Pierre van Groot is skipper of two barges, L'Hirondelle and La Mésange, on which he transports building materials along the waterways of Belgium and northern France for areas devastated by the First World War.
André Antoine, best known for his innovative theatre productions to which he brought new standards of realism, turned to the cinema in 1915 and he applied to his films his preference for naturalism in both settings and acting styles.
In 1982 the unedited negative (of about six hours duration) was rediscovered at the Cinémathèque française, and Henri Colpi was asked to edit a new version, using the original screenplay of Gustave Grillet and the working notes of Antoine.
Often Antoine diverts his view from the people to regard the river, its banks, the landscape which passes in lateral tracking shots until it becomes itself a character, a silent witness to the drama: a diversion of the attention which serves to extinguish the incandescent dramatic matter.
L’Hirondelle et la Mésange, which rejects theatrical effects, facile dramatization, everything that might spoil, in an arbitrary way, the telling of the story, seems to be born (or reborn) in each shot of the interior movement of the characters.”[7]