Those who have seen André Antoine's rediscovered The Swallow and the Titmouse (1920) at PFA or at the Castro Theater know that his brand of unfettered yet lyric naturalism gives new meaning to an old word: realism. "Antoine truly represents one of the great achievements in French cinema before Renoir," Professor Bertrand Augst has said. Antoine developed theories of outdoor, or plein air, filmmaking that challenged the studio-bound artificiality of the bourgeois cinema; his focus was on landscape, lighting, and milieu, his goal, dramatic understatement. Le Coupable, made four years before The Swallow and the Titmouse, shifted the focus of the French realist film from the provinces to the city, from the timeless to the modern. Made in the midst of World War I (shooting was interrupted by the Battle of the Somme during the summer of 1916), it is a rare portrait of wartime Paris, and indeed has been called "the first authentic (film) document about Paris" (René Prédal, in Abel's French Cinema). In a stunning use of cross cutting, Antoine observes the contrast between the bourgeois milieu and that of the proletariat which was virtually never seen on film. The story tells, in flashbacks from a court trial, of an abandoned woman, a flower girl, who bears a child and later turns to crime.