India drama
1951
color 99 min.
Director: Jean Renoir
CLV: $44.95 - available
           1 disc, catalog # CC1176L
VHS: available from Home Vision Cinema
Jean Renoir's hopes for a Hollywood production of
The River had languished for two years when, in November 1948,
a meeting with a Beverly Hills florist sent him on a reconnaissance
trip to Calcutta. This inspired an unexpected independent film of
great visual beauty and unconventional structure which introduced
western audiences to Indian culture and music and launched Renoir on a
new international phase of his career. Renoir called Calcutta "the
Bronx of India" -- overpopulated, dirty, rather ugly, but
fascinating. He was delighted to be "confronted every day with boatmen
working their oars in the Ganges who are directly stepping out of an
Egyptian bas-relief." He met a young journalist named Satyajit Ray who
helped him encounter Indian culture but was disappointed that a Renoir
film shot there would have only one Indian character in it.
Perhaps this prompted the invention of several new Indian characters
when Renoir and Rumer Godden wrote a script for the film that summer,
thus beginning the transformation of her autobiographical novel of
adolescence into an Occidental meditation on the Orient, a process
accelerated by Renoir's failure to find an American male star able to
spend five months in India. For, without the stabilizing, conservative
presence of a star, The River became an experimental
film. Multinational, with a cast made mostly of children and amateurs,
it was the first color film for both Jean and Claude Renoir, the first
Technicolor film shot in India, one of the first films anywhere to
record its sound on magnetic tape. Distance freed them from the
supervision of a Technicolor consultant; black-and-white rushes took
ten days to return from London. So, with little chance to see their
work, Renoir's crew had only their own eyes and sense of color to
guide them. A cable from London confirmed that sense: "Technicolor
chiefs consider photography of The River the best they have
ever had." Later Eric Rohmer would write of "the most beautiful color
we have ever seen on the screen."
All this in a project burdened by
a novice producer who initially failed to provide generators
sufficient to produce enough light for the 3-strip Technicolor camera,
a usable crane, or even a steel tripod on which the ponderous blimped
camera could pan, and whose actions often undermined Renoir's work. So
it was with relief that Renoir could at least write, "All together,
actors, crew members and myself, we arrive at the end of the shooting
in spite of the amazing ignorance of an amateur producer."
Renoir
had utilized a delay forced by lack of equipment to indulge has
fascination with India by shooting silent documentary footage of life
along the river. Over the protests of the producer he cast the young
dancer, Radha, as Melanie, making possible Harriet's Krishna story,
where Radha's wedding dance became, for many, the most memorable
moment of the film. When the shooting ended he used his tape recorder
to register some of the Indian music he had come to love. As India
pervaded Renoir's mind, it began to pervade the film.
The
combination of children, amateur actors and insufficient equipment
imposed on The River a style very different from that of other
Renoir films, with very short shots and almost no camera movement in
any scene requiring direct sound. The shorter the shot, the more
likely a child or an amateur would get it right -- and the less damage
if they didn't.
Back in Hollywood in June 1950, Renoir discovered
that the awkwardness of his actors made some footage unusable. Without
the possibility of retakes, he began to construct his film in the
editing room, first creating a version concentrating on the story of
adolescent girls coming of age through their encounter with a romantic
stranger. A preview audience liked the girls, loved the glimpses they
were given of India, but had trouble understanding the story. Through
subsequent versions Renoir reduced the elements of story and added
more and more of his documentary footage, compensating for the loss of
dramatic material by adding a commentary to help explain the action
and make Captain John acceptable. "I had to rescue Tommy's part. Now
people seem much interested in Captain John. Before, they simply hated
him and that was the ruin of the picture." In the ultimate triumph of
India over conventional filmmaking, Renoir decided not to have music
written for the film, but to score The River with the Indian
music he had recorded in Calcutta.
In the final version the
transformation is complete; India has overwhelmed the
story. Unintentionally, The River had become an early example
of the dissolution of plot critics would hail ten years later in
L'Avventura. The narrator's voice places the action in the past,
filtered through memory, allowing a reflective complexity that merely
showing the events could not achieve -- reflecting not merely on
adolescence but on India and the Indian attitude of consent to the
world that had captivated Renoir and that gives the film a cyclical,
timeless air. This introspective voice permits the interweaving of the
life of Harriet and the life of India, so that the sights and sounds
of India may dominate our experience of the film while Harriet remains
its conscious center. It becomes, thus, a device which allows Renoir
to remain true to the spirit of Rumer Godden's novel while giving
himself to his new love, India.
-- ALEXANDER SESONSKE
Credits
Director: Jean Renoir
Producer: Kenneth
McEldowney
Screenplay: Rumer Godden, Jean Renoir
Production
Manager: Kalyan Gupta
Film Editor: George Gale
Camera Operator:
Ramananda Sen Gupta
Director of Photography: Claude Renoir
Art
Director: Bansi Chandragupta
Production Designer: Eugene
Lourie
Narration: June Hillman
Transfer
This edition
of The River was transferred from a 35mm fine grain print.