https://greenhsu.com/greenscreening/issues/12_rules_of_the_game_renoir/
An overview of Jean Renoir's masterpiece for the Greenscreening series.
tl;dr - Why The Rules of the Game
An overview of Jean Renoir's masterpiece for the Greenscreening series.
tl;dr - Why The Rules of the Game
- The film is regarded as one of the greats of the canon. It has ranked near the top of every Sight and Sound poll since 1952.
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The Rules of the Game is an example of poetic realism, a movement in 1930s French cinema that combined stylized studio production with gloomy, pessimistic tales of contemporary society (very French) during the Depression and lead up to WWII.
- The film is a directorial masterpiece. Renoir used innovative production techniques like deep focus photography and fluid camera movement, two years before Citizen Kane used these same techniques to great effect. Countless filmmakers cite Renoir and The Rules of the Game as an inspiration.
- “The most complex social criticism ever enacted on the screen.” -Dudley Andrew (Professor of Film Studies at Yale).
- The hunt, the centerpiece of the film, is one of the great scenes in film history
- The film had a disastrous premiere and Renoir recut the original in response. During WWII the film was thought to be lost. In the 1950s, two film enthusiasts discovered old negatives, and worked with Renoir to reconstruct his original vision. Thus, this film is the original Director's Cut.
- “I first saw The Rules of the Game around fifty years ago, and I saw it again quite recently. Apparently I’m the same person I used to be, because I still felt that everything in the world is in that film, and I’m inside of it myself somehow.” -Wallace Shawn (“inconceivable!!”)
