Renoir restores family tradition
“An idea.” That’s how (fictionalized) impresario Henri Danglard (Jean Gabin) introduces his latest discovery Nini (Françoise Arnoul) to a dance instructor in Jean Renoir’s French Cancan (1954). The Museum of Modern Art’s annual presentation of a Gaumont restoration returns more than just the luster to Renoir’s first color film; it restores a modern “idea” that art can simultaneously explore human mystery and socioeconomic reality—the dual circumstances of an artwork’s creation.
In the background of the deep-focus shot in which Danglard announces his “idea,” a woman bathes behind the frame of an open door in the dance studio. Renoir doesn’t mimic the nudes of his father, impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir—though he approximates his father’s affinity for the curvaceous. Instead, Renoir dramatizes the vernacular experience (a woman bathing) that the impressionists radically recognized as worthy of being the subject of painting, as studies of light, color, nature, flesh and fashion.
Jean Renoir’s French Cancan Courtesy of the Criterion Collection
Eschewing narrative function, Renoir ends sequences or shots to impress a sense of place (as when a dog enters the frame and pauses to look toward the camera), sociology (when a man exits the frame to reveal a woman sleeping in a dance hall) or feeling (a long-shot tableau of a woman looking away from her suitor beneath a tree). Through such motion pictures, Renoir captures the consciousness of the impressionists.
Renoir’s nude also signifies the desire that motivates Danglard’s idea to revive the cancan and the complexity of the motivations behind those who participate in the founding of The Moulin Rouge. Danglard is inspired when he meets Nini (an Auguste Renoir-like redhead) at The White Queen, a lower-class dancehall where he and the clientele of his upper-crust revue, The Chinese Screen, go slumming. There Danglard witnesses, and then participates in, the cancan—a dance characterized by rhythmic, petticoat-baring high leg kicks. Nini gushes to him about the cancan: “It’s better than working at the laundry!”
Danglard recognizes the common need for release. To serve that need, Danglard conceives of a new venue for the working class and the aristocratic class to mingle—and, consequently, for a new, formalized, chorus-line version of the cancan as the venue’s signature entertainment. Danglard marks the difference by dubbing it “French Cancan.” “It’s progress!” declares a bystander as The Moulin Rouge rises from the rubble of The White Queen.
Renoir patriotically made the story of The Moulin Rouge the subject of his first film after his return to France following World War II. He shared the unifying impulse—the egalitarian ideals and liberated sensuality—of the impressionists and Danglard (as embodied by national treasure Gabin). The film evokes the Belle Époque, chronicled by the French impressionists, to secure a compact through their shared cultural heritage.
The film’s dazzling conclusion features the premiere of the cancan at The Moulin Rouge. Renoir constructs a montage of the appreciative crowd in which the audience’s responses are isolated—but not solo—portraits. Each shot contains a romantic coupling, each pair perfectly matched. Through montage, the scene constitutes a social cross section (assembling the film’s cast of characters)—and a social phenomenon. The colorful, dynamic cancan that bookends this montage expresses the idiosyncratic passions that form the foundation of a popular art.
“Only one thing matters to me—what I create,” Danglard says as he defines his solitary passion. Renoir crosscuts between the dancers’ triumphant premiere and Danglard’s pantomime (from memory) of the choreography. In French Cancan, Renoir films the perceptual reality of an idea dancing.
Gaumont Presents: Jean Renoir’s
French Cancan
Oct. 17, Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd St., 212-708-9400, www.moma.org.
John Demetry restores ideas to a critical relationship with our shared popular culture in his book The Community of Desire: Selected Critical Writings (2001-2007), available at www.lulu.com.
