I would applaud your blog -scholarship more if it referred to the article cited. Said article was written BEFORE the war contemporaneously with the attack on Le Quai des Brumes which has spurred this thread's particular tangent.jdcopp wrote:One does not need to look further than Jeanson's article. Sorry, but I have already gone and looked further.You need look no further than Jeanson's article 'The Two Renoirs'
http://jdcopp.blogspot.com/2008/01/reno ... -late.html
In 'La Fleche de Paris 12 August 1938' Jeanson (who as I mentioned is far from being safe from reproach himself)
wrote -
We possess two Renoirs
A true Renoir.
And a false Renoir.
.......
The true Renoir is delighted by the success of his friends,the younger filmmakers,
The false Renoir can't tolerate competition,and he suffers as much from the triumphs of his colleagues as from the failure of his own productions.
.....Quai des Brumes he has proclaimed is a film of fascist propoganda because the foreigners who see it will think that a country which produces the kind of characters played by Gabin or Brasseur is a country ripe for dictatorship.
So there!
Its reasoning is worth its weight in rubles.
.....
He ends with..
I also hope that the false Renoir reads this article through the eyes of the true Renoir and that he finds here all the lost illusions of someone who was once his friend.
I of course have cherry picked the lines pertinent to the concerns of this thread which in brief was What the fuck was Renoir on when he saw fascist characters in QdB?
Jeanson was a tricksy mercurial figure and I have no doubt as your blog notes was not beyond scabrous character assassination. But the article above is worth reading in full to see another side of a working colleague's appraisal of Renoir that is a sad disillusionment rather than cant and mere spite.
