The cinema as a whole still suffers from the mentality of the kind of people who like slick color prints. It confuses the beauty of the model with that of the painting, whereas the painter’s aim is not to depict a particular woman but to reveal a universal beauty. Renoir does not choose his actors, as in the theaters, because they fit into a predetermined role, but like the painter, because of what he can force us to see in them. That is why the most spectacular bits of acting in his films are almost indecently beautiful. They leave us with only the memory of their brilliance, of a flash of revelation so dazzling that it almost forces us to turn our eyes away. At moments like these the actor is pushed beyond himself, caught totally open and naked in a situation which no longer has anything to do with dramatic expression, in that most revealing light which the cinema can cast on the human figure more brilliantly than any other art except painting.
[translated by W.W. Halsey II and William H. Simon]