Social Roles / Political Responsibilities: Jean Renoir's Search for Artistic Integrity, 1928-1939
Throughout his life, Jean Renoir-the son of a renowned painter, a onetime potter, and filmmaker -was preoccupied with the role of the artist in society. What was the artist's place in, and his/her responsibilities to, the world (but particularly to France)? Under what conditions could an artist function and do meaningful work-not only meaningful for society but for him/herself? These were ethical, moral, and political questions with which Renoir wrestled, finding no easy answers, no simple verities. Rather he was often troubled by the relationship between artist and society which he understood as a dynamic one in need of constant reconsideration.
The Social Cinema of Jean Renoir
Reinterpreting twelve of Renoir's best-known works, Professor Faulkner attributes their qualities not to the director's unified sensibility but to varying social and historical circumstances.Originally published in 1986.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: "The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology"
stand in front of ourselves, the way we might have stood somewhere in a prehistoric past, but never before our waking gaze. Yet these images, developed in the darkroom of the lived moment, are the most important we will ever see. One might say that our most profound moments have been equipped -like those cigarette packs -with a little image, a photograph of ourselves. And that "whole life" which, as they say, passes through people's minds when they are dying or in mortal danger is composed of such little images. They flash by in as rapid a sequence as the booklets of our childhood, precursors of the cinema, in which we admired a boxer, a swimmer or a tennis player. ["A Short Speech on Proust," delivered by Benjamin on his fortieth birthday, 1932]