Le Retour

Cartier-Bresson was mobilized in September 1939, at the declaration of war between France and Germany, and was taken prisoner when the French army collapsed in June 1940. He escaped his Nazi work camp—Stalag VC, near Stuttgart—on his third attempt, in February 1943. In September 1944, shortly after the liberation of Paris, he was commissioned by the United States Office of War Information to make Le Retour (The Return), a documentary about the repatriation of former prisoners of war and other displaced persons, on which he collaborated with Captain G. Krimsky and Lieutenant Richard Banks. Like Cartier-Bresson, writer-journalist Claude Roy, who provided the commentary, and Robert Lannoy, who wrote the music, were also former prisoners of war. The final sequence, at the Gare de l’Est, was shot by chief cameraman Claude Renoir, nephew of Jean Renoir.