The Moving Image

Though often overshadowed by the commercial success of Grand Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939), Jean Renoir's expansive and prolific career was marked by artistic specificity and an idiosyncratic repertoire that pushed particular films to an unclassifiable periphery. While the late 1930s and early 1940s found the Western world indulging in Michael Curtiz's quixotic portrayal of a Moroccan existence in Casablanca (1942) and Jean Gabin infusing the Casbah with charm and seduction as the alienated gangster exile in Julien Duvivier's 1937 Pépé le Moko, Jean Renoir offered a strikingly divergent presentation of place. Representing a span of fifteen years in Renoir's career, A Day in the Country (1936) and The River (1951), despite overt and expected differences, exhibit a distinct similarity in their treatment of foreignness and familiarity, the relationship between people and the places they occupy. Charged with a measured and meticulous attention to pace, Renoir's frequent use of long takes affords the viewer an opportunity to linger. In The River, subtle nuances of texture and composition, as well as the vibrant blue fabric of a dress flitting in front of the muted browns and burnt reds of the Bengal River, are integrated into the narrative, becoming at once spectacle and story. Agitating the otherwise absolute command of the narrative, Renoir couples unembellished story lines with visually arresting imagery and technique that are at once both gratifying and peculiar. Perhaps it is within this unconventional aggregate of story and style that Renoir is able to offer such a candid, vibrant portrayal of these places, as anchors against the transience of human existence.

Despite containing all the trappings of a satisfying linear narrative, A Day in the Country marshals a pronounced sensitivity to environment derived from its seemingly arbitrary narrative structure. With a running time of only forty-one minutes, the unimpeded plot chronicles a delightfully ingenuous family that, for reasons unknown to us, seek some respite from life in the city. With a casualness reflective of a country setting, the film unfolds as though it's unaware that it's being watched, the story line developing upon a series of elaborate yet ephemeral engagements with this foreign and unmediated space. In one such instance, Monsieur Dufour (André Gabriello) and his vacuous future son-in-law Anatole (Paul Temps) stand in a boat on the side of a river, contemplating the behavior of fish, to which, after a lengthy observation, Anatole muses, "If only we had fishing rods." Adding substance to this seemingly desultory piece of dialogue is the camera that slowly tilts down to reveal their misplaced bourgeois frames, complete with top hats, as reflections in the slightly agitated water (Figure 1). Here, within these uninhibited, microscopic encounters, the viewer becomes incapable of dismissing the interplay between the characters and their terrestrial surroundings, the stark contrast between the metropolitan gentility of Parisian culture and the unadorned simplicity of nature. These glimpses become an integral [End Page 119] component of Renoir's narrative sensibility as the essence of the culminating romance lies within the spectacle of foreignness, the vitality derived from the incompatible and the unfamiliar.

This sensorial environment is accentuated, in part, by its format as a short film, realized as a proximity between the viewer and the film's design (Renoir himself, even) that, despite its intangibility, remains detectable. This "intimacy," as characterized by Conn Holohan, hinges on the notion of time and the consequences of authorial selection when altering it cinematically. For example, the scene in which Monsieur Dufour and Anatole observe the fish at the river's edge is immediately juxtaposed with a similarly self-contained scene of Madame Dufour (Jane...