On the making of La Grande Illusion: “My chief aim was the one which I have been pursuing ever since I started to make films—to express the common humanity of men.” —Jean Renoir, 1974
Biography. Born September 15, 1894, in Montmartre, Paris, Jean Renoir was the second son of the great French Impressionist painter, Auguste Renoir, and is the young, blonde boy with curls featured in many of his father’s paintings. Auguste had served as a cavalryman during the Franco-Prussian War. Romanticizing the adventure of war, following his father’s footsteps, in 1913, Jean enlisted in the First Regiment of Dragoons. He was named an officer by the outset of the War in 1914. Like most other French officers, with modern warfare, the cavalry was quickly replaced with trench warfare, and Renoir joined the soldiers in the trenches. The adventure was ugly and brutal, and injured by a shell, he almost died when his leg turned gangrenous. He would limp for the rest of his life. Because of his injury, he returned to the war as a reconnaissance plane photographer. Behind a camera for the first time, he took photos of the German troops from a slow, twin-engine airplane. Opting for the more glamorous illusion of fighter pilot, Renoir flew numerous assignments until another injury placed him out of combat completely. On one mission, Renoir was attacked by another German aircraft. He was rescued by the French Pilot, Armand Pinsard. The leather jacket worn by the pilot Maréchal, in the film La Grande Illusion, is Renoir’s actual military flight jacket (O’Shaughnessy, 6; Macdonald, 146-171; Jackson 35-41).
Cinematic Career. Renoir began his film career directing a 1924 melodramatic silent film, La Fille de l’eau. His early films begin to show a consistent focus on cinematic technique and experimentation. The advent of sound coincided with Renoir’s active involvement with the left-wing Popular Front. With his film Toni (1934), Renoir begins a lifelong shift thematically to films that had political, social and working class themes (O’Shaughnessy, 7). Initially Renoir’s films were politically optimistic as the Popular Front rose to power in France. Films like La Grande Illusion (1937) shifted their focus from the bourgeoisie to the working class. With that movement’s fall in 1938, Renoir’s films shifted to a focus on the nation’s blindness, intimating that change was still possible. This theme was apparent in Renoir’s film La Règle du jeu (1939), which showed a self-centered, frivolous aristocracy, ignorant of the dangers of War (O’Shaughnessy, 10-11).
Cinematically, Renoir’s pre-war sound films are marked by what is known as poetic realism. Recognizing that the camera defines what it wants us to see on screen, Renoir consistently uses off-screen space to remind the viewer that what we do not see exists and is equally important. To achieve this mise-en-scene, he uses dolly tracking, panning shots, very long takes, and deep focus that allow us to see the background, middle ground and foreground so that the actors can fully engage with different social groups and conflicting spaces. By using this deep space, the audience may also choose what is important to witness (O’Shaughnessy, 10-11; Macdonald 154-158, 176, 185).
The end of an Era. After making more than sixty films from 1924 through the 1960s, Renoir died February 12, 1979 in Beverly Hills, California (Macdonald, 171).
* In general a detailed biography of Renoir’s life can be found in Macdonald’s 2014 book, In Search of La Grande Illusion at pages 146-195.
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