Renoir's career was a river of personal expression. The waters may have varied in turbulence and depth, but the flow of his personality was consistently directed to its final outlet in the sea of life. If the much abused term "humanism" could have been applied to Renoir's art and to no one else's, it might have provided an accurate definition for his work as a whole. In Renoir's films, man's natural surroundings are almost always prominently featured, and it is this emphasis on man in his natural environment photographed by an unblinking camera that is the true precursor of neorealism. As Murnau represented the formal antithesis to Eisenstein's montage principles, Renoir represented the thematic alternative to Eisenstein's dialectics….

Renoir's stylistic personality can be expressed at times by no more than a beat's hesitation in the rhythm of the players' movements. In one sequence of La Regle du Jeu...