Renoir Speaks of Childhood and Art To Eager Flick Followers at Loeb

Jean Renoir, the French film director, saw his first movies in a Jesuit school where the fathers, " as they everywhere are, were in love with show business." He smiled at the Ivy Film types crowding the Loeb and continued to describe how one small boy who went to the movies on Saturday afternoon grew up to be the director of The Grand Illusion.

Renoir called his Theodore Spencer Memorial Lecture "Considerations in Film Making." However, as if demonstrating that "art is the conversation of the artist," he did not lecture but conversed with his audience.

"Let me tell you a story," he said, talking about his father--the French impressionist--his childhood in Montmartre, his experiences in World War I, and his films. "A friend visiting my home once asked if I wasn't ashamed that I had no portrait of my father. 'But I have a picture of his flowers,' I replied. This is the protrait on my father."

"The expression of the artist in his work in inevitable: this is the conversation of the artist," Renoir explained. The painter and the director try to communicate rather than to be perfect. "I am not in favor of perfection," he said; "I am in favor of human beings.

Renoir quoted Sartre in outlining his philosophy of film-making. "Just as essence comes after existence, we know what we are doing only by shaping out work. We have to see, to touch, to smell, to hear, I have made several blue prints for films in my life, and they were all false."

Much of Renoir's conversation concerned his early experience with film. "I started to direct," he explained, "because I couldn't stand what other directors were doing. My first attempts," he admitted, "weren't so good. I didn't understand that the purpose of film-making is the study of the human being. The camera is pitiless. The director is like a surgeon--he opens the chest and shows everything."

If Renoir quickly learned that the camera is candid, he also found that the public enjoys being fooled. His first major film, La Chienne (The Bitch), failed to attract an audience, "A Romanian friend," he relates, "advertised it at his theater by saying 'Don't see this picture, and if you see it don't bring your children.' The picture played for six months."