La piccola fiammiferaia

This is adapted from the Hans Christian Andersen story about a neglected, destitute matchbox girl who turns to light for a last flight of fancy. So how to transmute suffering into something that matters and we can take from?

It's so perfectly tailored for cinematic language of the time, sentimental but not daft; an outer story about hard-hitting emotional drama, ostensibly realistic but itself imbued with the afterglow of fairy-tales, and the canvas nested inside the mind that permits all manner of fantastic associations between the two fantasies.

The cruel father who sends her out to sell every night, is beautifully rendered as only a dark silhouette behind a window. Once out in the snowed street, the only one who notices the girl is the policeman. In their brief moment of intimacy before a shopping window they identify each other as toys behind the glass panel. It's good to note the distance they feel separates them, and therefore prohibits the romance, because it's repeated, then reversed inside the fantasy. They are again faraway, but eventually - imagined - very close.

The fantasy is brilliant, but first seems rather uninspired, the magic uncinematically transferred to the set design. But what seems at first as stuffy is revealed to be stuffy for a reason; the feeling is one of stasis and regression, the toys are life-like in size, so the girl reduced to their stature, hiding among them, finally finding love that extricates from the infantile level. Then a premonition of Death as the casting of the first shadow, here is where it soars and takes to the skies.

This second part truly amazes; Renoir does not merely transmute on the symbolic level by transferring notions between worlds, he transmutes for the eye as well. This heavenly world is in flux, rapid, violent. So we have a delirious flight of fancy as the couple flees from Death, a struggle, and eventually the capitulation.

You can read all of this as the wish-fulfillment of a suffering mind, the fluid dream world providing guidance from inside, or a spiritual blueprint with those things nested inside of it.

Eventually the cross, the rod of suffering, is transmuted in the tree of new life. We may think the blossoms spring up wistfully, because the fairy-tale calls for it, and perhaps for the filmmakers they were merely the proper symbols, but it is not quite so. Fairy-tales communicate something of our very soul, not the opposite. A common soul on her journeys through the world.

So, on an unconscious level, a sacrifice here points the road to the required breakthrough. The girl growing into a woman, then growing out of that too, and is a river its bank or the flowing water? Watch it again.

This short early silent from the French master Renoir shows a good deal of imagination on the director's part – although not in terms of casting: he once more looked no further than his then wife Catherine Hessling whom he was trying to build into a star for the lead role. Hessling is too old for the part, but at times she does manage to convey a degree of innocence required for the role, even if it does mean her performance borders on the (deliberately) comical at times. This being an adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson's tragic short story, these brief light-hearted moments are at odds with the general theme.

The second part of the film veers off into fantasy as we're treated to the girl's childlike fantasies as she slowly freezes to death. Again, there's a good deal of imagination gone into this sequence, but it does become a little repetitive after a while. The spectre of Death, initially in the form of a Jack-in-the-Box, looms over the fantasies, however, until the film climaxes with a concisely edited chase sequence on horseback.

This is a curious choice of story for Renoir, and it obviously doesn't reach the standard of his later output. However, it possesses a Gallic charm that sets it apart from most films of the era, and is worth catching simply to see a master of cinema near the beginning of his cinematic career.

While short and perhaps lacking in real pathos (for me), this is a great example of the sheer imaginative fun that movies rarely possess nowadays. From a horse-back sword fight in the sky to snow that turns into fruit, fantasy reigns supreme in this film. Catherine Hesslinger is captivating in the lead role (though she is even more remarkable in the less interesting "Charleston"). Seeing these silent shorts of Renoir's have helped me understand how he was capable of putting so many wonderful, unusual scenes into "The Rules of the Game"; I see how playful he was. Above all, one takes away Renoir's exuberant love for film in this movie. You can find it in the 7 film set released by Lion's Gate with remarks by Scorsese.

A very stylish outing from Jean Renoir spun from a simple children's fable from Andersen into something even simpler but memorably bleak as well.

The little match girl of the title is not so little here in the beautiful Catherine Hessling giving a mesmerising performance for Renoir, who filmed her lovingly in soft or blurred focus throughout. The story moves logically from trying to sell matches to live to trying to light them to live, in between with a child-like pressed nose to a café then a toy shop's window to living the dream while freezing to death in the snow. When your time's up even sheltering from the falling snow under a single plank can be taken away from you. There's some great low-key fancy camera and set trickery in the toy shop dream sequence such as Karen dancing in slo-mo through nets, and lovely smoky visuals especially the life and death chase through the sky. It can sometimes remind you of a silent pop video - the crew must had have fun piecing it all together!

Although it doesn't say as much for human determination as Passion of Joan of Arc from the same year (what could!), I've always found anything by Renoir to be highly enjoyable, educational and a salutary lesson in how to make art not Art movies.

I just stumbled on this early and silent Renoir short (along with the delightfully bizarre 'Sur un air de Charleston') on a DVD of 'La Grand Illusion' and, really, I think I love it more even than that great film.

It's loosely based on 'The Little Match Girl' but owes as much to 'The Nutcracker'; a poor match-seller (played by Mrs. Renoir, the absolutely gorgeous and appealing Catherine Hessling, who can also be seen in 'Charleston'), overcome with hunger and cold, hallucinates the inhabitants of a toyshop window coming to life around her. I imagine the animation and other special effects must have been fairly pioneering - I'm certain they're more spellbinding than anything CGI could do - and the result is magical, enchanting, heartbreaking.

The version I saw had a haunting, note-perfect accordion soundtrack by Marc Perrone.

Much as I love his other work I could almost wish Renoir had gone on like this; I could wish cinema had gone on like this.