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Silent Renoir Philosophy and the Interpretation of Early Film Colin Davis Silent Renoir Colin Davis Silent Renoir Philosophy and the Interpretation of Early Film Colin Davis Royal Holloway, University of London London, UK ISBN 978-3-030-63026-3 ISBN 978-3-030-63027-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63027-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland A cknowledgements Friends and colleagues have supported the research that went into this book in innumerable direct and indirect ways. I would like to offer my warmest thanks to Molly Andrews, Jens Brockmeier, Sarah Cooper, Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, Christina Howells, Eneken Laanes, Jakob Lothe and Barry Nevin. In recent years my work has been invigorated by the encouragement and example of Hanna Meretoja, to whom I am deeply grateful. As ever, my greatest debt is to Jane Hiddleston and Natasha Davis, without whom none of this makes sense. Some of the material in Chap. 3 originally appeared in ‘Too Far or Not Far Enough?: Alain Badiou and the Hermeneutics of Small Moments’. From THE COMPARATIST. Vol. XXXVIII. Copyright © 2014 by the Southern Comparative Literature Association. Used by permission of the University of North Carolina Press. v c ontents 1 Introduction: Renoir Goes to the Cinema 1 1.1 Adventures in the Film Trade 4 1.2 From Apprentice to Master? 6 References 12 2 But Is It Art?: Heidegger, (Moving) Images and the Interpretation of Early Film 15 2.1 Heidegger and the Work of Art 18 2.2 Heidegger’s Shoes 22 2.3 Early Film 25 2.4 Films, Dreams and Nightmares 27 2.5 Conclusion 30 References 30 3 Philosophy and Film (Again): From Ontology to Hermeneutics 33 3.1 Badiou and Film 39 3.2 Renoir’s Small Revolution 45 3.3 Conclusion 47 References 51 4 Reading and Overreading Film 53 4.1 Reading Images 57 4.2 The Kuleshov Effect 59 vii viii CONTENTS 4.3 Interpreting Nana, Interpreting Nana 62 4.4 Conclusion 65 References 67 5 The Woman Who Wasn’t There: Catherine Hessling 69 5.1 Someone’s Looking at You: Nana 74 5.2 Negotiating Desire 78 5.3 Who Is Catherine Hessling? 83 References 84 6 The Missing Real: La Fille de l’eau and La Petite Marchande d’allumettes 85 6.1 The Hole in the Real: La Fille de l’eau 88 6.2 Screening the Real in La Petite Marchande d’allumettes 93 6.3 The Screen and the Real 99 References 101 7 In Pursuit of the Untamed Other: Sur un air de Charleston and Le Bled 103 7.1 How Racist Is Sur un air de Charleston? 105 7.2 How Colonialist Is Le Bled? 107 7.3 The Conquest of Algeria 110 7.4 Parallels, Inversions 115 7.5 Pursuits of the Other 118 7.6 Conclusion 121 References 122 8 Traces of War: Erasing Memory in Tire-au-flanc 123 8.1 The Idiot Poet 126 8.2 Erasing Violence 129 8.3 Reversibility 131 8.4 Conclusion 132 References 133 9 Conclusion 135 References 137 Index 139 l f ist of igures Fig. 3.1 Old friends (Le Bled) 46 Fig. 4.1 The baron disapproves (Nana) 63 Fig. 4.2 Fury (Nana) 64 Fig. 4.3 Despair (Nana) 65 Fig. 5.1 At the theatre (Nana) 76 Fig. 5.2 There’s someone watching you (Nana) 77 Fig. 5.3 Male bonding (Nana) 79 Fig. 5.4 Humiliation (Nana) 80 Fig. 5.5 The Eiffel Tower (Sur un air de Charleston) 82 Fig. 5.6 A woman at rest (Sur un air de Charleston) 82 Fig. 6.1 A nightmare (La Fille de l’eau) 89 Fig. 6.2 A falling angel (La Fille de l’eau) 90 Fig. 6.3 A ride in the sky (La Fille de l’eau) 91 Fig. 6.4 A ride in the sky (La Petite Marchande d’allumettes) 92 Fig. 6.5 A ride in the desert (Le Bled) 93 Fig. 6.6 Through the frosted glass (La Petite Marchande d’allumettes) 98 Fig. 7.1 The bond between France and Algeria (Le Bled) 111 Fig. 7.2 An invasion of tractors (Le Bled) 114 Fig. 7.3 Young lovers (Le Bled) 116 Fig. 7.4 ‘What we have done is shameful’ (Le Bled) 119 Fig. 8.1 A harmonious scene (Tire-au-flanc) 127 ix CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Renoir Goes to the Cinema Abstract The introductory chapter gives an account of Renoir’s earliest encounters with film as a young child, and his later engagement with film in the 1920s. He initially went into film (he claimed) in order to make a star of his wife, but he became bitten by the cinema bug. None of his silent films was a critical or commercial success, but he had discovered his vocation. Following Renoir’s own lead, critics and commentators (notably André Bazin, who was instrumental in consolidating Renoir’s reputation as a great cinematic auteur) describe the decade as his ‘apprenticeship’, during which he learned the foundations of his art. However, this entails a critical neglect of Renoir’s early films. The introduction makes the case for a re-assessment of the films on their own terms, and it outlines the structure and aims of the book. Keywords Renoir • Early cinema • André Bazin • Silent film In 1920 Jean Renoir was a man about town, enjoying life but lacking direction.1 He had served in the Great War, first in the cavalry and later in the air force, sustaining an injury to his leg which would cause him pain for the rest of his life. His father, the celebrated painter Pierre-Auguste 1 In this chapter I rely heavily on Pascal Mérigeau’s monumental biography Jean Renoir (2012). Other biographies, such as those by Bertin (1991) and Bergan (1992), also contain useful information. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1 Switzerland AG 2021 C. Davis, Silent Renoir, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63027-0_1 2 C. DAVIS Renoir, had died in 1919 and left him sufficiently well off to be able to maintain a privileged lifestyle. In January 1920 he married the beautiful nineteen-year-old Andrée Heuschling, known as Dédée, whom he had met whilst she was working as a model for his father. He dabbled in ceram- ics, but mainly the young couple took full advantage of their wealth. Their indulgence in pleasure was barely interrupted by the birth of their son, Alain, in 1921. In the early 1920s Paris sizzled (see McAuliffe 2016); and the Renoirs sizzled with it, with a taste for fast cars, jazz, night clubs, and everything else that affluence could offer. At the same time, they were looking for something more, something which appeared in their lives when they began to devote their time, energy and money to the cinema. By the end of the 1920s the marriage of Jean and Dédée was all but over; Renoir, however, had discovered his definitive vocation. Renoir was born in 1894, in the year before the Lumière brothers gave the first public demonstration of their new invention, the cinematograph. He was aware of film from his early childhood. In one account, he claims that he was two years old when he first saw a film: ‘My first contact with the cinema took place in 1897. I was a little more than two years old’ (2005: 12).2 This first encounter was not a success. According to the account of Gabrielle, his carer, the young child was frightened by the noise of the projector and the accompanying piano, and by the succession of incomprehensible images. He screamed and had to be taken away: ‘So my first encounter with the idol was a complete failure’ (2005: 14). Only later, according to another account, would he come to love cinema, on the occasion of a screening at his boarding school: ‘I love cinema since the year 1902. I was eight years old and I was a boarder in a sort of elegant prison adorned with the name of a school’ (2006: 53). After the end of the Great War, he became a committed lover of film, more specifically a lover of American film which by then dominated the cinemas: ‘We were shown two or three films at each session, and the programme changed twice a week. For a period I would sometimes go to the cinema three times a day, which means that by the time I went to bed I had taken on seven or eight films, fifty by the end of the week, and around two hundred by the end of the month’ (2006: 55). 2 Translations from French sources are my own. I include French words and expressions when the original formulation seems to me to be significant.