Preceded by a short film by Georges Méliès: La Légend de Rip Van Winkle (1905). "André Antoine truly represents one of the great achievements of French cinema before Renoir" (Bertrand Augst). This breathtakingly modern film from 1920, shot entirely on location, tells a simple tale of a French riverboat captain guiding his two coal-bearing barges-L'Hirondelle (The Swallow) and La Mésange (The Titmouse)-through the tranquil canals between Northern France and Belgium, en route to areas in France devastated by the war. The pilot whom he has hired to steer the ships sullenly lusts after the captain's wife. Antoine cut through the melodrama by focusing not on the passions of this love triangle, but on landscape, lighting, and dramatic understatement achieved through remarkably naturalistic performances. The film is an extraordinary record of everyday life in Flanders just after the First World War, captured in lively, unstaged city scenes and elegiac rural vistas. André Antoine, a pioneer in modern stage naturalism, moved to the cinema late in life, but with a few films developed theories of "outdoor" cinema-as opposed to the studio-bound artificiality of the popular cinema-which were fundamental to the emergence of the French realist film. The Swallow and the Titmouse so disconcerted producer Charles Pathé with its unfettered naturalism that he simply refused to release the film. The still uncut negative was rediscovered 63 years later by the Cinémathèque Française and was edited by the brilliant film editor Henri Colpi (Hiroshima mon amour, Last Year at Marienbad, etc.). Working with the original shooting script and the director's working notes, Colpi brought Antoine's masterpiece to life. Organ accompanist Dennis James is a renowned composer and performer of pipe organ scores for silent films, and has played a key role in the international revival of silent films with live music. He was named Organist of the Year-1985 by the American Theatre Organ Society for his outstanding contributions to the preservation and presentation of theatre pipe organ entertainment. He is the resident organist at the restored Ohio Theater in Columbus.