A Film Canon

The Rules Of The Game perfects The Human Beast's abstraction of space, as well as its corresponding critique of criminal indifference, here translated into an aristocratic, rather than bureaucratic, register. Concomitantly, Renoir's fascination with the window as agent of abstraction finds its apotheosis in the conclusion, which takes place in a greenhouse, culminating a deep-focus aesthetic that transfers the narrative's coveted binoculars to the viewer. It feels as if Renoir's ultimate ambition is to present everything that is happening at any moment simultaneously, explaining the circumscribed location - an isolated country estate - and producing a quasi-scientific detachment that defines drama as so many trajectories in space, as quantifiable as the various motifs of mechanical movement - flight, conducting, shooting, marching, radio waves - that suffuse the characters' lives. That said, this determinism doesn't preclude local unprectabilities, as evinced in Renoir's strategy of outlining entrances and exits, and then allowing the actors to improvise large sections of their performances. The result is a powerfully disorienting experience, in which the absence of a protagonist (other than Octave, played by Renoir himself, who acts more as a catalyst for everything that occurs) finds immediate expression as the absence of any fixed focus to the shots, most of which need to be viewed several times to yield their full, often contradictory, meanings. This produces something akin to a visual echo, most concisely in a shot with a gramophone in the foreground, and a conversation in the background, but most explicitly through the proliferation of mirrors, which, along with the whitewashed walls, chequered floor and corridored vanishing-points, turn the house into a geometric sequence, the movement between its terms embodied by Renoir's artfully mobile camera.