That Paris should be a frequent setting in the films of Jean Renoir is unsurprising. Paris is the city in which the director was born, and from which he was exiled by war and occupation; itis the city immortalised in painting by his father Auguste Renoir and his nineteenth-century Impressionist peers; and the city where the figure of the auteur was first celebrated in the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma magazine and on the screens of Henri Langlois’s Cinémathèque Française. Born in 1894 in the gothically-named Château des Brouillards high up on the hill of Montmartre, Renoir’s initial association with the city is satisfyingly symbolic: as Ronald Bergan suggests, from Auguste’s attic studio one could look across the sprawling urban city and “see Mont Valerien, thehills of Meudon, Argenteuil and Saint-Cloud, and the plain of Gennevil-liers. The plain of Saint-Denis was visible [. . .] as were the woods at Montmorency. On a clear day you could even make out the basilica of Saint-Denis in the distance.”1 The temptation to which Bergan succumbs here is a compelling one: the nascent filmmaker-artist as a panoramic eye, an omnipotent yet benevolent force located at the very center of a picturesque and harmonious French landscape. And the temporal con-venience of Renoir’s childhood is also irresistible: Montmartre at the height of Belle Epoque bohemianism.

Renoir’s Paris: The City as Film Set by Sue Harris & Queen Mary

South Central Review Vol. 28, No. 3, Special Issue: Re-Framing Renoir Edited by Katherine Golsan (FALL 2011) pp. 84-102 Published By: The Johns Hopkins University