12 - The Filmmaker in the Film: Octave and the Rules of Renoir's Game

Summary

This chapter has two parts. First, it sketches a reading of The Rules of the Game that focuses on the figure of Octave. Then it examines the significance of The Rules of the Game within the context of Renoir's work. In brief, the claim of the first part is that Octave represents the film's author, serves as the filmmaker's surrogate in his intervention in the world of the film (the most direct possible point to Renoir's gesture of choosing to play the part of Octave himself). Octave's role constitutes a paradigm for the role Renoir conceives himself as playing as creator of films like The Rules of the Game. In this way, Renoir's conception of the creation of his art – a conception manifestly the subject of Renoir's late work (for example, the trilogy The Golden Coach, French Can-Can, and Eléna et les Hommes, and The Little Theater of Jean Renoir) – is inscribed within the The Rules of the Game. The film's delineation of Octave's role, its establishment of a certain relationship between the camera and the world it frames, and its story are integrally connected. The Rules of the Game is an acknowledgment by Renoir of the conditions of his own art.

The second part of this chapter argues that the way The Rules of the Game frames this acknowledgment is crucial to its significance in the context of Renoir's work.