Paintings by Auguste Renoir are echoed in scenes from the films of his son Jean, at a major Paris exhibition, writes Lara Marlowe
The influence of Impressionist painting on 20th-century French cinema is not obvious, but it is the underlying assumption of Renoir/Renoir, the splendid exhibition which the French Cinémathèque is holding to celebrate its re-opening in September.
Auguste Renoir was the Impressionist painter par excellence. His second son Jean, born in 1894, became one of France's greatest film-makers. Both men loved voluptuous women, sun-dappled water, foliage quivering in wind, long grass and joyous dancers. Jean even named one of his best known films Déjeuner sur l'Herbe, after a painting by Manet, one of his father's drinking buddies.
The Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyons' recent exhibition, Impressionism and the Birth of Cinematography, showed how the Lumière brothers, who invented the motion picture camera, (perhaps unconsciously?) adopted the lexicon of Impressionist painting: a young girl with a cat, the Pont Neuf, gondolas in Venice, the approach of a steam train. Film also changed art because there was no longer any point in realism. Painters moved on to fauvism, cubism and abstraction.
In the Paris exhibition, paintings by Renoir père are juxtaposed with scenes from the films of Renoir fils. The comparison is sometimes tenuous, and the show - like their paintings and films - is dictated more by feeling than a rational structure. At times it is merely a pretext to display Auguste's paintings. They are magnificent, so any excuse is a good one.
"Don't trust people who are not moved by a pretty bosom," the painter told his son Jean. The exhibition shows Auguste's Torse Effet de Soleil, painted in 1876, alongside the scene from Déjeuner sur l'Herbe where an uptight scientist suddenly wakens to the Dionysian possibilities of life when he happens upon young Nénette bathing nude.
Renoir's 1959 film had a modern twist: Nénette pursues the scientist because she wants to have a baby through artificial insemination.
Renoir filmed Déjeuner at Les Collettes, a provençal farmhouse set among olive trees, which Auguste considered paradise on earth, and the home where he had died 40 years earlier, clutching his paintbrush and palette.
Father and son were most similar when joyous. "I don't trust people who 'think'," Jean Renoir said. "I look, I listen, I touch, I sniff, and that is enough for me!" A scene in Jean's 1936 Partie de Campagne, where a young woman stands on a swing while her admirers look on consciously imitates Auguste's 1876 La Balançoire.
The finale of Jean's French Cancan (1955), in which dancing girls perform splits and somersaults among the laughing clients of the Moulin Rouge is probably the most exuberant scene in cinema history. Like the ball in Elena et les Hommes, it is a tribute to Auguste's Bal du Moulin de la Galette, La Danse à la Campagne and La Danse à la Ville, all masterpieces on loan from the Musée d'Orsay.
Like father; like son. Jean's mother Aline was a 20-year-old hat-maker when Auguste spotted her in the street outside his studio and asked her to model for him. Jean fell in love with and married his father's last model, Andrée Heuschling, whom he renamed Catherine. He said he'd become a film-maker out of love, to make Catherine a star. She left him when he chose another actress for his first talking picture.
Both painter and director involved their loved ones in their oeuvre. Auguste made hundreds of paintings of his wife and sons. Two paintings of Jean as a child, with his adored nursemaid Gabrielle, are particularly tender.
Jean continued the tradition, asking his older brother Pierre to act in his films. In an excerpt from the 1937 film La Marseillaise, we see Pierre as Louis XVI, stuffing himself with game and wine after a hunt as the Duc de La Rochefoucault tells him the Revolution has started.
Claude Renoir jnr, Jean's nephew, was his favourite cameraman. Claude strapped himself to the front of a locomotive for La Bête Humaine, the 1938 story of a train driver who commits murder.
Jean Renoir often acted in his own films. In La Règle du Jeu, he plays Octave, the over-size, generous friend who attempts to reconcile quarrelling lovers and unwittingly causes disaster. Renoir called La Règle du Jeu "a happy tragedy". The cynical tale of love among upper-class French people during a weekend in the country is now considered his finest. But when the film was first shown in 1939, French audiences booed it.
Renoir was so hurt that he considered leaving the cinema forever. Instead, he went to the US, where he made five films. La Règle du Jeu was not shown again in its original form for 25 years.
Renoir chose Jean Gabin, the Gérard Depardieu of his day, to play Danglard, the charming impresario who creates the Moulin Rouge in French Cancan. Like Renoir, Danglard goes broke financing his dreams; like Renoir, he transforms women into stars, only to move on to new conquests. Bourgeois comfort, money and morality are not important; art is the only thing that matters.
As a director, Jean Renoir was often a step ahead of evolving 20th-century cinema, embracing each new innovation, from silent pictures to talkies to the brilliance of Technicolor and the true-to-life style of New Wave. Francois Truffaut adored Renoir and though they were of different generations, the directors became close friends.
Renoir's happy childhood left him with a sunny character. He never shouted at actors, and when a scene had to be re-shot he'd say: "That was great! Great! What do you say we do it again, just for the pleasure?" Jean Renoir was nonetheless a lucid observer of his catastrophic century. He and his brother Pierre were both badly wounded in the first World War. The title of La Grande Illusion (1937), about French prisoners of war, alludes to the illusion that there would be no more wars. While his father Auguste never painted a sad painting, some of Jean's films - especially Toni (1935) and La Bête Humaine - are dark.
At the Cinémathèque's exhibition, a portrait of Jean Renoir en chasseur, painted by his father Auguste in 1910, is compared to the hunting scene from La Règle du Jeu. Jean loved the painting and kept it with him his whole life.
As beaters advance through the underbrush, rabbits and fowl emerge to be shot dead in rapid succession by the Marquis' weekend guests. The scene could be interpreted as an allegory for the violence of human relationships, but critics subsequently saw the slaughter of the innocent animals as a premonition of the coming war.
Renoir/Renoir is at the Cinémathèque Française until Jan 9, 2006 - at 51, rue de Bercy, 75012 Paris, Metro Bercy. Open noon until 7pm (10pm Thurs). Closed Tues. See www.cinematheque.fr
