A Companion to Jean Renoir

Dubbed simply 'the best director' by François Truffaut, Jean Renoir is a towering figure in world film history. This exhaustive survey of his work and life features a comprehensive analysis of his films from the multiple critical perspectives of the world's leading Renoir scholars. Renoir's career spanned four decades and four countries and included an extraordinary body of films, some of which - La Grande illusion (1937) and La Règle du jeu (1939) - are universally recognized masterpieces. Fathered by the celebrated painter Pierre-Auguste, filmmaker Renoir lived through much of the 20th century, beginning his career in the silent era and ending it in full Technicolor. His films are notable for their paradoxical combination of strong internal coherence and thematic breadth and diversity, and provide a rich source for today's scholars of film history and French culture. This handbook, the largest volume on Renoir ever produced in the English language, ranges in scope from extreme close-up analysis of individual films, to long-shot explorations of his aesthetics and the social and cultural contexts in which he worked. The most ambitious critical study of Renoir to date, this book will appeal to film enthusiasts as much as scholars and specialists.