Bergan Ronald - Jean Renoir: projections of paradise

To Catriona MacGregor, who gave me the idea.

Copyright 1992, 2016 by Ronald Bergan

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Owen Corrigan

Cover photo credit: AP Images

Print ISBN: 978-1-62872-570-4

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62872-625-1

Printed in the United States of America

The ideal Renoir biographyeasy, graceful, and unpretentious.

Los Angeles Times Book Review

Substantial, well-researched... Ronald Bergan creates a detailed, affectionate portrait... vividly realized.

Observer

Bergan has written a book that reads as well at the beach as it will in film class.

New York Newsday

Painstakingly chronicles the plots and making of Renoirs oeuvre ... Purely biographical and enjoyable.

New York Times Book Review

Whenever I want to convince myself that there is hope for the movies, that you can do something thats as eternal as a Mozart symphony, I can look at a Renoir picture. This charming and insightful biography helps to bring his delightful personality and unique poetic spirit to life again, and is very welcome indeed.

Peter Bogdanovich

Also by Ronald Bergan:

Sergei Eisenstein: A Life in Conflict

Dustin Hoffman

Anthony Perkins: A Haunted Life

The Great Theatres of London

The United Artists Story

... Isms: Understanding Cinema

Francois Truffaut Interviews

Eyewitness Companion Guide to Film

The Coen Brothers, Second Edition

There are some artists in all the arts whose reputations fluctuate, tossed on the tides of trends. However, although it is over two decades since my biography of Jean Renoir was first published, his films have continued to be an important and unwavering part of the canon. Orson Welless remark many years ago that Jean Renoir was the greatest of all directors still provokes few arguments. As a barometer of Renoirs continuing high status, The Rules of the Game (1939) is the only film to have been included on every top ten list in Sight & Sound s respected decennial poll since 1952. In fact, in 2012, the magazine voted it the fourth-greatest film even made.

The Rules of the Game pioneered the use of deep focus cinematography, which inspired Welless Citizen Kane , while Boudus Saved from Drowning (1932) showed how direct sound could be used effectively, and Toni (1935) was an important influence on Italian neo-realism. In fact, Renoirs career spans the history of cinemafrom the expressionism of the early silent movies to naturalism, committed cinema, film noir, Hollywood studio productions, period comedies in Technicolor, and fast television techniques.

At the time of writing this biography, I was very lucky to have been able to meet and interview Renoirs son Alain and many other people associated with the director. It was also enriching to visit all the places that meant so much to him, particularly the family home in Cagnes-sur-Mer, where he was brought up and which has changed little since the days when his father, the great Impressionist painter, Auguste Renoir, painted there. I hope that the reader will share my pleasure in (re)visiting Jean Renoirs fulfilling life and work.

As a result of my many talks with Gabrielle about the Chteau des Brouillards, where I lived until the age of three, I hardly know which are my recollections and which are hers.

Shortly after midnight on 15 September 1894, a midwife held a baby up for the mother to see. Heavens, how ugly! Take it away! she exclaimed; the father, with a certain amount of prescience, said: What a mouth; its a regular oven! Hell be a glutton. The cartoonist Abel Faivre, who was staying the night at the Chteau des Brouillards, thought the infant would provide him with a perfect model for his caricatures.

Doctor Bouffe de Saint Blaise said the mother had come through the ordeal splendidly, and he predicted that the child would have an iron constitution. He swallowed a glass of brandy from Essoyes, the home town of the mother, and left. Other witnesses to the birth were Eugne, the first cousin of the newly-born, a sergeant in the Colonial Army, and 15-year-old Gabrielle Renard, the mothers cousin, who had arrived from Essoyes a month earlier to help with the preparations for the birth. She had her own opinions of the baby. Well, I think hes beautiful, she averred. Everyone laughed, including the father.

The mother sat up in bed and asked Madame Mathieu, the familys cook and laundress, to prepare some baked tomatoes according to a recipe she had been given by their friend Paul Czanne. Just be a little less stingy with the olive oil, she suggested. Faivre had never tasted the dish before and ate almost all of it, so that Madame Mathieu had to prepare another serving. The father was not hungry. He had been very worried about his wife, who had suffered a miscarriage between her first child and this hippo-mouthed yelling creature. He sat around the table, pale and gaunt. To think of putting Aline in that condition just for a few minutes, he said self-accusingly. Dont you worry, matre, youll do it again, the cartoonist said, accurately as it happens, while he put away more tomatoes la Czanne. Eugne, who was actually born in Russia and might have been a model for one of those idle young men in Chekhov, finished his food, rinsed his mouth out with some wine mixed with water, stretched his legs, leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes.

A few days later, the father wrote to fellow-painter Berthe Morisot. I have a quite absurd piece of news for you... namely, the arrival of a second son. He is called Jean. Mother and baby are both in splendid health.

The Chteau des Brouillards, where the birth took place, was not a Gothic castle swathed in fog on the Normandy coast as its name might suggest, but was perched on the slope of the Butte in Montmartre, number six in a row of dwellings at 13 rue Girardon. Jean Renoir later described the houses thus: A hedge surrounded the property, which was composed of several buildings and a fine garden. Once you entered the wrought-iron gate you found yourself in a lane too narrow for a carriage to pass... the inhabitants, enclosed within the high hedge and enjoying a certain privacy behind the fences of their own small gardens, dwelt in a world apart, concealing endless fantasy under a provincial exterior... For most Parisians this little paradise of lilacs and roses seemed like the end of the world. Cab drivers refused to drive up the hill, stopping their cabs either at the place de la Fontaine du But [now called place Constantin Pecqueur], where you had to climb the slope to reach the house, or else at the rue des Abbesses, on the other side of the Butte where it crosses the rue Lepic... The difficulty of getting to the place was largely compensated for by the low rents, the fresh air, the cows, the lilacs and the roses.