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djoshuva's review against another edition
4.0
“For Renoir, what is important is not the dramatic value of a scene. Drama, action-in the theatrical or novelistic sense of the terms are for him only pretexts for the essential, and the essential is everywhere in what is visible, everywhere in the very substance of the cinema.” (32)
“The freedom of this construction, the contempt for dramatic and psychological verisimilitude, are the height of realism in the sense that Renoir, instead of taking the usual path from the idea to a simulated reality, imposes the idea by departing from reality. It is through Renoir's love, his sensibility, his intimacy with objects, animals, and people, that his moral vision confronts us so strikingly. With Renoir a swallow is enough to suggest spring.” (107)
“A Renoir film identifies itself instantly: the sensuality, the sense of happiness with its sharp counterpoint of skepticism and irony, but a smiling skepticism and an irony without bitterness. Cruel sometimes. but only out of tenderness. Its cruelty is objective; it is nothing more than the acknowledgment of destinies at odds with happiness, the measure of a love without constraint and without illusion. Its sympathy always goes out to the victim. Renoir has a sense of the tragic, but he does not dwell on it; not because he does not respect it, but because the only way to overcome destiny is to believe in happiness in spite of it.” (108)
“The entire work of Jean Renoir is an ethic of sensuality; not the affirmation of an anarchic rule of the senses or of an unrestrained hedonism, but the assurance that all beauty, all wisdom, and even all intelligence live only through the testimony of the senses. To understand the world is above all to know how to look at it and to make it abandon itself to your love under the caress of your eye.” (146)
“The freedom of this construction, the contempt for dramatic and psychological verisimilitude, are the height of realism in the sense that Renoir, instead of taking the usual path from the idea to a simulated reality, imposes the idea by departing from reality. It is through Renoir's love, his sensibility, his intimacy with objects, animals, and people, that his moral vision confronts us so strikingly. With Renoir a swallow is enough to suggest spring.” (107)
“A Renoir film identifies itself instantly: the sensuality, the sense of happiness with its sharp counterpoint of skepticism and irony, but a smiling skepticism and an irony without bitterness. Cruel sometimes. but only out of tenderness. Its cruelty is objective; it is nothing more than the acknowledgment of destinies at odds with happiness, the measure of a love without constraint and without illusion. Its sympathy always goes out to the victim. Renoir has a sense of the tragic, but he does not dwell on it; not because he does not respect it, but because the only way to overcome destiny is to believe in happiness in spite of it.” (108)
“The entire work of Jean Renoir is an ethic of sensuality; not the affirmation of an anarchic rule of the senses or of an unrestrained hedonism, but the assurance that all beauty, all wisdom, and even all intelligence live only through the testimony of the senses. To understand the world is above all to know how to look at it and to make it abandon itself to your love under the caress of your eye.” (146)
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