The old critical preoccupation with what is and is not truly “cinematic” has never ceased to detest the unreality of the stage and to assume that film must be liberated from that unreality by a Zola-esque attention to natural detail. Those who insist on an analogy between Renoir’s moving pictures and the paintings of his father forget that Pierre-Auguste rejoiced in the invention of photography as having liberated painting from the boring chores and dreary obligations of photographic realism.

As for Jean Renoir, he said, “The care of everyone who tries to create something in films is the conflict between exterior realism and interior non-realism.” As for working “close to nature,” he reminded us that “Nature is millions of things. And there are millions of ways of understanding its preoccupations.”

Orson Welles, Jean Renoir: The Greatest of All Directors, Los Angeles Times, 1979.

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