SCENES OF LOVE AND MURDER

Jean Renoir (1894–1979) has long been considered one of the greatest directors in the history of cinema. Films such as La Grande Illusion (1937) and La Regle du jeu (1939) rank amongst the masterpieces of film art. This book examines his films from the 1930s in the light of recent developments in philosophical film criticism. With reference to thinkers such as Aristotle, Wittgenstein, Girard, Derrida and Cavell, it argues that Renoir's work engages with and elucidates some of the great philosophical questions. In particular the films are shown to reflect on the nature of murder and its links with desire, community, ethics and the mystery of other minds. Although the 1930s end for Renoir in political disillusionment, his final film of the decade, La Regle du jeu, intimates a new accomodation with the enigma of the unknown other. It points toward the possibility of welcoming what remains alien to the self rather than violently eradicating it.

March 2009
224 pages

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Colin Davis is Professor of French at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the co-author of French Fiction in the Mitterand Years: Memory, Narrative, Desire (2000), After Poststructuralism: Reading Stories and Theory (2004) and Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead (2007).