Colin Davis is Emeritus Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London.

1. Introduction: Renoir Goes to the Cinema.- Interpreting images.- 2. But is it Art?: Heidegger and the (Moving) Image.- 3. Philosophy and Film (Again): From Ontology to Hermeneutics.- 4. Reading and Overreading Film.- Silent Renoir.- 5. The Woman Who Wasn't There: Catherine Hessling.- 6. The Missing Real: La Fille de l'eau and La Petite Marchande d'allumettes.- 7. The Colonial Other: Sur un air de Charleston and Le Bled.- 8.    Traces of War: Erasing Memory in Tire au flanc..- 9. Conclusion.

Jean Renoir (1894-1979) is widely regarded as one of the most distinguished directors in the history of world cinema. In the 1930s he directed a string of films which stretched the formal, intellectual, political and aesthetic boundaries of the art form, including works such as Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, La Grande Illusion, La Bête humaine and La Règle du jeu. However, the great director¿s early work from the 1920s remains almost completely unknown, even to film specialists. If it is discussed at all, it is often seen to be of interest only insofar as it anticipates themes and techniques perfected in the later masterpieces. Renoir¿s films of the 1920s were sometimes unfinished, commercially unsuccessful, or unreleased at the time of their production. This book argues that to regard them merely as prefigurations of later achievements entails a failure to view them on their own terms, as searching, unsettled experiments in the meaning and potentialof film art.