During the summer we used a haunting picture of
Jean Renoir for Gotz Adriani's book on the painter (Yale).
If Greenaway can't put a couple of fine actors into a two-shot and come away with a watchable scene, well, that just proves he's more ideologically advanced than
Jean Renoir. Maybe so.
Filmmakers who have adapted Simenon's material include
Jean Renoir, Henry Hathaway, Burgess Meredith, Akiro Kurosawa and Claude Chabrol.
The "Rediscoveries" included festival cofounder Lucien Clergue, an internationally renowned photographer who hardly needs rediscovering but was rendered a marvelously unconventional homage through Parr's presentation of Clergue's own photographs and books, artworks acquired from friends named Picasso, Cocteau, and Cartier-Bresson, letters from the likes of
Jean Renoir and Edward Steichen, and all sorts of memorabilia from thirty-five years of Rencontres.
One wonders where the Lean adaptations of Dickens fit with such a culture, or, for that matter, the works of
Jean Renoir, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Bunuel, Michelangelo Antonioni, Orson Welles, Federico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Jean-Luc Godard, Max Ophuls, and the rest of the great achievements of the most-visionary art form of the 20th century.
Reminiscent of the best of Ken Loach in its treatment of social issues, of
Jean Renoir in its "everyone has his reasons" humanism and of the Dogma 95 aesthetic in its hand-held, ultra-realistic approach, Protection also features brilliant work from cast members Nancy Sivak, Jillian Fargey William MacDonald and solid technical support on all levels.
The designs were by that inspired artist Lotte Reiniger who once came to Midlands Arts Centre for a showing of her silhouette film Prince Ahmad where we interviewed and where Lotte told me of her long friendship with
Jean Renoir, the painter's son.
Jean Renoir built the same kind of neighborhoods in his mid-1930s movies (typically, in The Crime of Monsieur Lange) and there are glimpses of other landscape signatures in some recent Australian offerings--for example, Gillian Armstrong's working-class corner of Sidney in Starstruck.
Also in the works is a new restoration of
Jean Renoir's Italy-set classic "The Golden Coach," with Anna Magnani.
Our point of reference here is not the human body and the stable theatrical space of, say,
Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game but rather a dematerialized, pure spatiality.