Directing
Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir (15 September 1894 – 12 February 1979) was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s. As an author, he wrote the definitive biography of his father, the painter, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Renoir, My Father (1962).
In the 1930s, Renoir was associated with the Popular Front, and several of his films reflect the movement's left-wing politics and deal with social issues as well as class disparities. He was perhaps the most significant director of the poetic realism movement. The satirical comedy-drama film The Rules of the Game (1939) is often cited by critics as among the greatest films ever made; it is the only film to earn a place among the top ten films in the respected British Film Institute's Sight & Sound decennial critics' poll for every decade from the poll's inception in 1952 through the 2012 list. Other important works are Grand Illusion (1937), A Day in the Country (1946) and The River (1951).
Andrew Sarris in his influential book of film criticism The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968 included him in the "pantheon" of the 14 greatest film directors who had worked in the United States.
Filmography
Browse movies and TV shows featuring Jean Renoir
Cinépanorama
Encyclopédie audiovisuelle du cinéma
Produced for television by Claude-Jean Philippe, the « Encyclopédie audiovisuelle du cinéma », recounts the his...
The Rules of the Game
The Marquis de la Chesnaye and his wife host a weekend gala where a variety of complicated romantic and social...
La Bête Humaine
Returning by train to the French port of Le Havre, Jacques Lantier, a tormented railwayman, meets by chance the...
A Day in the Country
The family of a Parisian shop-owner spends a day in the country. The daughter falls in love with a man at the i...
The Christian Licorice Store
A tennis champ falls in with the Hollywood crowd, finds himself being corrupted by the life in the fast lane.
The Little Theatre of Jean Renoir
Three vignettes and a musical interlude showcase acclaimed auteur Jean Renoir's eclectic range at the end of hi...
François Truffaut l'insoumis
This portrait of the world-famous French director based on his personal correspondance reveals the little known...
Life Is Ours
A propaganda film of the communist party of France, showing how the comrades help the proletariat against the c...
Jean Renoir: Part One - From La Belle Époque to World War II
Part one of a BBC documentary about Jean Renoir.
The Emma Bovary Trial
On January 31, 1857, the French writer Gustave Flaubert (1821-80) took his place in the dock for contempt of pu...
Little Red Riding Hood
This is 1929: the little red riding hood is still with us and her life is more complicated than ever. She still...
Backbiters
About the conflict between social classes through the life of the unhappy Catherine Ferrand, an orphan girl, wh...
Le Parti du cinéma
Louis Lumière
Eric Rohmer leads a conversation with Jean Renoir and Henri Langlois on the art of filmmaker Louis Lumière.
Quand Jean devint Renoir
The fascinating story of a man destined to be only a son of and who sought all his life to become "someone" by...
Langlois
Documentary portrait of Henri Langlois, co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française.
Mam'zelle Nitouche
Célestin, the organist of a convent, has written and composed a light operetta under the name of Floridor. One...
The Spanish Earth
Joris Ivens’s advocacy documentary for the Republican cause intercuts a besieged Madrid with a nearby village d...
Jean Renoir parle de son art
Three-part interview with French film director Jean Renoir, conducted by French New Wave director Jacques Rivet...
Jean Renoir, le patron, 3e partie: La règle et l'exception
In the third part of a Cinéastes triptych on Jean Renoir, the director sits alone in a cinema analyzing scenes...
D'un Céline l'autre
Passers-by, those who knew him in his youth, René Barjavel, witness of his beginnings, his wife, his doctor, wr...
Jean Renoir, le patron, 2e partie: La direction d'acteur
Second in the documentary trilogy from mastermind Jacques Rivette, featuring a conversation between Jean Renoir...
Those of Our Land
With family connections to some famous French artists, writers, and musicians of the time, Sacha Guitry decided...
Charleston Parade
Shot in three days, this surreal, erotic silent short shows a native white girl teaching a futuristic African a...
Jean Renoir, le patron, 1re partie: La recherche du relatif
The first of three documentaries by Rivette on Jean Renoir.
L'album de famille de Jean Renoir
The Pursuit of Happiness
Un tournage à la campagne
Edited from 4½ hours of unused material left over from the shooting of Jean Renoir's 1936 PARTIE DE CAMPAGNE (A...
Cinéastes de notre temps : Erich von Stroheim
Postface: La Petite Marchande d'allumettes
Jean Renoir talks about the making of La Petite Marchande d'allumettes.
La règle du jeu de Jean Renoir: Une analyse du film par l'image
This analysis is based on an ideological commentary on Renoir's film. From the beginning, the reading, unilater...
La P’tite Lili
La P’tite Lili is a silent short drama depicting the fate of a young orphaned girl in the working-class distric...
Directing Actors by Jean Renoir
A example of Jean Renoir's talents as a director as he works Gisèle Braunberger into the right frame of mind.