students of the director as well as for postgraduate scholars and faculty.