Jean Renoir, American Artist

Briefly compares Renoir's La Règle du jeu and Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings under the heading of "modernity" as initiating a reconsideration of Renoir's "Americanness." A confluence of America, modernity, and race is implicit in La Règle du jeu via references to Charles Lindbergh and pre-Columbian art, and a similar invocation of aviation, race, and American culture is overtly in play in Sur un Air de Charleston . Ambivalence about modernity and technology is depicted in La Bête humaine and Le crime de Monsieur Lange . Questions of America, art, race, and sexual exploitation/slavery are raised in La Chienne and Les Bas-fonds. The Woman on the Beach is described as extending Renoir's ruminations on art and sex, while it also recalls the modernity of film noir and of Renoir's earliest impressionist experiments. Interprets The Southerner and Swamp Water as culminating Renoir's interest in American race relations, if indirectly or allegorically, while attending explicitly to questions of capitalist exploitation and injustice.