On December 28, 1895, a screening by the Lumiere brothers at the Café Grande in Paris announced the birth of cinema in Europe.
In the following decades, European cinema and American Hollywood continued to wrestle with each other. The center of gravity of world cinema shifts back and forth across the ocean.
Unfortunately, the two world wars severely hampered the development of European cinema. After World War II, in particular, Europe fell into a state of decline. Hollywood, on the other hand, took this opportunity to usher in its golden period.
In order to form a confrontation with the Hollywood-style studio system, whether it is the neorealist movement in Italy or the new wave in France, independent authorization expression has gradually become the consensus of European filmmakers.
As we all know, France has become the forefront of advocating "author films".
French Film Magazine "Film Handbook"
Leaving aside the faults and wrongs of the "author theory", vigorously promoting the director's contribution to a film work has indeed had a strong stimulus for European filmmakers.
More and more young directors are beginning to go down the path of independent production, bringing fresh blood to European films with a unique style. To this day, European cinema is still proud of its "author's film".
Godard
Of course, the film cannot be completed by one person, but the expression of the film is likely to be only the thought and artistic vision of a few of them, or even one person.
It is worth noting that there is no "author theory" before there is an "author movie". Long before film critics invented the term, many film pioneers had begun to expand the possibilities of film expression with an indomitable attitude.
Jean Renoir, the master of poetic realism, is one of the best.
For the "infamous" Film Manual, Renoir became their most powerful example of "authorship."
Truffaut and Renoir
In January 1952, less than a year after its inception, the Handbook of Cinema launched a comprehensive review and evaluation of Renoir's past works. Under the strong admiration of film critics led by Bazin, Renoir's films have reappeared in the eyes of French audiences with a new attitude.
That year, Jean Renoir had just completed his first color film [The Great River] in India.
Renoir photographed in India [Big River]
Since 1940, he left his homeland due to the German invasion and went to Hollywood to develop.
For more than a decade, although there have been movies to make, he is at odds with Hollywood's production system. The French audience has long forgotten the "mediocre" director who was also not very popular in China.
People can remember his name, perhaps more because of his father, the famous Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
Self-portrait by Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Today, if a director can be called a film author from the bottom of his heart, it is certainly a comforting thing. This at least shows that you have the ability to maintain a certain self in your creation.
And for all filmmakers who want to realize the author's film, the biggest difficulty is how to protect their expression, especially when his "authorship" is not so popular.
Jean Renoir's film career has been extremely bumpy and difficult.
In the early 1920s, Renoir, who was less than 30 years old, gave up his father's last wish to make ceramics and started his film career.
At that time, he made a total of 9 silent films, some of which received praise, but never produced any returns. Fortunately, the son of a great painter, he really couldn't find an investment, so he sold a few of his father's paintings and continued to make films.
Renoir father and son
Soon after entering the era of sound films, Jean Renoir finally found a way to achieve self-expression.
In the 1931 film The, his personal style was actually expanded. The film was a turning point in Renoir's creative career, and a new artistic style, poetic realism, was born.
[Bitch]
Poetic realism has increasingly become a tendency of many young directors. Jean Viggo, Marcel Carne, and Julian Duviville all benefited from Renoir's films.
Perhaps, under the influence of the Impressionist painter father, Renoir began to think about how to reproduce the purest nature and reality of life on the screen from an early age. He bid farewell to the exaggerated avant-garde style of the silent film period and firmly established the direction of realism.
But this path of realism is ultimately contrary to the film public that pursues sensory stimulation and entertainment.
Even though Renoir himself was satisfied with [the bitch], he was even a little excited. But the film remained unpopular with audiences. He had to make commercial films such as comedy [Sottell Company], crime film [Night at the Crossroads], literary adaptation [Madame Bovary], etc.
He still tried his best to make some artistic attempts of his own in these commercial films. For example, in "Budu's Rescue from falling into the water", the passionate performance that allows the lead actor Michelle Simon to fully release.
[Budu Fell into the Water and Was Saved]
But to Renoir's dismay, the commercial work that followed these compromises still failed to achieve commercial success.
Perhaps it was not until the re-success of [Tony] in 1935 that Jean Renoir realized the importance of returning to his own creation, although it still did not sell well.
This realistic film ushered in a renaissance of French cinema and even had a crucial influence on the later Italian neorealist film movement.
[The Great Phantom] of 1937 and [Rules of the Game] of 1939 are Jean Renoir's most outstanding works.
[The Great Phantom]
He pushed this poetic realist style of film to the peak, and eventually became a generation of film masters in the history of film. He intercepts fragments of everyday life in a prose way, creating a cinematic style that is close to nature and timeless.
He often uses deep-focus lenses in his films to show his stage-style dazzling scheduling of scenes.
He also allows the actors to improvise, without any restraint in front of the camera, but extremely natural and stretched, as in everyday life.
For example, the German officer played by Stroheim in [The Great Mirage] easily presses his legs while talking.
[The Great Phantom] in Stroheim as a German officer (right)
No matter how popular these two works are today, they did not change Jean Renoir's dilemma at the time.
[The Great Phantom] brought a little profit in the market, but [the rules of the game] put him into a huge failure. The failure was unprecedentedly thorough.
[Rules of the Game] is now considered one of the greatest movies
Jean Renoir recalls:
"I've had many failures in my life, but never been so thorough, so completely."
The film nearly crushed Renoir, who panicked and did a lot of editing, but still didn't work well. Later, the film was banned by the government. Poor Renoir, saddened by the fact that his ambitions were so snubbed and ridiculed.
It wasn't until more than two decades later, at the 1959 Venice Film Festival, that the film was restored to its original appearance and re-released.
Jean Renoir, 65, came to the huge cinema and saw the audience packed, even standing. They loved the movie and cheered on it. At this time, Renoir's heart was full of relief.
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