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As much a reflection of its location as a total reinvention of it, Jean Renoir’s brilliant, evocative film The River takes us to an India that only exists in the mind of its creator. Certainly, the famed director is drawing directly from the memories and the words of author Rumer Godden (who not only wrote the novel from which the movie was based, but co-authored the screenplay as well), and by filming completely on location, along the Bengal countryside, he is using all the local color to his distinct advantage. But Renoir was naturally a painter at heart, and for this, his first film in Technicolor, the canvas he creates is both artificial and awe-inspiring. While it may not be completely faithful to the culture or the customs of the Indian people, there is no doubt about its cinematic facets. The River is a sumptuous visual feast, yet another example (following Grand Illusion, The Rules of the Game and The Lowers Depths) of Renoir’s amazing ability at using his camera as a paintbrush.

Napier wrote:I watched The River 3 times this weekend!This film is absolutely beautiful.The first time was ok!But the 2nd and 3rd viewing just really blew me away!I can't reccomend this DVD enough.This IMHO is one of the best Criterion's.I am overjoyed they made this available on DVD.If I had a choice of Grand Illusion,The Rules of the Game,or the Stage and Spectacle Trilogy,I would definitely watch The River!This one nudged The Killer from my 5 favorite Criterion's to number 6!THAT GOOD!!

Andre Bazin wrote:There is othing anti-aristocratic in the novel by Rumer Godden on which The River is based. Furthermore, in the film Renoir explicitly takes the point of view of Harriet. The events are thus filtered through the memories and sensibilities of an English adolsescent with a lively but still naive mind, scarecely aware of social problems. She sees India, like her garden, her friends, and her parents, from the viewpoint of a stable family life which takes for granted the social and economic stabilities on which it's based. Thus Renoir's point of view as it is expressed by her is exclusively moral. To reproach him for not using this fleeting love story as a vehicle to describe the misery of India or to attack colonialism is to reproach him for not treating an entirely different subject. I have it from Renoir imself that before he found a producer with resources in India he had considered for some time making the film in Hollywood. If this had happened we would have lost much, but nothing of the essential theme of the film, which is the discovery of love by three adolescents.

However, I am not being altogether sincere in pleading Renoir's case this way. I think that his fidelity to his central theme made for a vision of English society in India which though not at all false, ay be a little superficial, overly optimistic, and implicitly imperial.

But then Renoir never hesititated to take liberties with historical facts in hisFrench films either. As a matter of fact, the choice of point of view would seem to argue for a certain partisanship, not (as only an absurdly narrow-minded critic of The River contend) on behalf of colonialism, but rather on behalf of morals over sociology. The latter were not seperable in The Rules of the Game. They are in The River. Made in Hollywood with simulated Indian decor, the film would have had a completely different tonality. What the geographic and human realism adds, however, is not a social dimension, but a religious and mystical meaning. The probem of the confrontation of the Occident and the Orient is not posed in terms of economics or politics, or even history, but exclusively in terms of religious spirituality. India figures only as a setting, but more as a moral than as a geographical setting. Its silent presence, to which the protagonists pay only half-conscious attention, acts on their inds as a magnetic field influences the needle of a compass.

Andre Bazin wrote:There is at least one character who incarnates the mystical temptation of the Orient, and this is Bogey. Remember his games with his little native friend, as mysterious and taciturn as a bronze statue? He is the only witness to Bogey's death, and he is the only one at the burial who does not grieve, because he alone understands the vanity of the tears and the ignorance which the Westerners' love conceals: ignorance of the profound secret to which "the Unknown" has initiated Bogey for eternity.

Andre Bazin wrote:Renoir's mastery of his material in this film, his power to mold it in the shape of his vision, may surpass even that of The Rules of the Game. Certainly it is not inferior to it. yet this time Renoir's achievement rests 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 th scenes are framed only once. There is not a ingle pan or dolly shot in the entire film. Renoir used his lens like a telescope, moving in and out on reality, revealing and conealing things according to the instincts of his shrewd, mischevious sensibility. here he seems interested 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 expressionistic symolism. He uses it only as a narrative convention, and it does not for a second destroy the concrete reality of the moment.

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 which The Rules of the Game destroyed and supplanted, but rather an extension of the same revolution begun in the earlier film. 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 brought to the cinema at once more realism and more expression. He allowed it to mean more by showing more.

But in this negation of cinematographic canons, in this destruction of the shot as the basic unit of screen narrative and the screen itself as the unit of space, there remained an implicit acknowledgement of the "cinema" as a means of expression. Even as a mask, the screen remained a screen. Even in reversing its function Renoir had not destroyed it. This final step remained to be taken. In The River the screen no longer exists; there is nothing but reality. Not pictorial, not theatrical, not anti-expressionist, the screen simply dissapears in favor of what it reveals.

ran222 wrote:I just finished watching The River, and the film and the transfer were both amazing, however, I couldn't help noticing that throughout the film, the colors would change ever so slightly, so that the sky would flicker between different shades of blue, etc... Is this a problem with the disc or is it inherent in how the movie was filmed? Has anyone else seen this?

The shifting color you notice on COLONEL BLIMP is called "chroma
breathing". Chroma breathing is a shifting of density within the
individual strips in three-strip Technicolor. Consequently, the film
appears to change hue slightly at times. This appears in the original
film element and could not be corrected.

Certainly not a fault of the transfer.

One normally finds this YCM "breathing" in Technicolor dupes or sep masters.

Col. Blimp is a good case in point, but it can be seen beautifully in the Five Star Ultra edition of The Sound of Music. Simply look at a neutral area in a dupe and watch the colors shift kaleidoscopically.

RAH

India Without Tigers
By A. O. SCOTT

BASED on an autobiographical novel by Rumer Godden, "The River" (1951), directed by Jean Renoir, is one of the most beautiful movies ever made. This is not so much a critical judgment as the recognition of a mathematical truth. Renoir, the son of the impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and the director of such universally acknowledged classics as "The Rules of the Game" and "The Grand Illusion," was congenitally incapable of making anything ugly. Even his lesser efforts are distinguished by a precise and lively aesthetic sense - an eye for fluid, pleasing compositions and an attentiveness to the audience's pleasure. Add to this the fact that in "The River" Renoir was deploying Technicolor (for the first time) and using its palette to capture the bright colors and lush greenery of India, and the rest of the equation falls into place. The artist, the medium and the location combine, as though effortlessly, to produce an experience of surpassing loveliness. Proof can be found starting Aug. 3 at Lincoln Center, which will be showing a restored print in connection with the Criterion Collection's release of a beautiful transfer of "The River" on DVD.

Of course, as with any great movie, the experience of "The River" and the reality behind it turn out to be more complex than they may appear, though part of the film's beauty surely lies in its straightforward simplicity. The tale Renoir chooses to tell is not especially dramatic. It is an unassuming, understated coming-of-age story related mostly through the voice-over narration of Harriet (played as a child by Patricia Walters, one of many nonprofessionals in the cast), the bookish eldest daughter of a large, warm family of English colonials living in a picturesque corner of Bengal. Harriet's Edenic childhood is complicated by the arrival of Captain John, an American who lost a leg in the recent war and who comes to visit his eccentric English cousin, Mr. John (Arthur Shields). Harriet is not the only local girl to fall for the visitor, played by the Hollywood-handsome Thomas E. Breen. Mr. John's half-Indian daughter, Melanie (Radha), seems also to be carrying a torch for him, though she has a high-caste Indian suitor of her own. Harriet's more serious rival is a strapping redhead named Valerie (Adrienne Corri), only child of the owner of the jute factory that Harriet's father manages, who throws herself in Captain John's path whenever she has the chance. This romantic intrigue is more Louisa May Alcott than Jane Austen, and the interplay of story and setting suggests few of the psychosexual and political undertones E. M. Forster detected in "A Passage to India." The loss of Harriet's innocence is neither an epiphany nor a catastrophe, and to the extent that "The River" is her story it has the charming, old-fashioned appeal of classic adolescent literature.

Godden's book was published in 1946, a year before British rule over the Indian subcontinent ended. Renoir shot his film in 1950, the year India became an independent republic. Between the book and the film was a bloody process of parturition, partition and strife that killed hundreds of thousands and displaced many times more, and that left in its wake two nations, India and Pakistan, in a state of permanent hostility.

None of this is evident in "The River," which seems to cast its glance backward on the placid days of the Raj. Godden, recalling her own girlhood, sets her veiled memoir in the 1920's, while Renoir does not specify exactly when the film takes place. It is possible, therefore, to criticize "The River" as yet another exercise in colonialist nostalgia, in which the petty emotional dramas of privileged white people unfold against an exotic backdrop where darker faces are just another aspect of the scenery.

But such criticism sticks neither to Godden, who wrote matter-of-factly from the perspective of her own life, nor to Renoir, who knew little about India before he started shooting. In a short talking-head film included on the DVD of "The River," Renoir (who died in 1979) remarks that "India is one of the least mysterious countries," a statement that may reveal more about the director, for whom nothing human was ever alien, than about the country. After a review in The New Yorker piqued his curiosity, Renoir, who had spent most of the 1940's struggling in Hollywood, tried in vain to interest an American studio in Godden's book. He found little appetite for a movie about India without "tigers, elephants and Bengal Lancers." He told his eventual co-producer, Kenneth McEldowney, that he would pursue the project only if he could shoot it on location, and he found a rich local pool of talent and wisdom, including Satyajit Ray, went on to become India's greatest realist filmmaker.

The result of Renoir's long immersion in Bengal is a picture that embeds its story within a rich documentary context. This is not just a matter of authentic detail, of seeing the overgrown temples, the bustling markets and the river itself as they really are. India is the most active, complex character in the film, and the Western characters exist to bring its personality into sharper relief, rather than vice versa. Renoir, like his father, was an artist of the open air, and each of his frames implies a world that extends beyond the screen. His camera moves at a strolling pace, turning this way and that to take in new details, and it becomes the instrument of his endless, generous curiosity. This curiosity leads Renoir to attend to the nuances and peculiarities of human behavior and, at the same time, to illuminate the larger patterns of custom and belief that allow people to understand what they do.

The name most commonly given to this approach - a word that has attached itself to Renoir's reputation like a loyal, friendly dog - is humanism. While the term accurately reflects the ethical dimensions of Renoir's work - his essential faith in human decency and his sympathy for human weakness - it does not quite do justice to his sensuality, his sense of theater or his love of nature. And the discreet removal of politics to the margins of "The River" allows him to establish contact with the deeper rhythms of life. His narrative moves in a straight line, but it also registers, as few other English-language films have, the cyclical, endless movement of experience through time. Which may be another way of saying that "The River," which required months of Renoir's life and asks a little more than 90 minutes of yours, is timeless.