A Day in the Country.
This an excerpt from a conversation between Andrew Klevan and Stanley Cavell. It is worth reading the whole text attentively, but this moment is particularly telling of the way both approach film and films. The fact that the rain in A Day in the Country (Partie de campagne, 1936) was not planned does not mean that it is to be read as insignificant in the context of the film. They encourage us to attend to the film, to how the filmmaker integrates elements and gives them significance.
These remarks also resonate with me because Andrew, now at the University of Oxford, was my teacher (the most passionate and compelling teacher that I ever encountered, in fact). A Day in the Country was one of the films that we discussed in his Film Analysis course. So this exchange of words recalls to me not only Renoir’s great film, but the seminar about it as well:
ANDREW KLEVAN: I wonder why so many of the serious things we feel about films are mysteriously diverted when we speak or write about them. Why are our thoughts and words about film deflected? Anecdotes seem to be one of the many instances of diversion. I was just thinking of that anecdote about the Renoir film Partie de campagne...STANLEY CAVELL: ...Yes. “It rained that day.”
KLEVAN: Actually that is not necessarily an unhelpful anecdote if it leads one, as it led me, to be even more astonished at how Renoir made use of the rain (on the water) in the film. Indeed, we are more alert to the complexity of its integration.
CAVELL: Exactly, but instead I have heard the anecdote used as reductive, by saying “Oh he didn’t intend to film the scene in rain. He was just lucky.” In that case one might say that wonderful filmmakers are perpetually lucky. How can that be?[1]
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[1] “What Becomes of Thinking on Film?: Stanley Cavell in Conversation with Andrew Klevan”, in Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema After Wittgenstein and Cavell, ed. Rupert Read and Jerry Goodenough (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2005), 176.
