Still Life by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Still Life

Page 119

‘The Rules of the Game’ is remembered as a commentary on the moral callousness of the European upper class and their servants just before World War II. While making the film, Renoir knew a new world war was coming; he later said there was a sense of it in film, and wrote ‘it is a war film and yet there is no reference to the war.’ This sense of doom began just before shooting started in January when Barcelona fell to Franco and throughout the production when Prime Minister of France Édouard Daladier recognized Francoist Spain, Italy annexed Albania and Adolf Hitler prepared his Invasion of Poland. Renoir articulated this unmentioned theme of the film by saying: ‘What is interesting about this film, perhaps, is the moment when it was made. It was shot between Munich and the war, and I shot it absolutely impressed, absolutely disturbed by the state of mind of a part of French society, a part of English society, a part of world society. And it seemed to me that a way of interpreting this state of mind, to the world hopefully, was not to talk of that situation, but tell a frivolous story. I looked for inspiration to Beaumarchais, to Marivaux, to the classical authors of comedy.’

Renoir wanted to depict people as they truly were at that point in history; he said ‘The Rules of the Game’ was ‘a reconstructed documentary, a documentary on the condition of a society at a