My Life and My Films : Jean Renoir

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When I started to read French filmmaker Jean Renoir’s autobiography "My Life and My Films" [1974] and I was stuck at the line “In my view cinema is nothing but a new form of painting- another form of the total transformation of the world through knowledge” in the forward. I have fallen free in the nadir of nostalgia and recalled an incident.

In my orientation class for cinematography certificate course in Pathshala South Asian Media Institute back in January 2015, my course instructor asked for all what is cinematography, broadly speaking, what the cinema is? I was astonished as well as confident that I knew what to say in response. I said boastfully cinema is a third eye; an eye to see the world what others don’t say.

 I have also posted a statement in Bengali, তৃতীয় নয়নে অন্য জীবন দেখার শুভারম্ভ...... [The beginning of seeing the other lives through the third eye] with three pictures of Gordon Wills, the cinematic collaborator of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall [1977] & Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather series [1969], Roger Deakins with ARRI, a master collaborator of Cohen Brothers for No Country for Old Men [2008], Sam Mendes for 1917 [2019] & Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 [2017] and Emmanuel Lubezki, a repeated collaborator of Terrence Mallick’s The Tree of Life [2011], Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity [2013] & Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s The Revenant [2015]. 

 

I also think, modern forms of photographic arts are indebted to paintings and most of the cinematic aspects that deal with aesthetic and versatile perspective to the reality are borrowed from the prime innovations by paintings.   

        

 My Life and My Films [1974]

Ma Vie et mes Films

Jean Renoir

French, France

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