Direct from the Telluride Film Festival, where it was an enormous hit, this splendid film was shot in 1920 but never released; 63 years later, it had its world premiere at the Cinémathèque Française after the brilliant editor Henri Colpi (Hiroshima mon amour, Last Year at Marienbad, etc.), working with the original footage and screenplay, edited the film into completion. The Swallow and the Titmouse is the penultimate film of director André Antoine, a pioneer in modern stage naturalism who moved into film late in life, but who, with a few films, developed the theories of “outdoor” cinema for which he is now considered a forerunner of Italian neorealism. An opponent of the studio-bound artificiality of the popular cinema, Antoine wrote of “the difference possible between the cinema, which is living, outdoor creation, and the theater, whose principle, on the other hand, is the imitation of nature....” The Swallow and the Titmouse reportedly so disconcerted producer Charles Pathé that he refused to release it. The film is shot entirely on location on the waterways of Flanders, the story set on two canal barges, L'Hirondelle (The Swallow) and La Mesange (The Titmouse). The drama involves the tensions between the barge captain and the pilot whom he has hired to steer the coal-bearing ships to areas in France devastated by the war, and who sullenly lusts after the captain's wife. Antoine cuts through the melodrama by focusing not on the passion but on landscape, lighting, and dramatic understatement achieved through the use of non-professional actors. On the premiere of the restored print, tinted in sepia and blue tones, Variety's review called the film “breathtakingly modern.”