From the very first frames of this picture, as it hits its muscular and confident stride, it is clear that you are in the hands of someone who knows exactly what he is doing and where he is going.
Supported on a heavy concrete base, the frames of this screen interlock at the street corner like interwoven fingers, enclosing a small open-air terrace that will serve a ground-floor restaurant and bar.
And yet there is something frozen in the representation: the great striped cat has fixed three of its flexed paws in the hide of the rearing victim; the next frame (and Delacroix produced many frames of this contest) would show the awful effect of its first searing rake.
There is no doubt that the ambiguous shadow of France's experience in World War II lingered into the early 1960s and beyond, and that tremors of domestic social unrest and war in Algeria can be discerned hovering outside the somber, elegant frames of this film.
That was one of the great frames of this championship, pressure defeating the purpose".
Previously, only a few frames of this picture series had been made public.
