Célia Bertin: Jean Renoir – A Life in Pictures

RECENTLY, the scholarly Alistair Cooke was introducing John Mortimer's Renoir reminiscent tv-film series, Summer Lease on PBS. In describing the origins of the story, which lay in the author's family visits to Italy, Cooke started a train of thought on the number of artists over the years whose work was inspired by their parents' activities, family relations, the tales they heard as children, the travels they took and the institutions they attended, all forming an important part of their growing years and providing them with a vivid background to draw upon in their creative periods which followed. Co-incidentally, a new biography of the distinguished French filmmaker, Jean Renoir, the son the greatest painter of the time, provides us with a detailed and colourful description of how deeply influenced Jean was by his father, Auguste and family; and how much his films reflected this without in anyway detracting from Jean...