Still Life by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Still Life

Page 120

given moment.’ He believed this depiction was the reason behind the film's disastrous premiere, saying ‘the audience's reaction was due to my candour.’ ‘The Marriage of Figaro,’ an inspiration for the film, had also been considered controversial for its attack on the class system. ‘The Rules of the Game’ remained controversial with the French public shortly after World War II when it was once again banned. Renoir's biographer Ronald Bergan said the film hit a raw nerve with the public by depicting ‘people, who might have had an influence in shaping the world, but did nothing to prevent an advance of Fascism; some of whom, indeed, actually welcomed it.’

The rabbit hunt scene is often compared to the senseless death that occurs during war; Renoir said he wanted to show a certain class of people killing for no reason. Renoir himself had never killed an animal and called hunting ‘an abominable exercise in cruelty.’ Bergan saw the analogy to world events and wrote ‘in the great set piece of the hunt, the callous cruelty of the guests is laid bare as they fire at any rabbit and bird that moves after the beaters have led the game to slaughter.’

The film's most-quoted line of dialogue, spoken by Octave, is ‘You see, in this world, there is one awful thing, and that is that everyone has his reasons.’ Renoir's sentiment of objective humanism for the film's characters is articulated by Octave's