The Rain Takes No Direction

by André Bazin, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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Every film-maker knows the moment. The lamps are set, the actors are dressed, the dolly track is laid along the bank, and someone looks up at the sky and says nothing, because there is nothing to say. The clouds have come over. The light that was promised in the morning will not be given. The unit waits in the café, the producer telephones, the schedule is rewritten in pencil. In the history of cinema, which we like to tell as a history of styles and schools and men of genius, there is a second history, never written, of afternoons lost to the weather.

I want to propose that this second history matters more than it seems to. Weather is the one collaborator that cannot be cast, paid, persuaded or cut. The actor can be replaced, the set struck and rebuilt, the scene rewritten; the rain comes when it comes. And because it is indifferent to us, the way it enters a film, or is kept out, or is imitated, tells us with unusual clarity what a film-maker believes the camera is for.

I. The rain machine

Let us begin where cinema is least honest, which is to say in the studio, with a hose.

The rain of the studio film is a technical achievement. A pipe is run along the top of the set, perforated at intervals; water is pumped through; a lamp is placed behind so that the falling drops catch the light and become visible, since real rain photographs badly and tends to disappear altogether against a pale ground. The result is a rain of great regularity, which falls exactly on the actors and stops exactly at the edge of the frame, and which can be turned off between takes so that the star may have her hair dried.

There is nothing scandalous in this. The cinema has always been a craft of approximations, and I have no wish to be the kind of critic who demands that a storm at sea be filmed at sea in a storm. My question is a different one. It is not whether the rain is real but what the rain is for. And here the studio downpour almost always betrays its function: it is a sign. It arrives on cue to mean grief, or passion, or the purification of a guilty man. It is the rain of the scenario, not the rain of the world. It falls because the drama requires a falling.

Consider, by contrast, a case that seems at first to confirm everything I have just said and in the end overturns it. In Kurosawa's Rashomon, which reached Venice in 1951 and astonished the West, the frame of the story is a ruined gate in a downpour. The woodcutter, the priest and the commoner shelter there while the rain falls without pause, and it is through their talk, in that rain, that the four irreconcilable accounts of the crime in the forest are told. Now this rain was certainly made. It is recorded that the water would not register against the grey sky behind the gate, and that the crew poured black ink into the tank of the rain machine so that the drops would show on the film. One can see it, darkening the woodcutter's face, near the end.

Here is a rain more artificial than any Hollywood rain: water dyed so as to be seen. And yet I do not feel it as a lie. Why? Because Kurosawa does not use it as a sign. The rain at the gate does not mean anything in particular. It is simply the condition in which the men wait; it is the duration of their waiting made visible and audible, the long grey time in which men who cannot know the truth are obliged to talk about it. When it stops, the film ends, more or less, and a child is found. The rain was not a metaphor for doubt; it was the weather of doubt, which is a different thing. The ink was a trick in service of the real, and not of a thesis: an artifice used to restore to the image something that the emulsion would otherwise have lost.

I make this distinction because it is the only one that will hold. The question is never only how was it made? It is what is the viewer allowed to do with it? The sign-rain tells us what to feel. The weather-rain gives us time, and leaves us to fill it.

II. A summer that would not come

The second case is the most beautiful accident in the French cinema.

In July of 1936, in the first weeks of the Popular Front, Jean Renoir took a small company to the banks of the river near Paris to film Maupassant's story Une partie de campagne. The story is about a Paris shopkeeper's family, Monsieur and Madame Dufour, their daughter Henriette, the dull young man intended for her, who go out for a Sunday in the country, and about the two boatmen at the riverside inn who take the women out on the water. Henriette yields, on an island in the reeds, to one of them. Years later she returns, married to the dull young man, and finds the boatman there again; and that is all.

In Maupassant, it is a story of sun. The heat lies over everything, and the afternoon's languor is half the seduction. Renoir wished to film that heat. He did not get it. The summer was wet; day after day was lost; the shooting dragged on for weeks, and at last Renoir left to make another film, and the material lay unfinished. It was not edited and shown until 1946, after the war, when Marguerite Renoir and her sister Marinette Cadix assembled what there was, and intertitles were set in to bridge the scenes that had never been shot.

What there was is a masterpiece, and it is a masterpiece in large part because of the rain.

For Renoir did something which a director of the studio could not have done, because he would never have been obliged to. He let the weather into the film. The day in Partie de campagne is not the steady blaze of Maupassant; it is a fickle day, sun and then cloud and then sun again, the leaves turning up their pale sides in a wind that comes from nowhere. And after Henriette and the boatman have been together on the island, the storm arrives. We do not see what follows between them. We see the river: the surface of the water dimpled and then beaten by rain, the reeds bending, the camera travelling over the water through the downpour, while the music rises and then falls away.

I have seen audiences fall silent at this passage as they do at nothing else in Renoir. It is usually described as the moment of loss, the instant when the afternoon's happiness turns into the regret of a whole life; and so it is. But observe how the meaning arrives. It is not imposed by a cut from the lovers' faces to the storm, in the manner of the old symbolic montage, so that the storm should signify their passion or their sorrow. There is no such collision. The rain simply comes, as rain does on a river in a bad summer, and it falls on the place where they were, and the camera, rather than cutting away to explain it, goes with the water. The feeling we have is that something has been ended by the world, not by the author. The weather which ruined Renoir's schedule has become the weather which ends Henriette's day. It is the same weather. And because it is the same, because we sense obscurely that this storm was not ordered from a property department but endured by people standing on a bank with a camera under a tarpaulin, the passage has a gravity no hose could give it.

This is what I mean when I say that the cinema's vocation is to reveal and not to construct. Renoir did not set out to make a film about the fickleness of happiness. He set out to make a film about a hot day, and reality refused him the hot day, and he was great enough, and humble enough, to film what he was given. The result is truer to Maupassant than fidelity could have been. The sun of the story was always an image of a happiness that would not last; Renoir's rain is that impermanence itself, recorded.

I do not wish to make Renoir a saint of chance. He was a director of enormous skill, and the shots of the river in the storm are composed with care. But his skill was the kind that consists in knowing when to stop insisting. One does not "direct" the wind in the poplars; one waits for it, and holds the shot long enough for it to come, and does not cut it short when it does.

III. The shower in the Via

The third case is the smallest, and the most instructive.

Halfway through Bicycle Thieves, Antonio Ricci and his little son Bruno are searching the Roman market at the Porta Portese for the stolen bicycle, among the frames and wheels and handlebars that have been separated so that no owner can know his own. It is early on a Sunday. And it begins to rain, suddenly and hard, a sudden shower; and the man and the boy run for the shelter of a doorway, and a party of young seminarians, foreigners, crowds into the same doorway, chattering among themselves in German, and the rain falls, and after a while it stops, and the search goes on.

Nothing happens in this scene. That is precisely its value. I have written before that this film unfolds on the level of pure accident: the rain, the seminarians, the charitable ladies at the church, none of it arranged in a dramatic order. One must insist on it again, because it is the thing most easily lost when we praise De Sica for his "humanity" and his "message." The rain in the Porta Portese is not a symbol of Antonio's despair. It is not the heavens weeping over the unemployed of Rome. It is a shower. It interrupts the search, exactly as a shower would; it lets the thief, who was perhaps somewhere in that market, escape further; it puts a man and his son for a few minutes under the same arch as some boys from another country who have no idea of their trouble and no reason to have one. The seminarians are not there to make a point about the indifference of the Church or the foreigner. They are there because seminarians are often in Rome, and when it rains, people shelter where they can.

Imagine the same sequence in a film of the classical construction. The rain, if it came at all, would come at the moment of greatest despair, after the last hope had failed; it would be accompanied by music; it would fall on Antonio's upturned face. The seminarians would be cut, as irrelevant; or, if kept, would be given a line that drove home the irony. Everything would be made to mean. And the spectator, having been told what it meant, would have nothing left to discover.

De Sica's way leaves the spectator in the doorway, too, waiting for the rain to stop, a little impatient, aware of the time slipping away, aware of the German voices that make no sense, aware of the boy beside his father. We are not told that Antonio is a stranger in his own city, that the world goes on around his catastrophe without noticing it. We stand in that knowledge for the length of a shower. The duration is the meaning. If one cut it short, one would cut out the very thing the scene is made of.

The last point deserves a word more. Neorealism has been accused of being formless, a mere register of facts, and the rain in the Porta Portese might be offered as evidence: a sequence that advances nothing. But the form is there, and it is exact. It consists in refusing to subordinate the moment to the plot. The shower is given its own weight, its own time, and in that time the true subject of the film, which is not the bicycle but a man's life in a city that does not need him, becomes visible without being stated.

IV. Against the weather of the scenario

I come now to the objection which my friends who admire Eisenstein will already have prepared. Is not all this a sentimental preference? The great Soviet films also have their weather: the mists over the harbour at Odessa after the death of Vakulinchuk, the ice breaking on the lake in Alexander Nevsky. These are among the most magnificent images in the cinema. Am I to say that they are lies because they are made to mean?

No. But I will say that they belong to a different idea of the art. The mists of Odessa are assembled; shot is added to shot, the dawn, the anchored boats, the still water, the gulls, until the sum is mourning. The images are real, filmed in a real harbour; but their meaning is the editor's, laid upon them, as the meaning of a word in a sentence is given by the sentence. The viewer receives the mourning; he is not left free to find it, or not to find it. It is an eloquence, and I do not deny its power. Eloquence has power. But it is the power of an orator, and the cinema is capable of something else, something that no orator can do, which is to show a thing and step aside.

Weather is the test of this because weather is, of all the elements of the real, the most purely without intention. A face can be acted, a street can be dressed, a crowd can be rehearsed, but the rain is nobody's. When a film-maker turns it into a sign, he does to the world what montage does to the image: he takes something that was simply there and makes it say what he wants. When he receives it, he lets the world speak in its own ambiguous voice, which says nothing in particular, and which we nevertheless understand.

One might go further. The weather of the scenario, the storm that breaks on the climax and the sun that rises on the reconciliation, is in a sense a theological error. It presumes that the world is arranged around our dramas, that nature sympathises. Ruskin had a name for this in poetry: the pathetic fallacy. The cinema of montage commits it constantly and with genius. The realist cinema, at its best, is cured of it. It shows us what is perhaps harder to bear and more consoling at once: that the rain falls on the just and on the unjust, on the lovers and on the empty river, on the man who has lost his bicycle and on the seminarians who have lost nothing, and that this indifference is not cruelty but the very ground on which our lives, being real, take place.

V. Waiting

There is a passage in the cinema of the documentary that I return to often, the storm in Flaherty's Man of Aran, where the islanders bring their boat in through a sea that is breaking over the rocks. One may say many things about Flaherty, and some of them are not to his credit: he arranged his families, revived customs that had died, and asked men to row into a sea that might have drowned them. But what the camera holds in that sequence was not arranged. The waves come in their own time. No one could cue them. The suspense we feel is not manufactured by the cutting but borne by the duration, the sea gathering, the boat waiting, the next wave coming or not coming. Flaherty's patience, his capacity to stand for days on a cliff waiting for the sea to do what it would do, was his genius. He did not compose the storm; he was present at it.

That is perhaps the final lesson of the weather. It teaches the film-maker to wait. The studio teaches him the opposite, that everything can be had on demand: the dawn at noon, the rain at the turn of a valve, the moonlight from a blue gelatine. And there are films which must be made so, and some of them are fine. But the cinema did not come into the world to give us what we order. It came, through the automatic genesis of the photographic image, to give us what is there, including what we did not want and could not have imagined. The bad summer of 1936 gave Renoir his storm on the river. A Roman shower gave De Sica his doorway. Even Kurosawa's ink was a way of letting the camera see the rain that was falling in front of it.

The weather takes no direction. Of all the things that stand before the lens, it is the most perfectly indifferent to the film. And for that reason it is a kind of conscience in the cinema: in front of it, every director shows, often without knowing it, whether he means to tell the world what it means or to let the world be seen. When the clouds come over and the unit looks up and says nothing, the true film-maker does not only telephone the producer. He looks at the light, which is not the light he asked for, and he begins to wonder what it will show.

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André Bazin, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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Written 2 October 2026.

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