silver nitrate notes

La Règle du Jeu and the Depth of the Staircase

27 feb 2017

Jean Renoir's La Règle du Jeu (1939) was released in July 1939, six weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War. The French audience rioted. The film was pulled from distribution, re-cut for commercial release, banned by the Vichy government in 1940, and thought lost when the original negative was destroyed in an Allied bombing in 1942. In 1956, a group of French film historians reconstructed the original from two surviving prints. What they recovered is widely considered the best French film of the 1930s, and, on some lists, the best film of any kind made anywhere.

The cinematographer was Jean Bachelet (1894-1977), Renoir's regular collaborator since his immediate predecessor La Bête humaine (1938). What Bachelet and Renoir achieve in La Règle du Jeu is a deep-focus technique two years before Toland's work on Citizen Kane. The great interior set, the country estate of the Marquis de la Chesnaye, is photographed so that action in the foreground, middle distance, and background is all in focus simultaneously. The famous party sequence, where multiple characters conduct multiple affairs and the servants observe from various angles, is staged so that the camera can rest on any part of the frame and find a story in progress.

Renoir plays Octave, one of the film's main characters, himself. The decision was not vanity. He wanted to direct the film from inside the frame rather than from behind the camera, which meant he needed a cinematographer who could work without constant direction. Bachelet took the film's technical planning largely onto his own shoulders. Shot lists, lens choices, lighting setups: all Bachelet's. Renoir directed the actors, including himself.

The film's politics are sometimes described as liberal, sometimes as cynical, sometimes as bourgeois. All three descriptions are partially correct. What the film indisputably is, is a moral inventory of French society at the moment of its collapse. The rules that the aristocracy observes (sexual fidelity of a certain calibrated insincerity, hunting etiquette, a formality that everyone understands as a game) are the rules the war is about to end. Renoir knew this. The film is his farewell to the social order he had spent his career observing.

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sources
[1] Bazin, André. Jean Renoir. Simon & Schuster, 1973.
[2] Sesonske, Alexander. Jean Renoir: The French Films, 1924-1939. Harvard UP, 1980.
[3] Renoir, Jean. My Life and My Films. Atheneum, 1974.
[4] O'Shaughnessy, Martin. Jean Renoir. Manchester UP, 2000.