The Rules of the Game

Today in class, we discussed The Rules of the Game directed by Jean Renoir and how it related to Bazin’s concept of space and time in verisimilitude. We said that the time in the movie matched realistically to the amount of time things would take to do in reality. Also with the concept of space, we discussed the house and the camera walking us from room to room as you would in a real house.

There was something else I realized about the film that I didn’t get a chance to bring up in class. It deals with space and verisimilitude. I was thinking about camera shots. I noticed that many of the shots showed a bunch of different things in each. For instance when the actors would be standing in the hall or some other room, we as the audience would see the stands and vases in the foreground of the actors being focused on, and then the other actors and things happening in the background. It was as if the camera acted as a spectator looking in at everything that was happening which allowed us to feel like we were there, instead of being just a camera focusing on one part of the whole which would have showed us a limited range of what was going on.

My favorite scene in the film could also relate to my idea of space and verisimilitude. It was replayed again today in class as well, but for a different reason than why I like it so much. This scene was when one of the servants was carrying the tray from the kitchen (after gossiping) and the camera follows her out but looks up at Christine and another woman on the staircase without any interruption in the shot. There were a lot more pans and seamless shots in this film, making it much different from the others that we’ve viewed in class with all the fast paced cuts that created collision-like montage. It made The Rules of the Game seem like a “smoother” film.