La Marseillaise

Jean Renoir - 1938
Yet another masterpiece from Renoir... should I be surprised?
We have the classically Renoirean mis-en-scene. Long shots with full bodies, letting the action play out in depth. Wonderful, calmy sensational camera movements. It feels more like tracking than panning, though it's both. Moves across people, showing that comradeship (often vertical). Not strongly moves in, but focusses on a section of a mis-en-scene. Often moves that take us to what was previously out of the frame. Al these moves, so elegant, really give us a sense of a wider world, with war there are still children playing (an incredible track from people, to the children's game, to the battering ram).
We move into Renoir's shots, which he can also analyse a bit, where we have that everyday dialogue. I am not at all sure how Renoir makes what seems, on the surface, to be just everyday chat, so fascinating. Partly great acting, strong acting, with racuous types and dirty faces. Partly that the conversation isn't really 'everyday'. It's about matters we all care about, and has a seriousness, but mainly that constant humour, earthiness.
Politically, yes, all have reasons. But we obviously attack Marie Antoinette. Renoir focusses on everyone we don't usually see in the revolution (avoids actually seeing Robespierre, Marat etc, though the latter is involved in some smart newspaper montage shots, and in dialogue), to give us the soldiers. Through an omniscient narrative this is never self-obsessed though, what we know about them is what relates about them to the wider situations. We find out about them their political level; and that is, ultimately, their moral level, and what cinema is.
Their are dissolves that move us through historical events, though nothing is really passed over. It is a propogandist film, for working together depite differences, for freedom, for realising (among the gilded classes) that freedom comes from below, not above. The Marseillaise can damn well take care of themselves. Not that there isn't brutality (the shooting of the Swiss), idiocy and argumentation among them, but to grasp freedom...