I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land we meet on today. The Gadigal and Bidjigal people of the Eora nation and pay my respects to elders past and present. Always was always will be Aboriginal land.
A big thank you Geoff Gardner for asking me to introduce Renoir’s The Golden Coach. Thanks also to Adrian Danks for his excellent catalogue notes.
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| Jean Renoir (photo from his role in La Regle du Jeu) |
I first saw The Golden Coach in the late sixties in Melbourne. I was in my late teens and trying to make my way as a young actress. I had landed a bit part in a Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible. I only had a couple of lines and I had to scream a lot, but it gave me access to a series of actors’ workshops George Ogilvie was running for the company.
George had trained in Paris with Jacques Lecoq and the workshops covered mime, comedy and improvisation. He was laying the groundwork for his production of Goldoni’s A Servant of Two Masters, a play which drew on the tradition of commedia dell’arte, with its stock characters like Pantelone, Harlequin and Columbine, its acrobats and slapstick comedy, and its large sections reserved for improvisation.
Commedia dell’arte is also at the heart of The Golden Coach, so I assume it was through George’s workshops that I heard about the screening.
I didn’t know that Renoir was the son of the famous Impressionist painter and I knew nothing of the European post-war new waves of film production offering alternatives to the Hollywood films on offer in Australia. And I had never heard of, much less seen, Anna Magnani.
I have a vivid memory of climbing the rickety stairs of the International Bookshop in Elizabeth Street Melbourne where the film was screening. It was run by a socialist cooperative and there were overflowing tables of no doubt radical texts, but I was looking for the film screening. It turned out to be in a room above the bookshop, where rows of single wooden chairs faced a screen and there was a 16mm projector up the back.
I had never seen a woman like Anna Magnani on the screen before. She wasn’t conventionally beautiful, she didn’t defer to men, and she had a very loud laugh. In the film she plays the tempestuous Camilla, a member of an Italian commedia dell’arte troupe fresh off the boat in 18thcentury Spanish colonial Peru. As Columbine, she could command the stage. As Camilla she was larger than life, passionate and outspoken. When a man hit her, she hit him back. I wanted to be her.
Renoir claimed the film was not about commedia dell’arte. He had just ‘attempted to follow its style, with its involved complicated situations.’[i]
Graeme Blundell, who also participated in the workshops with George Oglivie, describes commedia dell’arte in his memoir as:
…a form of theatre descended from the performances of tightrope walkers, tumblers and acrobats, daubed with soot and adorned with phalluses, of ancient Rome’s Attellanae Fabulae. Troupes of popular comediennes roamed the fairs and carnivals of Italy carrying with them a simple portable stage, packed into a cart together with curtains, props, costumes and their immortal masks. The improvised dialogue from a plot line of scenario decided on in advance. Any actor at a loss for words or in any other predicament usually resorted to slapstick. [ii]
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| "...tightrope walkers, tumblers and acrobats..." |
Left free to improvise, actors would spice things up by weaving in references to political scandals and intrigues in the cities and villages they visited. It was a ribald and satirical form of comedic theatre and hugely popular.
Adrian Danks refers to the ‘porous boundaries between performance and reality, tradition and modernity, theatre and everyday life’[iii] in The Golden Coach.
Renoir said
… it was a film in which I tried to enclose one performance inside another. I tried, if you like, to erase the borders between representation of reality and the reality itself. I tried to establish a confusion between acting on a theatrical stage and acting in life. I don’t know whether I achieved my goal, but in any case, it was interesting to try it.[iv]
Janet Bergstrom argues that Renoir …constructed the entire film (…,) as if it were a commedia dell’arte performance.' [v]
Made in 1952, the film was a French/Italian co-production and, unlike Renoir’s earlier films, it is in English. It is also in dazzling Technicolor. As the film opens, we see the arrival of the coach as well as the arrival of the raggedy commedia dell’arte cart and troupe. We meet Camilla, who, along with the coach, has travelled five months by boat from Italy in order to reach the ‘New World’. It is a colonial multicultural world where many different languages and accents can be heard. Magnani didn’t speak English, but she learnt to say her lines in English and while Renoir wanted to do an Italian and a French version, he liked the English version and had no part in dubbing the other versions.
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| Camilla's lovers - the soldier, the viceroy and the bullfighter |
When the Spanish Viceroy falls in love with the tempestuous Camilla, we become privy to the disgruntled political rumblings below the surface that threaten the imperial power of the Viceroy to do whatever he likes. In this case to give the coach to Camilla, a lowly actor. Complicating the story are a handsome soldier, who is Camilla’s lover, and a Spanish bullfighter who also becomes besotted with her.
The question of what the coach symbolises is raised more than once by characters in the film. Looking at the coach, I think of Queen Elizabeth bedecked in precious jewels (no doubt from colonial plunder) riding in a golden coach to her coronation. The coach a symbol of great wealth and imperial power. In the film it is gold that has fed the Spanish colonization of Peru and it is the Spanish Viceroy who has ordered the coach for his own private use as a symbol of imperial prestige.
Some of my favourite shots in this film are the expressionless faces of the Indigenous South American Indians watching the troupe perform. They are almost documentary images of ‘witnessing’ the colonial appropriation of culture and of land, something which continues to this day in the Amazon.
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| Camilla onstage |
While the coach, like money, is, as Danks suggests an ‘object of exchange’, I suggest it is also erotized in this film as a powerful symbol of desire. Desire for wealth and power, but underneath it all the desire for something more, for a better life, and for love. Renoir loved flawed characters and the characters are all flawed and conflicted in the face of the power of gold to satisfy their desires either by acquiring it or by giving it away.
The coach itself was found by the producer, Prince Francesco Alliata, who did actually have royal blood, although he didn’t use his title in the credits. It had been created for the First Lord of the Kingdom of Sicily, but abandoned two centuries before in a stable in Palermo when Alliata found it and restored it for the film. [vi]
Alliata was a young filmmaker and lawyer, and, at one stage, it looked like the film would go spectacularly over budget and not get made. Visconti had originally been attached and had been paid handsomely for a year to develop the screenplay. Then Renoir took over. He wanted to film the exteriors in Sicily, but seven years after the war the streets had been modernized and there were electric lights and telephone wires. They decided to shoot the entire film in the famous Cinecittà Studios just outside of Rome, which meant the Viceroy’s Palace and the exterior of the Cathedral had to be built, at great cost.
As the production ran into more and more financial trouble, Alliata had a bright idea. Cinecittà had 16 sound stages and a massive area to construct sets. He would produce two low-budget swashbuckling cheapies at the same time, which he did. These films were very successful and paid the bills. It meant The Golden Coach could be finished, but it finished Alliata as a film producer too.
In the opening sequence Camilla asks if the two hours each night on the stage entertaining an audience are enough? If the power to transport an audience, to transform daily life into magic are enough. Her question is answered by her actions at the end of the film.
If you are ever in Sicily and want to see the restored coach, it is on display at the foot of a grand staircase in the palace of the President of the Sicilian Parliament, formerly the royal palace of Palermo.
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| The Coach today. Below is nearby museum description. Click to enlarge |
I hope you enjoy the film. It‘s a romp, a comedic farce and made to entertain you the audience and to give you pleasure.
Thank you
[i] Phillips, James, E. A commedia dell’arte The Quarterly of Film Radio and Television, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Autumn, 1954), pp. 16-24 University of California Press, Autumn
[ii] Blundell, G The Naked Truth: A Life in Parts, Hachette Australia, 2008
[iii] Danks, A. The Golden Coach Film Notes, Cinema Reborn Catalogue pp. 13-17 2024
[iv] O’Rawe, D. The Cinema of Masks: Commedia dell’Arte and Jean Renoir’s The Golden Coach in Clowns, Fools and Picaros, Brill, The Netherlands, 2007
[v] Bergstrom, J. Genealogy of The Golden Coach, Film History: An international Journal, Vol 21, Number 3, 2009, pp. 276-294 Indiana University Press 2009
[vi] Bergstrom, J. ibid.
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