Since our DVD of the Week, “The Rules of the Game,” holds over for a second week due to the magazine’s double issue, this installation of the Clippings File reprises two crucial themes from that movie—the out-front performance of its director, Jean Renoir, and the symbolic representation of breaking news—by way of a 1966 interview with Renoir conducted by the director Jacques Rivette, who gets him to speak about the effect of technical advances on the art of the cinema and on art as such, with surprising results.
Renoir says that “in the history of all the arts, the arrival of perfect realism has coincided with a perfect decadence.” He heads off into the realm of the history of tapestry to explain the point, which culminates in the following remark (above, at 4:40):
He wonders why, “when the technique is primitive, everything is beautiful, and when the technique is perfected, almost everything is ugly, except things created by artists who are ingenious enough to overcome technique?” He repudiates “technical perfection” and suggests that it represents “the death of art.” He spoke of “photographic boredom” in the presence of many well-made films, and suggests that “the average object in highly technological eras is ugly. Only the great artists are the exceptions. We live in an era in which one must be a great artist or nothing.” By contrast, he suggests that, earlier, “the possibility of artistic creation … existed in daily activities, in the way a fire was lit.”
Here’s where this remarkable discussion (which, Renoir admits, is merely theoretical) links up with the art of “The Rules of the Game.” The movie depicts, with a theatrical artifice, the end of an era; it shows—with a confected symbolism—a world on the edge of war and moral breakdown; and the very beauty of the film’s delicate depravities, its whirl of high society and its bumptious rusticity, is pushed to the breaking point by the introduction of a high-tech hero into the realm of the ancient aristocracy. Mechanized glory, forcing the fault lines of age-old prejudice and ritual violence, could only bring catastrophe. Yet Renoir’s movie also displays, with tender whimsy, the director’s own sort of aesthetic redemption of technique—one that is, however, impotent before the brewing storm.
P.S. There’s more to say about realism—whether, in fact, Renoir’s impeachment of realism at the price of beauty doesn’t speak to a decadent tendency of artists themselves and, for that matter, of critics; whether there isn’t an ambient prejudice in favor of the ugly (it’s worth remembering that “The Rules of the Game” was widely despised in its time, as were many of Renoir’s great postwar films) as a misguided touchstone of artistic seriousness.
