Original Jean Renoir Movie Posters

Jean Renoir movie posters are among the rarest and most historically significant items in all of European cinema collecting — authentic original prints for the films of the director who set the standard for humanist realism in the art form. Renoir, son of Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, brought a painter's eye to social observation and the rich moral complexity of French working-class and bourgeois life. His greatest actors — Michel Simon, Jean Gabin, Marcel Dalio, Nora Gregor — appear in campaign materials that treat performance as the central subject of advertising art. La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939) — consistently placed among the two or three greatest films ever made — generated original French grande and affiche materials that are among the rarest poster collectibles in world cinema art. The film was a commercial failure on release and withdrawn from distribution; surviving theatrical advertising materials are accordingly vanishingly scarce. La Grande Illusion (1937), his anti-war masterwork with Jean Gabin, was more commercially successful and produced more surviving material, but first-release French originals are still serious collector acquisitions. Renoir's wartime Hollywood period — The Southerner (1945), The Woman on the Beach (1947) — produced American one-sheets and lobby cards that are more available and represent a strong entry point to his filmography. His postwar return to European production, including The River (1951) and French Cancan (1954), generated both French and international campaign materials of considerable beauty. Purchase an original Jean Renoir poster and you're acquiring one of the genuine rarities of European cinema art. Browse alongside our Jean-Luc Godard and Nouvelle Vague collections for the French cinema tradition Renoir inspired. All Film/Art Gallery movie posters and items are authenticated originals.