Impressionism is my favorite style of painting so I was really enchanted with this biography. Written by Renoir's middle son, Jean, Renoir, My Father not only gives us an intimate look at the life of Auguste Renoir, it gives us an intimate look at the Paris of Renoir's day as well.

As we get to know Renoir we get to know his contemporaries, too. Jean Renoir writes about Monet, Cezanne, Manet, Sisley and many other great artists. We learn many "little known" facts, such as Monet's penchant for lace and his "artful" way with the ladies.

Paris really comes alive in this book. Many of the places Renoir writes about still exist and can be visited today. This book makes any art lover's trip to Paris more meaningful whether he's a Renoir fan or not.

When reading this book, one must remember that this is not a "run of the mill" biography. This is a son writing about the father he adored. The portrait we are given is very intimate, detailed and loving. It's obvious that Jean Renoir adored his father, just as Auguste Renoir adored his family.

Ultimately, this book is a beautiful tribute from a loving son to a father who was one of history's consummate artists. If you have any interest at all in art, this is one book you simply must not pass up. The last page alone will break your heart.

Renoir was far more than one of the world's greatest artists. He was an adventurer, a family man, a man who held interesting views on just about every subject under the sun, and finally, in his later years, a martyr to life. Although this book was written by Renoir's middle son, Jean, it is as vibrant and alive as if Renoir, himself, had just written the words in his own hand. Through this book we learn how the Renoir family left its roots in Limoges and moved to Paris. We read of Renoir's early years as a painter of porcelain and how and why he became an artist, more specifically, an Impressionist. We learn of Renoir's marriage to Aline Charigot of Essoyes, the birth of his three sons and his move to the south of France. Some of the most interesting sections of the book deal with Renoir's feelings about the effect of light on a painting and why he needed to paint in a "natural" setting. Also, most interesting are the chapters on the birth of Impressionism and Renoir's relationships with the other artists of the time, such as Monet, Manet, Sisley and Cezanne, just to name a few. Lovingly and charmingly written, this book truly brings Renoir to life and makes him accessible to all. Absolutely a must for anyone with even a passing interest in art or artists!

Not only is this a book about Renoir, whose tableaux peer out of every other art store on every mall in North America (what a curious fate!), it is also a book about Paris. Born in 1841, Renoir was older than most of the other Impressionists with whom he grew friendly later. He also had the chance to see Paris as it was before the Commune and the war of 1870. He lived a good part of his life on the Butte in Montmartre and it is hard now to recapture the atmosphere up there among the hordes of tourists. Yet early on Sunday mornings with a light rain playing on the umbrellas of the artist's stands in the Place du Tertre, you can wander freely among the memories of the rue Lepic and elsewhere, and catch glimpses of Renoir (and others) as you pass through the old streets. Reading this book first will help.

Jean Renoir is a very famous artist in his own right, having made numerous films and become one of the most acclaimed directors in French cinema history. Here he has taken great pains to paint a fine portrait of his renowned father, this time with a pen. He has succeeded admirably.

Jean Renoir is one of the greatest masters of the art of cinema. This autobiographical work traces his life from his childhood in France to his later years in Beverly Hills, not in the conventional sense, but rather through the world of film. This is fitting since the world of film was truly Jean Renoir's world.

Jean Renoir, middle son of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, made his first public debut quite early, albeit quite reluctantly, as the little boy with the long, golden curls who figures so prominently in many of his famous father's paintings.

Jean Renoir's early life, in later 19th century France, was dominated by two people--his father and Gabrielle Renard, his maternal cousin, who was to become his nanny and later, his dearest friend. While it was Auguste Renoir who introduced Jean to the world of art, it was Gabrielle who led him to the cinema. Jean, himself, says, "To her I owe Guignol and the Theatre Montmarte. She taught me to realize that the very unreality of those entertainments was a reason for examining real life. She taught me to see the face behind the masks and the fraud behind the flourishes."

Jean Renoir begins and ends this book with Gabrielle Renard, and, along the way, he examines and reveals the profound influence this marvelous woman exerted over him. In characteristic fashion Jean writes more about others than about himself. He lets us peer into the lives of the actors, technicians and producers with whom he worked, in places as diverse as Paris, Hollywood and even India. And, also characteristic of Jean, the unknown often play a role as large or larger than do the very famous.

While most of Jean Renoir's personal life remains unrevealed (this is definitely not a vapid, "tell all" tale!), he does tell us how and why he became a filmmaker and he goes to great lengths when explaining the relationship between film and life. From the depths of his dazzling imagination, Jean Renoir created nearly forty films, films that Francois Truffaut called, "the most alive films in the history of cinema." Two of these films, Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game, are often thought of as Jean Renoir's masterpieces.

But other films also live on, including The River, the lyrically beautiful film Jean Renoir made in India, and The Southerner, a poetic tale in which all the characters are heroic, in which every element plays its part and all come together in an act of homage to divinity.

This book should be required reading for all students of film everywhere for, as Garson Kanin said of Jean Renoir, "In the world he inhabits he is known as the best of men. In the cinema universe he is a living god."

Everyone, I believe, film student or just a lover of film, can find something to love in My Life and My Films, for Jean Renoir was a man of immense and daring imagination and creativity; he was both simple in outlook yet profound, but above all, he was a lover of humanity, one whose heart and spirit were always as generous as they were wise.

Jean Renoir, the son of the Impressionist painter Pierre Auguste Renoir, is regarded as one of the all-time great film directors. Two of his films, "La Grande Illusion" and "La Regle du Jeu", regularly feature on critics' lists of the greatest films ever created. Even now, over 60 years after some of his films were made, they still seem fresher and more modern (as well as more entertaining) than most of the films produced today.

This warm and witty book presents Renoir's own view of his life and career. It is not only filled with engaging insights into Renoir's own films and his views on cinema in general, but also amply stocked with vivid anecdotes, from visiting Berlin at the time of Hitler's rise to power to watching Jean Gabin and Marlene Dietrich quarrel in Hollywood.

For those who already know and love Renoir's films, this will be essential reading; for those who have not yet discovered them, this book should make them realize what they have been missing out on.

The RKO Classic Screenplays series is a must for any serious videophile. These books separate the video into its basic constituencies and allow one to understand what the subliminal shots are supposed to portray. Even the background sounds are described.

This particular book has an introduction telling of the environment and time in which the film was made. They point out that this is not a typical film of the time and shows depth of character in both strengths and weaknesses. There is a cast list and credits. Being a screenplay the focus is more on the movie and its impact. The book fades out as the movie fades out.

More than just a reference you will become intrigued as you are reading.

Jean Renoir's THE RULES OF THE GAME takes place on the eve of World War II at an aristocratic house party in an opulent chateau just outside of Paris where the overlapping 'affaires d'amour' of all social classes are observed with a keen and compassionate eye. Renoir looks to the eighteenth-century world of Commedia dell'Arte and Mozartian opera, and seamlessly integrates farce with tragedy, using a classical form to offer his audience a profound and multifaceted parable on the disturbing realities that underlie the veneer of contemporary French society.

It is the middle-class aviator, André Jurieu (Roland Toutain), who embodies the film's central conflict between the private passions and a sense of obligation to a larger social body. Right at the outset of the film, he violates the unwritten "rules" of social propriety by declaring to a radio reporter his disappointment that the woman he had been courting, Christine de la Chesnaye (Nora Grégor), is not present at his reception after completing a record-breaking flight across the Atlantic. His skill with the advanced technology of aircraft is not matched by an ability to deal with people, particularly in matters of love. Indeed, André's careless and unmediated show of desire for a highborn lady not only transgresses the received law of proper social conduct but of traditional class distinctions as well.

Other characters also entertain desires that come into conflict with the social order. The Marquis, Robert de la Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio), is having a fling with Geneviève de Marrast (Mila Parély) behind Christine's back, and Geneviève is sincerely attached to him and wants for them to go away together yet he maintains the proper outward appearance, and out of politeness and consideration for his wife's feelings, keeps up the charade that their affair is a secret in spite of the fact that "everybody knows." Christine observes her husband's liaison with strange amusement, commenting that they look "very interesting" together - for her adultery is a form of entertaining spectacle. But even Robert loses his cool at one point when he discovers Christine and André together in the gunroom and punches the aviator in the face.

Strangely enough, it is only the classless Pandarus-figure, Octave, who can get through to the serenely unattainable Christine because he seems to have no particular desires of his own; he only concerns himself with regulating the desires of others. Octave confesses that, like Marcello Mastrioanni in Fellini's LA DOLCE VITA, he is "a failure" who merely pleases his friends so that he may live off their wealth like "a parasite." Apparently, Christine loves him for his understanding that everything in life, every social relationship, is really a lie of some sort, and that all desire and romantic fantasy is, at bottom, a blind form of narcissistic self-deception. It seems that the two of them have come to understand the law that underpins desire - "La Règle de Jeu" - all too well.

As Pauline Kael has pointed out, Renoir may have conceived Robert de la Chesnaye as a composite of two different characters in GRAND ILLUSION: Marcel Dalio's rich young mercantile Jew, Rosenthal, and the generous, self-sacrificing French nobleman, De Boeldieu, played by Pierre Fresnay. Here, the director appears to equate the waning aristocracy of Old World Europe with the imminent fate of the European Jewish community in the wake of rising nationalism, militarism, and xenophobia. When a chef makes an anti-Semitic slight against the Robert, revealing the bigotry of the French working classes, it evokes the controversy surrounding the Dreyfus Affair. By the same token, the General's final comment that Robert is one of a "dying breed" not only heralds the decay of aristocratic privilege but, from the vantage point of hindsight, also seems a chilling spectre of Nazi racialist ideology and the Final Solution.

Christine's Austrian origin alludes to the looming war with Germany and seems a prediction of France's collaboration under the Vichy régime. Likewise, the reference to Schumacher's home of Alsace-Lorraine, the highly contested land ceded to the Germans at the end of the Franco-Prussian war in 1871 and then returned to France with the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, highlights an old geopolitical conflict between the two countries. The indiscriminate destruction of life in the rabbit and pheasant hunt sequence forecasts the waste and destruction of the war to come.

Renoir's approach to mise-en-scène is especially groundbreaking. He employs seamless cutting as well as long continuous takes and tracking shots which follow the characters as they move from one space to the next in a manner that anticipates the graceful circling, panning, sensuously kinetic camera of Welles, Ophüls, Godard, Resnais, Bertolucci and others. He uses deep-focus compositions, avoiding close-ups by putting many actors in the frame at the same time to suggest multiple viewpoints. The balustrades of La Colinière and the languorous tracking shots down the long corridors undoubtedly inspired those in LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD while the checkered floor suggests a harlequinade and a chess board upon which the characters maneuver themselves in relation to each other - like the similarly checkered shuffleboard floor in Antonioni's LA NOTTE or the geometrically precise arrangement of the garden in MARIENBAD. (Interestingly enough, Coco Chanel designed the costumes for both THE RULES OF THE GAME and LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD).

Octave's gorilla suit at the party implies a regression of human behavior to a more primitive state, setting up a conflict between barbarism and civilized life, between the savage realities of human desire and the law of the social contract that contains them as theatrical spectacle. The Shakespearean convention of "the play within the play" appears - just as it does in THE GOLDEN COACH - in various forms throughout the film, the most ominous being the 'danse macabre,' echoed in the séance and ritual journey to the realm of the dead in LA DOLCE VITA, suggesting that Renoir's superficial 'affaires d'amour' are really a dance of death heralding the apocalyptic destruction of the old Europe.

No history of cinema would be complete without "The Rules of the Game" (1939). Director Jean Renoir's brilliant, perceptive study of a dying French aristocracy remains among the finest examples of visual poetry captured on film -- as evidenced in the savage "rabbit hunt" and the haunting final shot. Along with "Grand Illusion" (1937), "The Rules of the Game" represents the high-water mark of Renoir's career. It's as close to perfection as a film can get.

This is arguably Jean Renoir's best film (Grand Illusion is his other masterpiece). I recommend this movie for sophisticated viewers, and people who love foreign movies. But it is also, romantic, comic, dramatic, tragic and smart. The idea that three men can be in love with the same woman is an excellent premise that is expertly executed, but also the movie is like a mockumentary of the upper class. See this movie and you'll be wiser for it.