The River

 Film :- The River

Director :- Jean Renoir

In this film, Renoir's achievement lies on techniques considerably different from those he used until 1939. For the fluid camera, the lateral reframings of the deep-focus shots, Renoir here substitutes a pictorial stability in which the scenes are framed only once. There is not a single pan or dolly shot in the whole film. Renoir uses his lens like a telescope, moving in and out on reality, revealing and concealing things according to the instincts of his astute, puckish sensitivity. Here he seems concerned only in showing things precisely as they are. Even when he falls back on traditional montage, using many shots, as in the scene of the siesta, there is no hint of expressionist symbolism. He uses it only as a narrative convention. Furthermore, the classicism of the editing in The River is perhaps more apparent than real. It is in no way a return to the traditional forms, but rather an extension of the same revolution begun in his earlier films. For the decorative or expressionist frame of the traditional shot, for the artificiality of discontinuous montage, Renoir has substituted the mask and the living continuity of reframing. By this he adds to the cinema at once more realism and more expression. He allows it to mean more by showing more.

Now as a Bengali, I can say the sights and sounds and moods of India, or rather, the Bengal riverside have been captured beautifully by Renoir in this film. But this too is primarily a story of Britons in India. The presence of a GI dates the story around the mid-1940s, a period of considerable political unrest. But Renoir’s calm, metrical approach, and the script by Rumer Godden and Renoir, prevents the intrusion of such components. As a result, an air of fairytale unreality permeates

the whole film and robs it of value as a social document.