Jean Renoir

This classic in the literature of cinema represents the convergence of the three leading figures of French film: Jean Renoir, universally considered the greatest French director; Andr Bazin, the outstanding French film critic and theorist; and Franois Truffaut, the pioneer of la nouvelle vague. Bazin left this examination of Renoirs films unfinished when he died in 1958; Truffaut collected and edited the essays, and added a comprehensive filmography in which Bazin, Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, and other Cahiers du Cinma regulars comment on the films. Here are brilliant insights into the whole of Renoirs oeuvre, from the avant-garde fantasy of La Petite Marchande dAllumettes, through the epic humanism of Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game, to the quiet grace of The River and the profound theatricality of The Golden Coach. Bazin shows why Renoir is the critical figure in the development of cinema since the silent era, and how he went beyond montage to give the art new expressive potential.
Renoirs work constitutes one of the most fully and beautifully elaborated visions in contemporary art, and nowhere is this humanistic vision better illuminated than in this book.

Author Biography

Andre Bazin (1918-1958) was a film critic for Le Parisien Libere, the founder and editor of Cahiers du Cinema, and director of cultural services at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinematiques. Considered a father figure by the filmmakers of the “new wave” of French cinema, he wrote dozens of important theoretical and critical essays on film, which are collected in the two volumes of What Is Cinema?