The Whirlpool of Fate | |
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Directed by | Jean Renoir |
Written by | Pierre Lestringuez |
Produced by | Jean Renoir |
Starring | Catherine Hessling |
Cinematography | |
Production company | Les Films Jean Renoir |
Release date |
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Running time | 71 minutes |
Country | France |
Languages |
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The Whirlpool of Fate or The Girl of the Water (French: La Fille de l'eau) is a 1925 French silent drama film directed by Jean Renoir and starring Catherine Hessling as its heroine.
All of the French copies of this film have been lost but English copies continue to exist with complete copies of the intertitles (albeit in English). The intertitles have been translated back into French so that modern viewers in France can still enjoy the film in a way that is as close as possible to the original as it originally screened. [1]
In an age of canals and barges, the movie takes place in the late 19th century. The scene opens with the slow progress of a barge making its way down a canal that is lined with oak trees. The heroine's brutish father, a pole man, is somehow knocked off the barge, where he disappears under the serene and still surface of the water. The camera lingers on the water, perhaps to detect a bubble or two rise from below, but nothing can be seen of the pole man's last breath. The death is purely by accident, and although a rescue effort is mounted, his body is not recovered until the next morning.
Reduced to poverty from the loss of her father, the heroine falls back upon her own resources to eke out a simple living by stealing. She happens upon a rogue who has a similar lifestyle, and they join for a few brief acts of criminal mischief, but he is far more abandoned to petty crimes than she is.
A classic case of mistaken identity leads to the heroine being accused of setting fire to a French peasant's haystack. Alarmed, the farmer peasant races to all his neighbors to help put the fire out. A wheeled water wagon is rushed from the village fire station to the scene of the crime, but no one can put out the fire. The peasants think she started the fire, and rush over to her gypsy wagon, and torch it. A macabre fire dance ensues as the locals dance around the burning gypsy wagon, shaking their fists at the wagon, not knowing if someone is inside it.
Jean Renoir was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s. His films La Grande Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939) are often cited by critics as among the greatest films ever made. He was ranked by the BFI's Sight & Sound poll of critics in 2002 as the fourth greatest director of all time. Among numerous honours accrued during his lifetime, he received a Lifetime Achievement Academy Award in 1975 for his contribution to the motion picture industry. Renoir was the son of the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and the uncle of the cinematographer Claude Renoir. He was one of the first filmmakers to be known as an auteur.
Pierre Renoir was a French stage and film actor. He was the son of the impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and elder brother of the film director Jean Renoir. He is also noted for being the first actor to play Georges Simenon's character Inspector Jules Maigret in Night at the Crossroads, directed by his brother.
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Catherine Hessling was a French actress and the first wife of film director Jean Renoir. Hessling appeared in 15, mostly silent, films before retiring from the acting profession and withdrawing from public life in the mid-1930s.
Janie Marèse was a French actress who appeared in four shorts and three feature-length films, most notably Jean Renoir's second sound film La Chienne, before her premature death, aged 23, in a road accident.
Jean Bachelet was a French cinematographer who started as a newsreel cameraman and whose numerous theatrical films include The Rules of the Game (1939) for Jean Renoir.
Renoir is a 2012 French drama film based on the last years of Pierre-Auguste Renoir at Cagnes-sur-Mer during World War I. The film was directed by Gilles Bourdos and competed in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. The film is set in the south of France during World War I and stars Michel Bouquet, Christa Theret, Thomas Doret and Vincent Rottiers.
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Shop Girls of Paris or The Ladies' Delight is a 1943 French historical drama film directed by André Cayatte and starring Michel Simon, Albert Préjean and Blanchette Brunoy. It is an adaptation of the 1883 novel Au Bonheur des Dames by Émile Zola.
Pierre Lestringuez was a French screenwriter and film actor. He wrote the screenplays for several Jean Renoir silent films during the 1920s.
Claude Rodier was a physicist, teacher and staff sergeant in the Mouvements Unis de la Résistance (MUR), part of the French Resistance in Auvergne, France.
Blond Girl with a Rose is a late work period (1892–1919) oil painting executed in 1915–1917 by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and held in the collection of the Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris. The painting portrays Renoir's last model, the teenaged Catherine Hessling, who featured in several of his paintings during his final few years. She went on to marry Renoir's second son Jean in 1920 and become a film actress.
Henriette Henriot was an actress and a favourite model of the French artist Renoir from about 1874–1876. She is known for the model in his painting La Parisienne on display at the National Museum, Cardiff.