A Pequena Vendedora de Fósforos

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.

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.

La Petite Marchande D'Allumettes is another of Renoir's bleak portrayals of meek and meager lives at odds with their milieu. Something about it though feels like a re-hashing of earlier Renoir works (Une Vie and La Fille...even Nana). This piece was filmed in the Vieux-Colombier and produced by Tedesco. I conjecture (or just straight up fantasize) that the pair brainstormed on a film concept that was to be "suited" for Renoir and Hessling together. I imagine the idea of adapting a famous tale (Andersen's short story) as a compromise (never a great way to produce art imo)... and what you get is something not quite original in any way whatsoever. Now, that isn't to say that the French Impressionist film techniques used in the hallucination sequences are not constructed and crafted with technical precision and genius intuition... but that it was already fertile ground for Renoir (and Hessling for that matter). I have previously hypothesized that some of Renoir's silent work was prophecy and prognostication through forming a death allegory between human freedom and the film industry itself. This may have been the last time that Renoir favored a stylistic system constructed around a protagonist's psychology and showcasing avant-garde editing techniques (impossible to say without a full print of Le Tournoi available). Certainly, Renoir's next film, Tire au Flanc would begin a shift toward a dominant stylistic system and diegetic construction (characterized by depth of field, mobile framing, multiple protagonists, etc.) that marked Renoir as a unique and exceptional filmmaker. Interesting also, that it was not sound film production that spurred this stylistic shift for Renoir as Tire was a silent film (although, I do believe it may have been the imminence of sound film that also had Renoir thinking one step ahead).

A stylish short-film updating of the popular Hans Christian Andersen fairy-tale accompanied by a score that includes excerpts from two celebrated classical pieces – Wagner's "The Walkyrie" and Moussorgsky's "Night On Bald Mountain". Catherine Hessling (naturally) is an affecting if over-age lead and, once again, the film was originally longer but its initial run was interrupted by a plagiarism suit and it was only two years later that it was eventually re-released as we know it today!

While obviously commenting on the class struggle and the inevitable hand of fate – themes which, interestingly enough, resurfaced via a very similar plot-line in the first episode of Renoir's directorial swan song, the made-for-TV THE LITTLE THEATRE OF JEAN RENOIR (1970) – the accent here is once again on special effects enacting the titular character's dream sequence in a toy shop, which culminates in a chase across the skies involving the girl and two rival military officers on horseback (which, curiously enough, brought to mind the melodramatic excesses of the fantasy sequences in the later Powell & Pressburger films!

Little Match Girl, The (1928)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Jean Renoir's short film based on the story of Hans Christian Anderson features the director's then wife Catherine Hessling in the title role. The film tells the story of a poor girl who goes out on a snowy night to sell matches. She's unable to sell any and instead of going back to her shack, she stays out keeping warm from the matches. She strikes one lucky match and begins to see all sorts of strange things through a toy shop window. This film starts off pretty well but slowly gets boring as the surreal aspects of the story start to set in. The fantasy side of things are pretty good but it's clear Renoir was going for something a tad bit surreal and the budget just didn't allow for this to work. All of the fantasy sequences are good on their own but none of them are done well enough to really work. Hessling is much too old to be playing the character but she is able to bring an innocence to the role.