7 Results
The Rules of the Game: Everyone Has Their Reasons
By February 1939, it no longer seemed evident that the surrender of Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler at Munich had “saved the peace.” A sense of doom was beginning to hang over Europe. In this atmosphere, Jean Renoir, anticipating war and deeply tr…
West Meets East
If we adapt the language of horse breeders to the genealogy of films, one might write Yojimbo, by Shane out of Scarface.But while this odd coupling does suggest the most obvious hereditary traits of Kurosawa’s black comedy, it fails to capture the …
8½: A Film with Itself as Its Subject
8½: a bizarre and puzzling title, but one precisely appropriate for this film, which announces in its first frame that modernism has reached the cinema. If the mark of modernism in art is self-reference, 8½ surely goes beyond any predecessor in hav…
Jean Renoir’s The Lower Depths
In 1936 the rise of Hitler in Germany and the Popular Front in France created within the French Left a new sense of solidarity with the Soviet Union. In that context the Russian immigrant producer Alexander Kamenka asked Jean Renoir to direct a film …
Ikiru
In the movies as in life, love and death hold sway, exerting an irresistible attraction on our imagination. Love usually dominates in cinema; we sit entranced for hours as affairs of the heart wax and wane. Death seldom holds the field for so long, b
…The River
Jean Renoir’s hopes for a Hollywood production of The River had languished for two years when, in November 1948, a meeting with a Beverly Hills florist sent him on a reconnaissance trip to Calcutta. This inspired an unexpected independent film of g…
Rashomon
Three men seek shelter from the rain under the ruined gate of the ancient city of Kyoto. There is nothing to do but talk, about a topic which torments two of the wayfarers, who have just been witnesses in a police court inquiry. In the woods a woman …