Formal Analysis

      Medium shot of Maréchal, Rosenthal, and other prisoners, with surprised looks on their faces, reading the newspaper in the wings of the stage. Cut. Medium shot of the actor and an English officer in drag doing a number on the stage. Maréchal bursts onto the stage and stops the show. Cut. Very long shot of the whole hall, with the actors on stage in deep focus. Maréchal announces that the French troops have taken Douaumont back from the Germans. The whole audience stands up. Cut. Near shot of an English officer who takes off his woman’s wig and instructs the musicians to play “La Marseillaise.” While the whole audience sings the French national anthem, the camera pans slightly to the left, tracking slightly backwards at the same time, then pans back to the right across the whole stage before stopping in a low-angle full-length shot of Maréchal who is glaring defiantly at the two German officers in the audience. Slight pan downwards to frame the two Germans in a near shot; they exchange a few words then leave the room followed by a continuation of the pan to the left, then towards the right to sweep over the whole audience of prisoners, in a circular near shot which finally stops, after a slight tracking in, with a near shot of the English officer on whom the pan had begun. The shot comes to an end after the camera reverses direction once again and pans back to the audience for a final shot of the officers of mixed nationalities as they finish singing “La Marseillaise.” Cut.

Commentary

    This is one of the most famous of Renoir’s sequence shots, a veritable cinematographic exploit by the cameramen Claude Renoir, Jean Renoir’s nephew. The camera movement combines a long pan with short trackings in and out which sweep across the scene from left to right, then pass over the whole hall before framing again the English officer on the stage who had given the order to play “La Marseillaise.” The circle is completed, uniting the characters on stage and the audience into a single group. As if that were not enough, the camera then pans in the opposite direction, a very unusual manoeuvre, and stops again on the audience, as if to emphasis again the unity between the hall and the stage. It is the refusal to break up this sequence into separate shots (the segmentation of the space) which permits Renoir to emphasis so strongly the unity between the characters on stage and the audience, a unity which, like the French national anthem that everyone sings, expresses the sentiment of solidarity all of the prisoners share, whatever their nationality, with their French comrades. The end of the scene thus comes full circle back to the beginning, where the theme of international solidarity had been introduced by the fact that it was an English officer who had given the orchestra the order to play “La Marseillaise.”