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Posts tagged ‘Michel Simon’
September 14, 2010  |  An Auteurist History of Film
A Jean Renoir Birthday Celebration

Boudu Saved from Drowning. 1932. France. Directed by Jean Renoir

Boudu Saved from Drowning. 1932. France. Directed by Jean Renoir

These notes accompany the </i>Jean Renoir Birthday Celebration screenings on September 14, 15, and 16 in Theater 3.</p>

Jean Renoir (1894–1979) would have been 116 years old tomorrow (September 15). One is hard pressed to name a twentieth-century artist in any medium whose work reflects a richer diversity of feelings and ideas. Renoir’s broad and serious concern with the social state of mankind is combined with a warmly romantic sense of humor, and the whole is given expression through an almost effortless command of the complex tools of his métier. He was a self-proclaimed realist, an improviser, and the infinitely loving apostle of egalitarian humanism.