In the late 1960s, not long before his death, the screenwriter Henri Jeanson on French radio and later in print that Jean Renoir, on the eve of departure from Lisbon for America in late 1940 made anti-Semitic statements to the Portuguese press praising Adolf Hitler and bemoaning his own involvement with the French Communist Party. French film historian Claude Beylie investigated those allegations and, in 1975, in his book Jean Renoir la vie, la spectacle published a rebuttal. Beylie probably had no idea at the time that there existed more information which tended to refute Jeanson's charges. That information was contained in FBI files of Renoir's activities in the USA where he became involved soon after his arrival in america with organizations such as the People’s Educational Association, the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee and the National Council of American–Soviet Friendship, strange quarters for someone pro-Hitler, anti-Jewish and anti-Communist. That information has been published on-line in An Archive of the (Political) Unconscious

by Christopher Faulkner of Carleton College.

What follows here is
1) Jeanson's charges as published in his memoir Soixante-dix anneés d'adolescence

2) Beylie's rebuttal as published in Jean Renoir la vie, la spectacle

3) an excerpt from Faulkner's article An Archive of the (Political) Unconscious

from Henri Jeanson Soixante-dix anneés d'adolescence (page 359, my translation)

This is what Jeanson has Renoir saying in Portugal in December 1940

"Alas, yes and it is not without regret. But I am a temperamental man, often rash and I have done some insolent things.I have stupidly compromised myself with the Communist party and the people of the Left. But time is working in my favor, I will return to France. Hitler is an agreeable man, I am certain that the both of us understand each other very well. For like all my brothers I have been victimized by Jews who prevent us from working and exploit us. When I return I will be in a France stripped of Jews where man will again find his reason for being."

from Jean Renoir La vie la spectacle by Claude Beylie (page 30 my translation)

"The brief Portuguese interlude in Renoir's life in 1939, we'll let it be known, has touched off a serious controversy. Le Canard enchainé, in the pen of Henri Jeanson, bruited the rumor that he revealed himself there, on the eve of his departure for the USA, by anti-Semitic proclamations. It is high time to restore the truth on this painful affair, magnified form scratch by these one-time bitter collaborators.
The truth. Here it is. We owe it to the archaeological thoroughness of Portuguese friends (from 1975) who have relocated the corpus delicti for us. Welcomed triumphantly on his arrival in Lisbon, as was natural, by the cinephiles of the era (Renoir has always been in Portugal the object of a true cult, we have had the proof of this yet recently), he was promptly interrogated by them on his past and his future. This was during the Salazar regime and feelings are heightened quickly, especially in such a period. In the course of an interview conducted in November 1940 by Fernando Fregedo (which will be published some months later in the magazine Hollywood em Lisboa), Renoir allowed himself to proclaim -which wasn't new with him - that French, Italian and Portuguese cinema (he avoided speaking of Germany), if they combined their efforts, were capable of competing with the great Hollywood machine, not on the economic plane, he made clear, but on an artistic plane. The Latin people had no reason to envy the Americans in the cultural domain. That, really, is the least that one could say when one is returning from Italy where aLuchino Visconti -- who was Renoir's assistant before the war -- was in the act of laying the groundwork for the neo -realist movement. But, his representative seized the opportunity and interpreted, in his manner, curiously, Renoir's proposition, having him literally say this,
"I am certain that the future belongs to the Latins. Up to now, we have witnessed the triumph of the Anglo-Saxon cinematic genius which today finds itself at its apogee; but, all that is changing, evolving, and it is in thinking of this immutable rule that I dare make this prophesy. . . . I let myself be influenced by the idea that the Latins had no gift for cinema. Since I have gone to Italy, to France, yesterday, to Spain, today, to Portugal, I am thinking differently. The Latins are the greatest interpreters of the future. Because of this, it is necessary to organize a commercial and spiritual collaboration among all the people of our race."
Those last words certainly, if they are authentic, do sound bad. this encounter with the Salazarist propaganda machine which was then made an untimely use of this notion of "Latin" was unfortunate. We are persuaded, nevertheless, that Renoir was misused by an unscrupulous - and politically determined - go-between. The commentators will decide.
In another newspaper - Animatografo - dated December 2, 1940, Renoir underwent a different interview by the manager Antonio Lopes Ribero who was definitely more "objective". He spoke there of The Grand Illusion and his other films without flattering any regime whatsoever. The JewRosenthal was indeed discussed, but it was to praise his heart and sensitivity; while von Rauffenstein, the Junker, (which a misprint had rebaptized as "Rischoffen ") represents a nobleness of caste "that the war has eliminated from the surface of the Earth". The 'humanitarian' values of the work banned by Goebbels andMussolinian censorship are highlighted straightforwardly. One looks, in vain, even reading between the lines, for the least anti-Semitic or fascist allusion. And, although the journalist observes incidentally that it is "thanks to MarshallPétain " that Renoir is free to relocate to America, he assures us with this stunning observation of his own. Finally, Renoir returns to his idea of a "Latin cinema able to countervail, in Europe, the American influence."
It is heady to observe that this notion, thirty-five years later, is making progress in a Portugal delivered from the Salazar regime. Maybe, after all, this was a case (as it so often happens with Jean Renoir) of a revolutionary concept only a few years ahead of its time."

from An Archive of the (Political) Unconscious by Christopher Faulkner (Carleton University)

"Renoir was first of all a supporter of the People’s Educational Association (to which he gave money) from 1943 to 1945. The PEC was an experiment in education for working people that grew out of a 1943 writers’ congress held at UCLA on the theme of “unconscious fascism.” Although it survived until 1948, this organization was condemned in the 1945 Tenney Report (the state of California equivalent of HUAC) because it had been directed by some members of the Hollywood Writers Mobilization, who were also members of the Screen Writers Guild, and of the defunct League of American Writers. (The blacklisted writer Ben Barzman was told that he lost his U.S. passport because he had worked for PECThis Land Is Mine, and many of his remarks about workers’ rights and anti-fascism in that talk are to be found in the dialogue of the film (Faulkner, 1996). According to Larry Ceplair & Steven Englund (1980), among those few groups who really played “crucial” parts in the struggle against fascism, two were the LAW and the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee (p. 100). To the American right, their anti-fascism was synonymous with pro-communism. [Schwartz, 1982]). The People’s Educational Centre in Los Angeles offered courses “in history, in culture, and in the problems of various ethnic groupings within the community, such as blacks, Chicanos, and Jews, in addition to courses in the arts, which included writing workshops …” (Schwartz, 1982, p. 203). Prior affiliation with the League of American Writers (LAW) was in itself condemnable. On April 23, 1943, Renoir delivered an address to the LAW, just a month before the release of

The Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee was frequently cited in the HUAC hearings as an anti-Catholic communist front, “master-minded by Jews” (Schwartz, 1982, p. 239). Along with people like John Garfield, Dorothy Parker, Irving Pichel, Frank Tuttle, and others no less well known or well connected on the left, Renoir was an active member from 1941 through until at least 1948. In fact, he was, for a time, co-director with Dorothy Parker of the motion picture committee, and then Honorary Chairman of the Los Angeles branch in 1946 and 1947. (Before Renoir’s turn as Honorary Chairman of the JAFR, Philip Merivale had preceded him in the position. In a fortuitous bit of casting, Merivale was the actor who had played the role of Professor Sorel in This Land Is Mine, the editor of the pro-worker, anti-fascist underground resistance newspaper who is executed by the Nazis after having been denounced.) The JAFRC was a coalition of groups like the American Committee to Save Refugees, the League of American Writers, and the United Spanish Aid Committee, all of which had previously been cited as subversive by the Dies Committee. To raise money for medical supplies, ambulances, hospitals, orphanages, and the like on behalf of refugees from European fascism, the JAFRCJAFR programs: “The Varsovie Hospital people are hanging on the phone to proclaim their enthusiasm about your name and Paulette’s name printed on the mail paper. I feel the same and hope that we will very soon get the necessary money to help these Spanish Partisans who, in the real beginning of the war, were the first defenders of our liberties” (in Thompson & LoBianco, 1994, pp. 167-168). With this last sentence, Renoir seems to be recalling the defeated anti-fascist Popular Front governments of the 1930s in both France and Spain, causes to which he had willingly devoted his energies in film and print. Later, in March 1948, Renoir was the committee head for a fund-raiser chaired by Edward Dmytryk and attended by Edward Barsky, the national chairman of the JAFRC, who had earlier been cited for contempt of Congress along with 16 other executive members (Schwartz, 1982). The main speeches at this gathering were about the fate of refugees loyal to the Spanish Republic and the subject of “Atomic Energy for Peace.” sponsored a number of events in the 1940s with which Renoir’s name (and many another name) is repeatedly linked in the FBI files. One such event infiltrated by FBI informants was a gathering called the “Free People’s Benefit Dinner” at the Beverly Hills Hotel on July 2, 1942. The entire guest list is in the FBI files. A letter written to Burgess Meredith on October 27, 1945, gives every indication that Renoir was actively collecting funds in support of

The third important, targeted organization with which Renoir was connected in the 1940s was the National Council of American–Soviet Friendship. It was as a member of this group that Renoir made occasional visits to the Soviet Consulate and with Hanns Eisler attended a reception for the Soviet filmmaker, Mikhail Kalatozov (who later directed I Am Cuba, 1962), at the Mocambo Cafe in Hollywood on August 12, 1943. (Kalatozovtri-coloured flag, the standard of the Paris Commune” (Renoir, 1944, p. 1). became Soviet Consul in Los Angeles.) On behalf of this group Renoir broadcast an address — still unpublished — to the women of the Soviet Union on March 8, 1944, that begins: “Women of Russia, I send you my best wishes. Although these greetings are coming to you from the United States of America, they are those of a Frenchman, a Frenchman among so many others, who has not forgotten that in Red Square, beside Lenin’s Tomb, there rests a

Renoir’s most important role on behalf of the National Council of American–Soviet Friendship was his membership on the committee of administration for the cinema. His most interesting service on the committee’s behalf, and far and away his most interesting political engagement during this entire period, was his stage direction of a spectacle whose existence has until now been entirely forgotten. Renoir took responsibility for mounting an elaborate political rally held at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on November 16, 1943, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. Thanks to the diligence of the FBI, I can report the discovery of a “new” work by Renoir and reproduce the program of the event..."

Unrealized Jean Renoir projects

This is a list of unrealized film projects of Jean Renoir digested from Jean Renoir La Vie, La Spectacle by Claude Beylie published as part of the Cinema d'Aujourd'hui series in 1975 (pages 131-134)

1925 -- La Pelotte

1925 -- Le Plus mauvais film ("The Worst Film") -- Claude Beylie comments, "A hoax? Renoir retains no memory of this project"

1925 -- Manon Lescaut -- a modernization

1928 -- Puss in Boots

1931 -- Hamlet -- to star Michel Simon

1931 -- a Georges Feydeau play -- possibly Occupe-toi, Amélie

1931 -- a Jacques Deval screenplay -- to star Michel Simon

1932 -- an André Derain screenplay

1932 -- Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves

1932 -- Prosper -- from a Lucienne Favre play and to star Michel Simon

1936 -- Le Sequestree de Poitiers -- from an André Gide novel, script co-written with Jean Aurenche

1938 -- La Dame blanche -- co-written with Jacques Becker and to be directed by Erich von Stroheim

1940 -- a film set in Brazil

1941 -- Joan of Arc -- to be produced by David O Selznick

1941 -- Sarn -- from a Mary Webb novel and to star Ingrid Bergman ("Unfortunately, no producer wanted Ingrid Bergman concealed behind the hare-lip which disfigured the heroine", Jean Renoir wrote to Claude Beylie)

1942 -- Call Me Yours -- for Universal Pictures and to star Deanna Durbin

1943 -- Wind, Stars and Sand -- based on the novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

1946 -- a film on the history of Los Angeles -- to be produced by David Loew

1951 -- Flesh and the Devil -- an American production to be shot in France and star Gérard Philipe

1951 -- The Madwoman of Chaillot -- to be made in France

1953 -- a life of Vincent van Gogh -- produced by MGM and starring Van Heflin

1953 -- Les Braconniers -- to star Daniel Delorme ("the departure point" for his play Orvet)

1954 -- Rue de l'extra -- published in Cahiers du Cinema May 1954 as Paris-Province (inspiration for a film)

1957 -- First Love -- from Ivan Turgenev's novella

1957 -- Three Bedrooms in Manhattan -- from the Georges Simenon novel and to star Leslie Caron

1960 -- Un Matin d'été -- for 20th Century-Fox'

1965 -- C'est la revolution -- led to the sketches La Cireuse électrique and Le Roi d'Yvetot in the film Le Petit theater

1968 -- Julien de mon amour; La Duchesse; a adaptation of his novel Le Cahiers du Captaine Georges -- three projects for Jeanne Moreau

undated projects

a silent Diary of a Chambermaid

Ce Cochin de Morin -- from Guy de Maupassant

La Fuite de Monsieur Monde -- from Georges Simenon

Romeo and Jeannette -- from Jean Anouilh

Hunger -- from Knut Hamsun

The Lower Depths -- a remake with Montgomery Clift

Trilby -- with Ingrid Bergman

various projects with Tony Curtis and Leslie Caron

The Postman Always Rings Twice

François Truffaut letter to Jean Renoir -- Oct 1960

François Truffaut's letters to (and from) Jean Renoir were not published in Correspondence 1945-1984 /François Truffaut. That corrspondence was withheld and published a few years later in Jean Renoir : letters / edited by David Thompson and Lorraine LoBianco ; translations by Craig Carlson, Natasha Arnoldi, Michael Wells ; translations of the letters of François Truffaut by Anneliese Varaldiev. The first letter in that collection written by Truffaut to Renoir was written on October 31, 1960 with a short addendum written on November 20 just before Truffaut got around to sending it. These two excerpts are from that letter.

letter of Oct 31 1960

I haven't really kept up-to-date on what you're doing these days (teaching cinema courses?), but if any of your current activities might result in writing something which you would entrust to Cahiers, I can assure you that we would be extremely grateful for it. All of us at Cahiers have resorted to "begging for alms", as it were -- you see, we (Godard, Rivette, Doniol and myself) are so shocked by the gap between our ideas as cinephiles and our discoveries as film-makers that we don't dare write anything any more. Nevertheless, so much journalistic attention has been paid to the "New Wave" that the magazine is selling better than ever.
The situation with French cinema is very strange at the moment -- the number of films produced has doubled within a year, and in the last year's euphoria, many young film-makers jumped in feet first and made films without producers. And what's more, some young producers have also thrown themselves into the water the same way, by producing films without having distribution for them. What this means is that right now, distributors (and especially exhibitors) are in a very advantageous position: they can sit back and let the films pile up -- and collectively depreciate. Then they can pick and chose the ones they want, only taking what they think is sure to do well at the box office. And so, for most films, the market is totally closed off -- the only films which get released are by major directors, with big budgets and stars. Perhaps the revolution in film production happened too quickly, too roughly, or perhaps what's to blame is that no restructuring took place at the level of distribution and exhibition. In any case, the "New Wave" is currently coming under such attack -- from all sides -- that in order to survive, it needs to come up with a big hit every three months. The most recent one, last February, was Jean-Luc Godard's A Bout de Souffle. Ever since then, we've been massacred. Godard's second film, Le Petit Soldat (about torture) was completely banned by the censors, and everything else has completely flopped or was never released in the first place -- even some really lovely films, like Eric Rohmer's Le Signe du Lion.
page 400-401 (translated by Annaliese Varaldiev)

Sunday 20 November

I let this letter go unfinished for a couple of weeks, feeling doubtful that the one-way chatter I'm imposing on you is even worth sending. But, as I am leaving Paris the day after tomorrow and will be gone for a number of days, I decided that I might as well send it after all. My film, Tirez sur le Pianiste, is opening here in Paris next Friday -- that's why I'm escaping to where it's warm and sunny, because I predict the worst. It's a small tight-lipped film without laughs and at times sad, and is in no way suitable for a big first-run house on the Champs-Elysées; in a cinema like that it's bound to be buried.
page 401 (translated by Annaliese Varaldiev)

Alain Renoir on his father,(Jean) Renoir

Alain Renoir was the son of the film director Jean Renoir. In the late 1930s while still a teenager Alain Renoir worked as an assistant cameraman for his father on The Rules of the Game and The Human Beast. He left for the United States during World War II and he became a professor of English at the University of California -- Berkeley. These are transcription from an interview he gave in 2003 for the Criterion DVD of The Rules of the Game.

from 11:00 to 13:35 in the interview.

"When the first World War broke out, my father was a career non-commissioned officer in the military, the French Calvary - the Dragoons. and some of the effect that he cavalry had upon him can be seen in his films. For instance, he repeated to me over and over again that in the cavalry their was no such thing as a white horse or a black horse -- it did not exist -- in the cavalry a white horse was a light gray horse and a black horse was a dark gray horse....Well, if you think for a second you can see that that applies to everything he did. You have nothing that is just straightforward and cut-and dried. People are always a little bit of this and a little bit of that."

"My father had a knack for getting people to do exactly what he wanted. Pretending for them and for himself that it was not the case. For instance, he would say to the actor, "This is wonderful, this is absolutely wonderful. But you know it may be fun to try something else. Never saying it was lousy. And eventually I knew damned well where it was going. It would be the same thing with his cameraman. He would say, "Oh this shot is wonderful. You know it might be interesting to try it in a slightly [inaudible]way". But he never told them that is what I want done."

"I will tell you an anecdote that for obvious reasons I will not give you the name. On one particular occasion, I had heard a certain actor spouting the movie and it was obviously totally wrong. Well that night I went back home and my father and I met at the door of the apartment and I said, "Oh dad, this guy I'll call him X said that-and-that. He completely doesn't understand the movie. I think you should tell him" And my father turned to me and said, "Don't you say a word to him. When an actor understands his part in a play or a movie, he can no longer play it."