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Jean Renoir.
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Renoir, Jean (1894-1979)
A French filmmaker who created some 37 films in the realist tradition during a 40-year career, Jean Renoir is regarded as a mentor to the French New Wave directors of the late...
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French-born Jean Renoir (1894-1979) directed two of the twentieth century's most critically acclaimed films, La Grande Illusion and La Regle du jeu (Rules of the Game), and is credited with inspiring ...
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Critical Essay by James Shelley Hamilton
Changing a novel into a motion picture—really changing it from the medium of words into the medium of the camera—is a thorough-going process that...
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Critical Essay by Gideon Bachmann
For those who see in the 1863 Manet painting, from which the title [of Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe] is derived, the essence of natural peace, it may seem sa...
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Critical Essay by Richard Whitehall
Disjointed, lyrical, uneven, beautiful, [Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe] is magnificently in love with life, with nature. The warm, sunlit landscapes of Prov...
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Critical Essay by Peter John Dyer
La Fille de l'Eau [is] an almost involuntary expression of several themes destined to preoccupy Renoir throughout his career…. Despite the coy story-tit...
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Critical Essay by Raymond Durgnat
Erotism in Renoir's work is linked so intimately with every aspect of life that it is impossible to separate them; every Renoir film is a hymn to fertility, to...
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Critical Essay by Tom Milne
[Le Caporal Epinglé], Renoir's Grande Illusion of World War Two, is the wickedly and tenderly witty chronicle of a prisoner-of-war's persistent attempt...
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Critical Essay by Peter Harcourt
[Renoir] has succeeded in providing us with some of the warmest, most tender moments in the cinema…. [However], what aspects of life must Renoir exclude from hi...
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Critical Essay by Louise Corbin
[Le Caporal Epinglé] is not one of [Renoir's] best, and I was unable to work up any interest in his mishmash about French prisoners of the Germans during ...
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Critical Essay by Brenda Davies
[La Marseillaise] is an optimistic film, full of hope and the joy of creation. It glows with summer sunshine as the amateur soldiers tramp the long leafy road from Mars...
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Critical Essay by Daniel Millar
Renoir's post-American films, from 1950 onwards, present genuine difficulties, though of a peculiar kind, just because they do not seem difficult or obscure at a...
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Critical Essay by John Bragin
[The opening action of La Marseillaise] sets defining boundaries for the film, creates the tone of … revolution-as-theater, and allows Renoir to break from both th...
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Critical Essay by Marvin Zeman
The Little Theatre of Jean Renoir is an old man's film: Renoir is using the film to express his view of life from the vantage point of seventy-six years, which di...
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Critical Essay by The New York Times
Exactly what Jean Renoir had in mind when he wrote, performed in and directed "The Rules of the Game" … is anybody's guess. This is the...
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Critical Essay by Leo Braudy
Renoir makes his world energetic and compelling through the complexity and irony with which he treats even his most cherished themes. His films do not come to a stop in th...
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Critical Essay by Stanley Kauffmann
[Le Petit Théâtre de Jean Renoir] is something of a bundle of reminiscences…. The old-fashioned feeling of the picture comes less from the abse...
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Critical Essay by Roger Greenspun
[The Lower Depths (Les Bas-Fonds), The Diary of a Chambermaid, and Picnic on the Grass] possess an incredible richness of idea and imagination, partly because of thei...
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Critical Essay by Peter Harcourt
Along with those of Vigo, the films of Jean Renoir are the most tentative in the history of the cinema. They work by indirection, implying qualities and attitudes that...
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Critical Essay by Andrew Sarris
Renoir's career was a river of personal expression. The waters may have varied in turbulence and depth, but the flow of his personality was consistently directed...
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Critical Essay by Elizabeth Grottle Strebel
Renoir's receptivity to the French Left and active involvement with it played a critical role in shaping his artistic vision at a time when he was co...
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Critical Essay by Alexander Sesonske
La Petite Marchande d'allumettes represents the first full flowering of a tendency that runs through Renoir's films from 1924 to 1970, a tendency to ...
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