The Social Cinema of Jean Renoir by Christopher Faulkner (review)

234 LEITERS IN CANADA 1986 scholarly activity generated by the increasingly important Festival of New Latin American Cinema held annually since 1979 in Havana, Cuba. In all cases, editorial information is carefully provided on when and under what circumstances the selections were originally written, and if and to what extent they have been adapted or revised. One nevertheless fears that a reader tempted by the dip-and-savour approach which the text's smorgasbord organization invites may inadvertently attribute contemporaneity to outdated material. It seems reasonably certain that, aside from the rich variety of its illustrations, the most frequently consulted and ultimately the most useful portions of the text will be the introductory historical overview and the concluding chronological summary of significant cinematic and sociopolitical events. Concise and coherent, the introduction is a balanced presentation of a complexity of issue and events, consistently informed by a clear awareness that, events of the last decade notwithstanding, 'the peculiar dynamics of the national film industry must be explained with reference to autonomous social and cultural forces as much as to the country's often calamitous political events.' Despite the considerable merits of this unassuming but attractive English -language introduction to one of the most diverse cinemas of Latin America, the serious student of Argentine film - as, indeed, of Latin American film in general - would still be strongly advised to acquire a working knowledge of the language in which both the films and the majority of the critical writing were originally conceived. (WENDY L. ROLPH) Christopher Faulkner. The Social Cinema ofJean Renoir Princeton University Press. 210. US $25.00 The son of the great impressionist painter, Jean Renoir brought to the cinema, more than most of its early masters, an inherited sense of the visual, what D.W. Griffith considered the first qualification of the practitioner of the new art, a Conradian ability 'to see' and to make us see, as well as a commitment to the art that transcends life. Thus along with Renoir's artistic sense is a corresponding social one; as Octave (the most notable part Renoir played as an actor) says in La Regie du jeu, 'There's one thing ... that's absolutely terrifying, and that is that everybody has his reasons.' Renoir sees, and enables us to see, his characters, but he encloses them in an embrace of human compassion. Most critics of Renoir have regarded these two tendencies in his work as being in conflict. The title of Christopher Faulkner's latest treatment suggests that he will regard Renoir as primarily a social realist; and, indeed, Faulkner loses no time in confronting the auteurists who up to HUMANITIES 235 now have largely defined Renoir in career-wide thematic or artistic terms. His epigraph is Andrew Sarris's complaint that unless artists can 'be wrenched from their historical environments, aesthetics is reduced to a subordinate branch of ethnography,' and the title of his introduction is 'For Ethnography.' But Faulkner goes on to argue the existence of a much more complicated Renoir than most of his earlier critics have seen, even Bazin, who painted him as essentially a realist; and he accounts for what most have seen as Renoir's multiplicity as an artist by uncovering to our view at least two Renoirs. But it is really by denying the categorical nature of his title that Faulkner evidences and finally proves that multiplicity. Though he announces his intention to give 'a rereading of some of Renoir's best known films for their immediate relation to historical and social developments ,' his perceptive reading of the films of Renoir's last three decades arises out of a recogrution that those films represent a passage from the house of life to the palace of art. Thus Faulkner follows Renoir from his early phase of passionate commitment to the French Left, in works that he properly reads as anticapitalist , such as Boudu sauve des eaux or, more definitively, La Marseillaise . Then in the late 1930S come the two supreme masterpieces, La Grande Illusion and La Regie du jeu, one showing the class system as having broken down for all useful purpose, and the other showing it as still capable of closing its ranks...