Renoir's La Règle du jeu between automata and the phantasmagoria, or how to show the collapse of the European Enlightenment project when rational truth-telling becomes impossible

O’Shaughnessy, M ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1167-3214, 2025. Renoir's La Règle du jeu between automata and the phantasmagoria, or how to show the collapse of the European Enlightenment project when rational truth-telling becomes impossible. Nottingham French Studies, 64 (2), pp. 218-234. ISSN 0029-4586

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Abstract

This article brings together three essential elements of Jean Renoir’s masterwork, La Règle du jeu (1939): its generic instability and capacity to destabilise contemporary spectators; its mobilisation of automata and other machinic elements to activate an Enlightenment imaginary and ground its historical depth-of-field; its use of Benjaminian phantasmagoria to make sense of a period when appeal to an rational Enlightenment subject no longer seemed viable. Pulling the three elements together, the article argues that the film’s bewildering generic mix and mobilisation of an array of cultural and historical references constitute it as a phantasmagoria which confronts its spectators despite themselves with the failure and destructiveness of their civilisation. The article draws on Renoir’s La Marseillaise (1938) for comparison. A key intertext for La Règle du jeu, La Marseillaise has the kind of clear-sighted, radical, collective actor whose absence in the later film means its society is condemned to decaying stasis.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Nottingham French Studies
Creators:	O’Shaughnessy, M.
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Date:	July 2025
Volume:	64
Number:	2
ISSN:	0029-4586
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.3366/nfs.2025.0448 DOI 2503721 Other
Rights:	This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Edinburgh University Press in Nottingham French Studies. The Version of Record is available online at: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/nfs.2025.0448.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Melissa Cornwell
Date Added:	13 Nov 2025 16:08
Last Modified:	13 Nov 2025 16:08
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/54726

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