Boats on the Marne , livre ebook

BOATS ON THE MARNE
BOATS
on the
MARNE
JEAN RENOIR S CRITIQUE
of
MODERNITY

PRAKASH YOUNGER
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2017 by James Prakash Younger
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress .
ISBN 978-0-253-02901-0 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-02926-3 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-02942-3 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 22 21 20 19 18 17
This book is dedicated to
Jocelyn, Leela, and Meenakshi .
CONTENTS
Preface: The Enigma of La r gle du jeu
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Jean Renoir, Cinephilosopher
1. Genesis and Style of the French Renoir
2. Escaping from Flaubert; or, Reflecting on Romanticism
3. Loving the Distance; or, Historical Experience and the Fruits of Reflection
4. La r gle du jeu ; or, Putting Modernity in Question
Conclusion: Why La r gle du jeu Matters
Bibliography
Index
PREFACE: THE ENIGMA OF LA R GLE DU JEU
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.
Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, 1940
When I made La R gle du jeu I knew where I was going. I knew the malady that gnawed at the contemporary world. That doesn t mean that I knew how to give a clear idea of that malady in my film. But my instinct guided me. My awareness of danger furnished the situations and the lines, and my comrades felt like I did. How anxious we were! I think the film is good. But it s not so difficult to do good work when the compass of anxiety indicates the true direction.
Jean Renoir, Interview, 1952
THOUGH I FIRST SAW La r gle du jeu a long time ago, during my first year in college, I have never forgotten the astonishment of the experience. I was not far into the film when I caught a glimpse of something vital, the key to a mystery of human relations I had been wondering about in real life, and the expectation that this magical something was about to be revealed riveted my attention to every detail of events onscreen, carried me all the way to the end, when I realized that I had absolutely no clue whatsoever-only the vivid memory of having glimpsed one, blissful confirmation that the magical something existed. That glimpse felt like proof of something because, as far as I could tell, the film had just made me more intimate with a civilization that was completely strange to me than I had ever been with anything or anyone; since I could not have imagined such intimacy on the basis of past experience, could not even have colluded with the film to produce it, I figured it could only be, had to be, real -grounded in some deeper strata of existence that my world and the strange world of the film had in common. But what the magical something was, or by what incredible mechanism I had become intimate with an entire foreign civilization, I hadn t the slightest idea.

I know that as I watched the film I became acutely sensitive to what I might now call its ontological effects. As the intricate narrative unfolded, every detail and nuance of events seemed to add to a complex, ellipsis-ridden backstory, which I imagined in the form of a vast baroque coral reef, teeming with life; I sensed that this rapidly expanding enigma was never going to be resolved by the film and-somewhat logically-came to believe its source could only be located somewhere just behind the fiction, in the historical realities of the time when the film was made. But much stranger, I came to feel that this invisible Event behind the film s events had not yet finished happening , that, like the light and sounds that still travel to us from long-vanished stars, it was desperately trying to make itself manifest now, as I watched the film. Every shot in the film was alive and teeming with unfinished business, as if I was always just a moment too late (because it was too close, too distant, too fast, too slow, too loud, or too soft) to catch what was essential, which I nonetheless felt was somewhere right in front of me, patiently waiting to be seen and heard. A unique historical world was flaring up and vanishing before my eyes; everything had an unsettling poignancy, to the point where I could feel the cool, damp air of the hunt sequence against my skin, feel the heavy gray lid of that sky, imagine that I was somehow the first person-and might be the last person-to see all these strange and wonderful people alive. One catalyst for this weird way of watching the film must have been the indelible death spasm, the languid stretching and folding gesture of the rabbit at the end of the hunt; for reasons that are either obvious or impossible to explain, the patch of ground on which that rabbit dies always seems to be imperceptibly moving, a documentary evocation of the immense size and rotation of the planet at that very moment. In any case, I must really have dwelled on-or in-this wormhole in Time, for I came to believe the actors always knew their ultimate fate, exactly how ephemeral their world was in the grand scheme of things; beyond all reason, I thought I could see the actors knowing then that people like me would be watching them now , and because they kept this and their other secrets so perfectly, they made the entire film glimmer with an uncanny ironic familiarity, like a glistening eyeball.
Of course, when my brain cooled I realized I had it all backwards, that my hallucinations about the actors secrets were the result of having imbibed more uncanny ironic familiarity than I, as a cocky but naive undergraduate, was used to. But at the time, and as a sort of reflex to my time-traveling contemplations, I became starkly aware of the arbitrariness of the location to which I had returned, been thrown, when the film ended, that is, a university auditorium in Queen s Park, the leafy center of Toronto, Canada, planet Earth, in the early 1980s. 1 I sat for a while after the lights came back on, trying to secure all the pieces of the experience, and then walked in blissful lucidity through the cosmic dusk of the campus to the dining hall, where I got my supper and sat down with a few guys from my dorm. Our usual banter seemed totally absurd, and I must have been abnormally quiet because they looked at me strangely-and looked strange to me; I had a brief but agonizing moment of existential panic, as if seeing the film had permanently defamiliarized my world.

Back then there was nobody I could discuss the film with, and I would not in any case have known how to discuss it, with the same hyperbolic phrases- an infinite, teeming world or the precise flow of life or completely adult (meaning deeply experienced, flawed, human, conscious of mortality )-bouncing around in my head. Absorbing my professors passion for Foucault and Barthes, I was learning that any film is only a machine of culture designed to reproduce ideological effects, yet no amount of skeptical head-shaking could erase the impression that this particular film was somehow more real, or at least better digested , than real life itself: in no detail did it resemble my own experience of life, but in every detail I could see that it had thoroughly digested the life it had been given to digest. To me it was as complex and multifaceted as life but more intense and more distilled, infinitely fresh and surprising and yet, with each surprise, somehow more familiar; it was faster than anything I had ever experienced, like a raging mountain torrent, and yet, at the same time, crystal clear, a deep and limpid pool one could, in principle, see through to the very bottom. I had the sense that if I ever did get to the bottom of it I would also have caught up to my own life, grasped some of the logic behind the meandering routes it had taken.

Sharing this personal story is obviously not the most prudent way I could have started to explain what this book is about, but it seems relevant to disclose its roots in what, several decades later, still feels like a gift of chance, a message in a bottle that dropped into my lap from a starry night sky. Beyond its extravagance, my encounter with the film put me on a hook, created a void that was only aggravated by further screenings and amateur research, and I soon learned that both elements, the extravagance and the hook, were common to the experience of others, including the filmmaker Alain Resnais:
It remains, I think, the single most overwhelming experience I have ever had in the cinema. When I first came out of the theatre, I remember, I just had to sit on the end of the pavement; I sat there for a good five minutes, and then I walked the streets of Paris for a co