“Tout le monde a ses raisons”

Abstract

Much about Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu could place it among the classic works of modernism, but Renoir’s film is also traditional and even conservative. This ambiguity derives from Renoir’s impressionism. He was dedicated to an impressionist aesthetic that he inherited in part from his father, the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir—an aesthetic that also brought him artistic and ideological uncertainties. Renoir intended mainly to push film further toward full development of its own aesthetic through the fuller realization of an impressionist aesthetic, the immediacy, subjectivism, and immersiveness that had for some time seemed best able to assert film’s unique claim to artistic excellence. But the problem of impressionism—its uncertain way of resolving perceptual differences—threw him back upon older theatrical and pictorial modes. It is finally the problem of such inconsistencies that give La Règle du jeu its major claim to modernism.