JEAN RENOIR has had one of the longest and most varied careers of all directors. Always an experimentalist, Renoir did not stop inventing new genres of film after the thirties, as The River (1950) and Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe (1959) show. At the same time each of his films has roots in the social and intellectual trends of its historical moment.

Within this variety is an astounding unity of vision and method. Renoir's view of people's actions and their place in the world hardly changed in forty years of film-making. The vision he imposed on his material made his films closed works of art describing a closed social order and pattern of lie. An expressive rather than an analytic director, he did not build his films around a scheme of personal development, but instead knitted all patterns of human and natural action into a single pattern within each film.

This article describes his most important films individually and chronologically in order to establish simple terms of analysis and develop them. The points made for one film can be applied to all.

THE EARLY FILMS: spirited rebels against closed worlds.

Nana's dramatic-visual technique reveals characteristics of Renoir's sensibility and style which last throughout his career. The drama depends on strong-as-possible establishment of characters. Each shot is a vignette in which background and lighting are used solely to express a character's emotions and desires.

Taken from Zola's Naturalist novel, Nana shows people's lives fatally ruled by simple drives. A cafe dancer named Nana uses wealthy men to advance her station. Her single-minded selfishness drives two to kill themselves because they can't win her; a third, Comte Muffat, goes to her bedside when she's dying despite the danger of catching her pneumonia. The fatal love of these men for Nana is simple and unchanging.

Renoir accepts this strong and simple view of motivation. His use of the entire frame to describe each character's emotional makeup means that (1) any shot of a given character looks much the same as the others, since characters' psychological makeup remain constant; (2) successive shots are disjunct because the background, manipulated to support one character, changes for another. The background has no consistency; it is not an independent entity.

A figure distant in a frame is, in general, week compared to a figure close to the camera. Changing characters' distance from the camera is a way of making them more or less strong and immediate. The characters of Nana are always coming into close shot, asserting their power. Here again the background loses out; the characters fill the frame with their personalities, or rather unchanging personal' essences.

The peculiar power of Renoir's frontal compositions culminates near the end, when characters really begin coming into the foreground. The apparition of one of the men Nana drove to suicide appears when she lies dying in bed. He points his hand accusingly at her; Renoir shoots him straight on, his hand clawing toward us. This is intercut with symmetrical frontal shots of Nana in bed surrounded by curtains--only to be followed by a symmetrical shot of Muffat entering the room. These close shots following one another push the film to a climax.

The climax is a track in on her dead body. It shows her unchanged, the same center of power and attraction she has been through the film. It vindicates her by increasing and establishing, once and for all, her strength.

Built on a view of motivation (Naturalism) that is fixed and simple, Nana is often tedious. Its immediate interest lies in Renoir's quick establishment of a particular social milieu in secondary characters--Nana's maid and manager. Its rare long shots also evoke this period. Renoir's method of establishing character is never again so unrelieved; but it never loses the immediacy, simplicity, and unchangeability from which the characters of Nana suffer.

In the very first shots of Petite Marchande Renoir overrides clear narrative progress to create quite a different effect. The superimposition of the first title on a whitish image, and the composition of the first several shots with show falling in the foreground, establish a fairy-tale world in which a white screen separates the viewer from real objects. The first three shots--a very long shot of the town, a medium long shot of it with a train running across the background, and a medium shot of the match girl's hut--are a silent film's normal way of establishing a setting and moving in to the specific scene of action. The action here begins early, with the train running and the girl opening the hut's door. But instead of showing the next step in the action, Renoir cuts to a close shot of a post swaying beside the door as if to present the essence of the action of the snow and wind. Then he cuts to a medium shot and a diagonal long shot of the hut from above. Having established the action, he is separating us from it, pushing us out into the cold. Shown the situation close up and forcefully, we are removed from it and left only with a sense of the planes and light of the scene.

Renoir uses space in Petite Marchande to create two planes, of which one (black) is real and one (white) is not. Thus the opening shots of snow falling between the camera and the girl create an entire plane, a screen that separates us from her. When she looks through a window into a warm restaurant, the window at once separates her from what she wants (warmth and company) and expresses the notion that the view is an illusion--a notion reinforced by reverse-angle shots which show only her face through the frosted plane.

The idea of her physical surroundings as an imaginary view is carried through a sequence in a toy shop. Mechanical movements of dolls in the background, huge foreground objects that destroy our sense of scale, create unreal planes that detach her and us from the action. The following sequence, in which Death pursues her and a young soldier (both on horses) in the sky, abstracts the image and physical motion still further. The background becomes pure white, a single plane. White is pushed entirely to the back, so that it no longer separates the actors from us; it is thus reduced as far as possible, so that these scenes are the most immediate and the most real of the film. The characters are most solidly established; there is nothing but them against the screen. Their struggle, against Death, is most desperate. The acting style becomes more direct and potent; the positioning of characters in the frame, the angle their bodies form as pure black shapes often in silhouette, their simple expressions and body movements completely express the drama. The means and effect of Renoir's expression are here completely united, integrated with his dramatic method.

Therefore it's noteworthy that this sequence of the struggle, of two lovers against Death, doesn't treat any kind of personal development or change. Its dramatic premise, the tension that moves it, is the unchanging opposition of their spirits to their situation. Renoir stylizes these shots to express the situation and their opposition as vividly as he can. Outsiders in a cold world closed to them, they cannot penetrate through its white screens to something real and human. They want something more than do the other characters who move doll-like through the streets. They are killed by one of their own kind--Death is as black, as real, and in a sense as full of spirit as they--who is nevertheless the executioner of the closed world that rejects them. the plot recurs through Renoir's films.