this is my piece on renoir
so far , haha
i will translate his notes on the difference between french & indian color
& i would like the river picture to be displayed … somehow … .
james pasternak’s interview as well as gilliatt’s should be additional material.
what can i say?
i did not want to describe his work …. salut salot …
Illusion improves eyesight/vision
to collect art is to uphold the illusion to not have to go to war.
forget castle walls & wars &
look at a german duke’s venture – anton ulrich’s collection in braunschweig,
falling for italian splendor as well as for rembrandt, giogione, vermeer …
suddenly the provinces won’t deem you all that bad
while
nothing
is more provincial than Sacre Coeur,
considering,
it being build to make the Commune of 1871 a thing to forget.
but what a great fad, yes, you could say that,
but,
quite like the lion of brunswick- the dedication to Mars –
this is a seigniorial motif which can turn into a musical thing …
a new hat with a smack of
saint mark’s lion taking off
to be
mushrooms & leonine mane
calling on the disquieting strings …
… let’s just think of the Lion King not having sound
to feel the band of maniacs “Bande d’énergumènes” …
sounds that recall jean renoir & his love for dance (french cancan).
the equivalence of emotions, he said, touching deep generality;
barely making it to not be cliché.
sounds don’t talk … he said … they have to climb a ladder to reach the feudal tower –
so to speak.
imagine a world not talking …
a world deriving solely from lenders
as well as from optical illusion,
imagine la grande illusion,
imagine the benefit of time,
imagine being helped by jean gabin
& the rest of the gambling lot,
embracing randomness,
then you find his most magnificent illusion,
the quiddling, the precise wasting of time & Arizona Jim (the crime of monsieur lange)
as well as the color line of surreal pitch, Indian Green & Red (the river)
where ancient melody floats out to the sea of points …
quite a hitch,”to move around fixed points”.
nothing more scary than an eye,
nothing more scary than a son,
walking his visitors through the myriads of colors which aren’t exactly the ones of the Ile de France
to evoke his father’s ease, playing the mountain of mars:
montmartre, le bateau lavoir, scenery of characters stuck in a caste-like system of what belongs to art
& what to the shopkeeper,
what to the bourgois
& what remains to be on the roll,
followed by the invisible cameras of the rest to see
the melodramatic professionals, the streetwalkers, the political quest.
this turf & that turf, clumsily, fluidly at rest,
while the abstract movement of the camera allows them to mingle in the light of spectacle.
it’s the spectacle that mixes seemingly incompatible characters & colors, now,
taking on the fluffiness, the lightness of matisse;
the tender lightness of unmixed bengal colors in remembrance of marie laurencin, of dufy.
nevertheless, it’s the hoisting of the flag of India
a new Green & a new Red – the colors of photography,
meeting with the theatrical scene,
the talent show (la grande illusion) or the masquerade ball (rules of the game)
at the same time, creative destruction (à la schumpeter) does not need a considerable sense of humor
yet, realization as conciliatory act does (no proselytizing here! – as he said).
if americans make money out of negroes
&
french men out of arabs (jean renoir),
it’s the freak oeuvre of monsieur lange
that does not offer us a mauvais roman.
And what do we see instead?
we see that a spiral staircase can improve vision
like a barber shop’s red-white-& blue flag.
so, there is no : neither i nor you can stop the march of time ( cap. de boieldieu, la grande illusion)
the antiphon can set us free … so long mack!
–Martina Gertrude Siebert
The welcome reappearance of a new print of Jean Renoir’s The River. Made on location in Bengal, this was Renoir’s first movie after his wartime sojourn in Hollywood and his first in colour (the exquisite photography is by his nephew, Claude). Based on Rumer Godden’s semi-autobiographical novel, it’s a beautifully observed rite-of-passage and culture-clash story of a crippled American war veteran’s impact on a British community in the last days of the Raj.
