Whirlpool of Fate

Gudule lives on a barge with her father and her uncle. When the father drowns the uncle is all she has left, and he squanders her inheritance and tries to assault her. She runs, takes shelter with a travelling household, grows close to a young man there, and has to leave that too. It was Jean Renoir's first film. He produced it himself, selling a few of his father Auguste Renoir's paintings to do it, and worked with complete freedom. His wife Catherine Hessling plays the lead. The most discussed passage is the nightmare in the middle of the film, built out of slow motion and a sense of weightlessness, the kind of sequence Renoir rarely attempted again.