The River is an experiment in ways of depicting personal development. The American films were partly unsuccessful because of their acting style. Acting for psychological description, constantly metaphorical about something larger than the character himself, is always somewhat faked; the drama, always somewhat illusionistic. Renoir couldn't build a drama of any complexity and richness of interplay from acting that had to be so clear, not to say didactic.

In The River he had all his characters underplay their parts. He used them purely as positions in the frame around which he built his drama. He thus managed to create a social milieu for the English just out of people's positions in the frame, and by inter-cutting shots which are essentially the points of view of the English, he then represented their experiences directly while his other shots illustrated their social dynamics and development. A split persists, though, between the point-of-view shots, which illustrate a recurring patterned social world, and the English shots which document development. The connection is purely ideal (as, strictly speaking, it is purely visual): the narrator's feeling that her development makes her a part of the vast process of degeneration and recreation, cyclical flow, she sees happening around her.

Renoir's treatment of the English and his treatment of the Indians are quite different. The Indians have no individuality; their activity is treated as a natural process. In a sequence at a jute mill. Renoir shows three men's legs moving in unison, then a line of about seven Indians carrying bundles of raw jute into the mill across the screen, then groups of Indians putting jute through machines--following the journey of the jute and treating the Indians as so much more machinery. Similarly, the film's first shots are of a man singing in a boat panning up and out to longer shots of the river with its boats; cutting to a barge and showing a gang of men rowing in unison, focusing closely on the coordinated rhythms of their limbs, then cutting to a slow pan over the river-scape. The activity of the men and the flow of the river are seen as one. The non-differentiation of foreground and its action from background is emphasized by pans, which stress the surface of the shot by presenting a series of people or objects as if they were a screen (across which the camera moves).

The visual and script treatment of the English, though, stresses their individuality. It relies on their relations to each other (whereas the Indians are lined up together like inanimate objects) and builds their personal development--at least that of the three girls. Their characters are established by camera tracks. An early shot of Captain John tracks into his figure in bed; the narration stresses his immaturity and isolation as the shot creates a special space around him. The camera track reveals his self-indulgence and passivity, a reflection of his wish to have people come to him.

In general these tracks create depth around each character by involving them in depth. Moving in or out on characters, they give them greater importance and size dramatically as visually. Dramatic placing built on this technique gives each character his own space in which he acts and interacts. More responsive to individual actions than pans, these tracks' motion develops characters. They change the relation of foreground to background and with it the moral relation of the character to us.

These social relations, the perception of the English social milieu, are colored very strongly by one point of view--that of the narrator. She is at once the most imaginative and the most isolated. The visual expression of this is an image crucial to The River because it defines one pole of the experience the film treats. The image is of her hiding-place, a hole cut out of the wall which is her personal space. In it she daydreams and writes poetry. The place of the most personal depth and isolation is the basis for the most complete personal experience and development.

The other pole of the movie's experience is the objects and people seen. Here the Indians and their land can be connected to the English: almost every sequence of Indian activity is presented as the Englishmen's experience. The flatness of these shots expresses the Englishmen's isolation from their experience. Only one Englishman tries to go beyond this vicarious experience of India, to assimilate himself into the Indian world. The little boy tries to charm a snake; he is bitten and dies. The way to participate in the Indians' world of recurring natural process is, rather through poetry and vision--vicariously, ideally. We see this not only above, but in the last shot. The three developing girls, including the narrator, line up on the veranda; the camera tracks in on them, over their heads, and down to the river. The shot at once shows their isolation from their background, their distant purely mental link to this background, and the similarity of their vicarious experience of this world to ours.

Golden Coach's plot can be summarized as a series of transformations, actors into audience and audience into actors. The Italians on stage observe and judge their Spanish audience as acutely as the Spaniards judge them. Anna Magnani continually puts off her mask only to find that she is playing a role again. The Viceroy can control his Spanish nobles as long as he maintains a style that dazzles them. When he tries to penetrate everybody's masks to find the reality behind, their material power confronts his power and he is defeated. For Renoir, penetrating is not the way to discover the sesence of others or oneself. This essence exists within the social process; one must submit to this process, play along, to understand the greatness of people.

In Golden Coach the theater is a metaphor for the social process. The Coach, for example, is a magnificent spectacle that keeps everyone in awe and in line. The symbol of power and wealth alone generates authority. The error of the Spanish nobles, the reason they are such shallow men, is that they proceed directly from the material (gold) to the symbolic, not realizing the necessity of the spiritual factor to the symbolic. The Italians, conscious of the importance of imagination, put on a far better show. They are more in touch with themselves; their consciousness of their roleplaying (Magnani looking in the mirror sees Theater) refers them constantly back to their own lives and desires and imaginations. They, in particular Magnani, show those qualities Renoir thinks essential to greatness in men. The Spaniards, who never look at themselves, are unaware that their facade is shallow and without real style.

Magnani is probably the outsider of this film. She is vindicated by a plot reversal: the Bishop is on the side of actors, the world (in terms of its power-authority structure, and thus in terms of what characters can do) is a stage after all. But to win, to survive, she has had to surrender herself to art. It seems that she has given herself to the Church--her pledge to the Bishop, her black costume. She has renounced her most prized possession, even (one feels from the epilogue in front of the curtain) renounced the world. Now she will exist only for the stage, on stage--because in terms of human greatness that is all you can have. That's because acting is a heightening of the social process--and for Renoir the social process is the only real thing in life.

The period setting of Golden Coach establishes it as an artificial drama. Renoir handles the sets so as to allow each character his personal part; there are endless blind walls and corners in which one-minute acts are performed. The shooting style also presents the characters vividly, bringing their acts across as it tends to close shot vignette of the heroes and facade-emphasizing medium shots of the Spaniards, who remain at a distance from us and never become full people. Toward the end of the film, though, Renoir begins to dismantle his sets, tracking for example across the interiors of three rooms (sitting room, anteroom, and council chamber) as the Viceroy's conflicting parts takes him from one stage to the other. Renoir cuts in close shot of Magnani fullface in the scene where all her lovers come to visit her; she seems alone and nowhere, none can reach her. The next scene, of the plot reversal and Magnani's self-sacrificing triumph, is mostly in long shot with motions tending to ritual--Renoir is beginning to separate us from his characters and abstract the drama. The final abstraction comes when he tracks out from his last shot, only to have the curtain fall and Magnani come out before it. Isolated on a bare forestage, no depth behind her, she delivers her last lines to us. Her self-awareness has reached a new height, and she has accepted her part in the play, which means that she cannot penetrate beneath its surface but must remain part of its flow. Her last lines apply to Golden Coach as well as to herself, and thus make the film self referential and completely closed.

French Can-Can also describes the assimilation of a person, in this case a young girl, into the world of Art. Set in Paris of the late eighteen-hundreds, it tells the story of an old showman who decides to invent a new dance routine and build a new night club, the Moulin Rouge, for it. He gets together a troupe of girls--young, for the dance demands suppleness--and painstakingly trains them. After great difficulty he reaches opening night--and the head of his troupe catches him kissing an older woman. Having believed he loved her, she throws a tantrum and refuses to dance. The showman/artist tells her, in a long speech at the heart of Renoir, that Art is bigger than her narrow desires; she may quit, but she will never be an artist. She decides at the last minute to go on, thus losing her other lover. The last shots of the film show the dance beginning.

Despite the similarity of its theme, Can-Can is an entirely different movie from Golden Coach. Renoir builds a period world, a background which has a life of its own. Whereas all Golden Coach's backgrounds were at least three-dimensional sets, Renoir actually uses painted backdrops in some scenes of Can-Can. They evoke the era with a coloristic grandeur--the film has been called "Impressionist", but is bigger in scale than Impressionist paintings--and give the foreground action a real background. The spirited activity of the characters has a last found a worthy setting. The background colors the action of every shot and shapes the characters to its gay, idealistic quality.

Renoir's magnificent use of angled long shot climaxes in two crucial scenes. The first shows the principal girl when she has just turned down an offer of marriage from a young nobleman. She goes out of the frame, leaving him standing against a column in a huge hall; the scene is shot long, at an angle, so that he is completely alone, yet surrounded by a sympathetic seting. The deep setting maintains great, deep space around him which at once isolates him and gives great freedom of movement; its colors and columns echo his figure and make his situation, rather than simply barren, one with many possible choices. This depth-filled scene shows a moment of strong emotional experience and important personal decision. Renoir cuts outdoors and we hear a pistol shot.

The film's last sequence, of the dance, is shot in the same hall, now darkened and intensely colored as it is filled with spectators. Into its center jump the girls--one from off right, another from the balcony. Their white and red dresses pick up the light and they become a mass, distinguishable yet unified, of forms in motion. They are set in the middle of the long shot; Renoir cuts closer and farther, but each shot maintains a balance between the dark forms in fore ground and the light ones in the center, and integrates the two through color. Characters and background remain two terms defining each other, yet they harmonize perfectly. The physical motion of the sequence sweeps us into a transcedent motion whose visual appearance completely carries its ideal quality. Everything, every spirit, is incorporated into the work of art in motion.