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Jean Renoir

Directing Born Sep 15, 1894 Paris, France 24 credits

Biography

Jean Renoir (15 September 1894 – 12 February 1979) was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s. As an author, he wrote the definitive biography of his father, the painter, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Renoir, My Father (1962).

In the 1930s, Renoir was associated with the Popular Front, and several of his films reflect the movement's left-wing politics and deal with social issues as well as class disparities. He was perhaps the most significant director of the poetic realism movement. The satirical comedy-drama film The Rules of the Game (1939) is often cited by critics as among the greatest films ever made; it is the only film to earn a place among the top ten films in the respected British Film Institute's Sight & Sound decennial critics' poll for every decade from the poll's inception in 1952 through the 2012 list. Other important works are Grand Illusion (1937), A Day in the Country (1946) and The River (1951).

Andrew Sarris in his influential book of film criticism The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968 included him in the "pantheon" of the 14 greatest film directors who had worked in the United States.

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Known for

Film

The Rules of the Game

as Octave

Full filmography

  • Cinépanorama (1956) as Self
  • Discorama (1959) as Self
  • Encyclopédie audiovisuelle du cinéma (1978) as Self (archive footage)
  • The Rules of the Game (1939) as Octave
  • La Bête Humaine (1938) as Cabuche
  • The Emma Bovary Trial (2021) as Self - Filmmaker (archive footage)
  • A Day in the Country (1946) as Père Poulain
  • Quand Jean devint Renoir (2017) as Self (archive footage)
  • The Christian Licorice Store (1971) as Self
  • Backbiters (1927) as le sous-préfet
  • The Little Theatre of Jean Renoir (1974) as The Narrator/Host
  • Jean Renoir: Part One - From La Belle Époque to World War II (1993) as Self (archive footage)
  • François Truffaut l'insoumis (2014) as Self (archive footage)
  • Life Is Ours (1936) as Le patron du bistrot
  • Little Red Riding Hood (1930) as Compère le Loup
  • D'un Céline l'autre (1969) as Self
  • The Spanish Earth (1937) as Narrator (voice)
  • Le Parti du cinéma (2021) as Self (voice) (archive footage)
  • La P’tite Lili (1927) as Man with Bowler Hat
  • Those of Our Land (1915) as Self
  • The Pursuit of Happiness (1930)
  • Louis Lumière (1968) as Self
  • Cinéastes de notre temps : Erich von Stroheim (2012) as Self
  • Langlois (1970) as Self