Time to put on your jutte skirt and hat and join Harriet, Melanie, Bogey, his turtle and Captain John, and don’t forget Hoppity, as they celebrate Diwali on the banks of the Ganges in Jean Renoir’s 1951 enchanted tale of first love, THE RIVER, set in Bengal, India and based on the Rumer Godden semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, in Episode Six On the Art of the Arts of the Victoria Wilson Foster Hirsch podcast, A Cobra in the Garden . . . Renoir’s  first Technicolor film and the first color film ever made in India.

“What particularly delighted me as a film-maker, “ said Renoir, son of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, painter, printmaker, sculptor, “were the Indian colors, which afforded me a marvelous chance of putting my theories about the use of color photography into practice. I had longed for years to make color film.”

See you in the gardens of Renoir’s paradise where all is not as it appears.  -  V WIlson