The Swallow and the Titmouse

After its humiliating defeat in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, France went through a social revolution. Over the next twenty years, many of its long-standing artistic traditions, such as the classical style of Academy painting, would be cast off in favor of new approaches, such as Impressionism. Live theater was one of the few holdovers from the pre-war era — formulaic pieces spoken by actors in dull declamatory style. But change was coming, voiced by the prophet of naturalism, novelist Emile Zola. “A work must be based in the real . . . on nature,” Zola wrote in Naturalism in the Theater. Zola explained that a playwright must observe facts, with no abstract characters or invented fantasies. Rising to meet this challenge, actor, and theater director André Antoine (1858-1943) founded the Theatre Libre, essentially a community theater, dedicated to showing new work by innovative writers. Antoine also staged works by controversial playwrights from outside of France, such as Ibsen and Chekhov. Under Antoine’s guidance, French theater became serious and legitimate. What is less known about Antoine is that he was also a film director, and a vital link in the development of the ‘realist tradition’ that has so enriched world cinema(…)

In 1920, Antoine filmed L’Hirondelle et la mésange (1920). The producers shut down this production when the rushes of the film looked too much like a documentary, and Antoine was never able to complete the movie

The story follows a family living on two barges, the Hirondelle and Mésange, (translated, the names mean “the Swallow and Titmouse” — joined together they function as one large boat). The captain and husband, Van Groot (Louis Ravet) takes on a new pilot Michel (Pierre Alcover). At first the new man seems to be getting along well, perhaps good husband material for the wife’s sister Marthe (Maguey Delyac), but later Van Groot sees Michel make sexual advances to his wife Griet (Maylianes). The animosity deepens when Michel sees that Van Groot is a smuggler, and tries to get a piece of the action. Van Groot catches Michel trying to steal from him, and his punishment is along the lines of the ‘code of the river.’ Simple. Absolute. Almost mundane. The river keeps flowing, life moves on.

It’s impossible to know exactly what Antoine would have done if he’d had the chance to edit the same material, but in any case the results are dazzling. A blend of documentary and story, L’Hirondelle et la mésange (1920), is by far Antoine’s best film, a pleasure to watch from start to finish. Ironically, since it was never released until the 1980s, its influence in film history will always be in the vein of ‘what could have been.’ If the film had been a success, perhaps Antoine would have been encouraged to make more films in this style. But the reality is that Antoine was trying something too radical for its time.

However unseen, ’Hirondelle et la mésange anticipates a film made fourteen years later by a someone who had absorbed all the lessons silent film could teach him. Pouring all his emotion, energy, and conviction into his last project; this filmmaker would die of tuberculosis at the tragic young age of 29. The film is Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante. —www.SilentEra.com