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Jean Renoir
(Taschen Books, 192 pages, $24.99)
By Christopher Faulkner
ean Renoir’s career, wrote Andrew Sarris, is a river of personal expression. With all the water imagery in his movies—from 1951’s The River, to Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932) and the melancholy shot of the receding stream in A Day in the Country (1936)—Renoir’s filmmaking always displayed certain aquatic tendencies. As Christopher Faulkner writes, the director’s worldview could not be contained by conventional barriers, be they genre distinctions, spatial limitations or class differences, and often simply flowed right over them.
In his most fertile period, the Popular Front years in the 1930s, when he made 15 films, his settings ranged from the top of the social ladder (Rules of the Game, 1939) to the very bottom (The Lower Depths, 1936) to depict French society in a way that would have made Balzac proud. Renoir’s sense of space was no less fluid, as his smoothly mobile camera swam elegantly through his complex sets, with deep-focus cinematography layering and complicating his compositions.
In his peak years, Renior worked in nearly every genre besides science fiction and even created a foreshadowing of Italian neorealism, particularly in Toni (1935) (Visconti was his assistant on the film). And in his working methods, Renoir adopted the familial sense of creativity that characterized his aristocratic-bohemian childhood—peopling his crews and his films with the same friends, lovers, wives, and family members who filled his off-screen existence. The result was an atmosphere of organic naturalism, of life extending beyond the frame. Anna Magnani’s question in The Golden Coach (1953)—“Where does theater end and life begin?”—is an essential component of Renoir’s art and humanism.
Within these parameters, Faulkner delivers a compact yet comprehensive survey of one of the great careers in cinema history. Succinctness is key to Taschen’s series of director profiles, aiming to show a life in one clear, wide-angle shot, with frequent close-ups when necessary. Faulkner divides Renoir’s career into four sections: the silents through 1929; the above-mentioned Popular Front of the ’30s; a wartime detour to Hollywood and the postwar color pictures. Perhaps best of all for a director of Renoir’s visual grace are the numerous images—production sketches, frame enlargements, paintings of the director by his impressionist father Pierre-Auguste, movie stills and even pages from Renoir’s FBI file. Renoir directed 40 films, but as he was fond of saying—and this worthy volume reminds us—“a director makes only one movie in his life.”
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Women Filmmakers
in Early Hollywood
(Johns Hopkins University Press,
336 pages, $45)
By Karen Ward Mahar
ere's s a test: Name 10 successful women directors working in Hollywood between 1896 and 1990. Ida Lupino…Dorothy Arzner….
Well, the list usually dries up long before 10. Like black filmmakers in the years before Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing blew open the studio gates, women filmmakers tend to view their full participation in Hollywood as a utopian ideal located firmly in the future.
Karen Ward Mahar, however, informs us that now-forgotten women filmmakers of the silent era were often as important, influential and commercially successful—and as well paid—as their male counterparts; this at a time when women still lacked the vote. Director-writer-stars like Lois Weber, Ruth Roland, Helen Holmes and Dorothy Davenport made critically esteemed and successful films throughout the teens and 1920s, and were the equals of such male directors as D.W. Griffith and C.B. DeMille.
Mahar’s point is that both pre- and early Hollywood filmmaking drew its working model from the bohemian egalitarianism of late-19th-century theater, where gender roles remained fluid. In this environment, women were freer to rise from supporting roles and backroom technical jobs to become writers, actresses and even directors. They made the usual cliffhanger thrillers and anarchistic slapstick, but also created films that highlighted women’s issues such as birth control, white slavery, unwed pregnancy and domestic abuse.
It was only, Mahar argues, the corporatization of Hollywood at the close of the sound era—the moment when Wall Street started calling the shots at the studios, vertically integrating the production/distribution/exhibition monopoly, and applying a more “masculine” business ethic—that finally stripped women directors of the prominence they had enjoyed. Thoroughly researched, rich in illustrations and powerfully written (with little recourse to academic jargon), Mahar’s book offers stirring revelations that illuminate a forgotten pioneering spirit among early women filmmakers.
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Scenes from the City: Filmmaking in New York
(Rizzoli International Publications, 288 pages, $49.95)
By James Sanders
lthough filmmaking in this country had its start in New York at the turn of the last century, once the industry moved to Los Angeles, it pretty much steered clear of the city until 1966 when John V. Lindsay established the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting. Hollywood knew that New York’s convoluted permit system and sometimes-uncooperative police could derail a big-budget movie in an afternoon. The city as seen in most Hollywood movies before 1966 was often no more real than the Empire State Building in King Kong. How things have changed.
James Sanders, a New York writer and architect, concentrates mainly on the explosion in film production that the Mayor’s Office directly facilitated and which continues to this day. A short introductory chapter outlines New York location shooting before 1966, an era with a rich, but diffuse tradition of documentarians, avant-gardists, independents and wayward studio outings like Jules Dassin’s The Naked City in 1948.
The Mayor’s Office, which produced this book to celebrate its 40th anniversary, clearly aided in the development of a distinctly New York cinematic sensibility. Directors like Sidney Lumet, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, and Jim Jarmusch might never have developed their hometown worldviews without the filmmaker-friendly civic attitude.
Sanders’ vividly illustrated account is filled with shots from famous New York movies of the last 40 years, and over 200 splendid production stills showing the challenges of shoehorning the massive apparatus of film production into a crowded modern city. The book also includes a perceptive interview with Scorsese along with comments and anecdotes throughout from Nora Ephron, Allen and other diehard New Yorkers. The story is divided not just into eras, but neighborhoods and types of locations—rooftops, the subway, Central Park—thus demonstrating that there are as many faces to this great city as there are filmmakers to capture it.
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Digital Filmmaking
(Faber & Faber, 176 pages, $13)
By Mike Figgis
s a trained jazz musician and a veteran of live theater, Mike Figgis’ filmmaking career ( Leaving Las Vegas, Stormy Monday) has been defined by a jazzman’s adaptability and a theatrical sense of spontaneity. In fact, when he became a professional filmmaker, his desire for immediacy of expression and greater technical simplicity was often frustrated by the unwieldiness of the cinematic production model. Only now, in the era of user-friendly digital equipment, has he found a working method that clears away all the logistical and technological baggage he felt intruding between the filmmaking and his audience.
Figgis’ short volume on the perils and delights of digital filmmaking notes that there exists now the means for a near-revolution in the way films are made—if only the moneymen and the studio bigwigs could see it. He discerns a bloated, prohibitively expensive orchestral model of filmmaking that still holds sway, even though films can easily now be made by a crew more reminiscent of a jazz quartet. That means adapting oneself to locations (rather than vice-versa), being prepared to scrap overly ambitious approaches for cleaner and simpler ones, working with different kinds of natural or electrical light (he has lit whole scenes with Mag flashlights and cell phone displays), and being flexible and inventive in the face of sudden changes in light or location.
Whatever one makes of Figgis’ oeuvre, there is no doubt that his smaller, digital movies—Timecode and Hotel—offer as compelling a set of alternative filmmaking strategies as the work of flashier digital directors like Harmony Korine or Lars von Trier. His approach, as he outlines it here in jargon-free style, is as useful for the neophyte studying Filmmaking 101 as the experienced studio director who’d like to work in a smaller and more intimate register.
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A History of the
French New Wave
(University of Wisconsin Press,
424 pages, $26.95)
By Richard Neupert
revious surveys of the French New Wave have tended to concentrate on the five young critic-directors who emerged from Les Cahiers du Cinema. This approach isolated these filmmakers from the diverse traditions that nourished them and the filmmaking establishment that infuriated them. Thus James Monaco’s otherwise excellent The New Wave (1976) suffered from a lack of deep historical-political context, while Roy Armes’ French Cinema (1985) similarly saw the New Wavers as lacking forebearers or descendants. That all changed when Richard Neupert published A History of the New Wave in 2002, the first comprehensive overview in English, and now, in this expanded second edition, surely the standard work on the subject.
So accustomed are we to the familiar accounts of the New Wave’s rise and fall (or rather, its slow absorption into the French filmmaking establishment) that Neupert’s drastic and necessary reframing of the story consistently surprises and rebukes our sense of the movement’s contours.
Instead of starting with The 400 Blows and Breathless, Neupert tracks back to the early 1950s, when the harbingers of the New Wave were laying the foundations for a filmic revolution. From Jean-Pierre Melville came the notion of deifying pulp material; from Agnès Varda, the prototype of self-financed poetic filmmaking; from Roger Vadim, unbridled sexuality and, from Alexandre Astruc, the authorial notion of caméra-stylo, or using the camera as a pen. Other French directors, from Jean Renoir and Robert Bresson to Alain Resnais and Louis Malle, were similarly venerated, belying the notion that inspiration for the New Wave came solely from within the Hollywood studio system.
The Cahiers graduates are thus situated within a wider, richer portrait of French history and culture that contextualizes their films much more sharply. This enables Neupert to examine certain less well-known works such as Truffaut’s short Les Mistons or Godard’s immediately banned political provocation, Le Petit Soldat. He delineates the personalities and roles of the major directors: Chabrol the canny financier of his friends’ work; Truffaut the ringleader and Godard the bad boy. The revised
edition includes a new chapter devoted to Left Bank filmmakers like Resnais, and a new afterword, which only makes this a more essential acquisition for the hungry Francophile film fan.
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