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Silent Renoir: Philosophy and the Interpretation of Early Film . By Colin Davis

2022; Oxford University Press; Volume: 76; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fs/knac187

1468-2931

Barry Nevin,

Philosophy, History, and Historiography

Ever since the 1950s saw the groundbreaking reassessment by Cahiers du cinéma of Jean Renoir’s œuvre, his reputation as the quintessential French auteur has relied heavily on his sound films of the 1930s, not least La Grande Illusion (1937) and La Règle du jeu (1939). In fact, Renoir’s status has arguably depended on the neglect of the eight aesthetically diverse silent films (including two shorts) that he directed during the 1920s. This oversight stems largely from the influential theory and criticism of André Bazin, who lionized Renoir but argued that the director required sound to reach his aesthetic peak as a realist director. Moreover, Renoir claimed to have become a director in the silent era solely to make a star of his then wife, Catherine Hessling (née Andrée Heuschling), and their partnership ended with the arrival of sound, having failed to reap any major commercial success. As Colin Davis observes in this enlightening and eloquently written monograph, ‘If Renoir had fallen under a bus in 1929, he would probably be remembered only for being his father’s son’ (p. 6). For many, these silent films remain inconsistent and aesthetically inferior drafts of the masterworks he directed from the rise of the Front populaire to the eve of the Second World War, but it is precisely this view that Davis seeks to look beyond. In the first three chapters, Davis engages with philosophical and hermeneutic issues regarding the interpretation of images as raised by Stanley Cavell, Heidegger, and Plato, among others, illustrating how Renoir’s silent films productively intersect with their concerns. Among the many provocative and insightful analyses developed in the chapters that follow are a reassessment of Hessling’s unusual (and often derided) acting style through the prism of Russian formalist theory; a reconsideration of the distinctly Renoirian motif of the window as a metonymic screen drawing on Plato and Cavell; a rich Levinasian interpretation of otherness in Sur un air de Charleston (1927); a study of class relations and military life in Tire au flanc (1928); and an especially welcome allegorical reading of Le Bled (1929) that centres on the tension between friendship and hierarchies in French Algeria. Through these studies, Davis also broaches broader questions regarding Renoir’s techniques, such as the director’s narrative style and his approach to adaptation as well as debates regarding authorship. Furthermore, departing from a longstanding tendency among scholars to focus on Renoir’s deployment of deep space and camera mobility, Davis refreshingly demonstrates the importance of montage to the filmmaker’s ambitions in the 1920s. Although Davis acknowledges that a number of Renoir’s collaborators, working methods, and themes would be carried over into the sound era, he consistently succeeds in resisting the temptation to view them as anticipations of the director’s better-known films of the 1930s. Whilst the latter are likely to remain central to any consensus on Renoir’s œuvre, Davis lucidly revises the silent films on their own terms and convincingly indicates their value to a comprehensive appreciation of the diversity and complexity of Renoir’s career.