The Little Match Girl (1928)
A forty minute silent film by Jean Renoir.
Oddly gripping and almost gruesome, this short fable based on a Hans Christian Anderson story, is almost impressionistic in its black and white crudeness. We will assume it's all intentional, the odd cuts, the simple effects, the lack of focus and generally rough textures. Certainly from 2014 this is what makes the movie distinctive and at times remarkable.
The story taken literally is simple—a poor girl trying to sell matches is a failure, and cold, and as the snow falls she is shivering and hallucinating and eventually she falls asleep. We enter her head along the way (we see her hallucinations, then her dreams) and have a little girl's notions of being rescued, of her idea of being happy, run up against Death itself.
Much of this last third of the film is made of layered images, double exposures of different kinds, and it's quite a mind trip, and a visual astonishment. The liberties Renoir takes are fabulous, and totally refreshing. If you compare to films made by Hollywood or by the German Expressionists in 1928 or so you'll see such a difference in attitude and style it's breathtaking. Or shocking, at least.
You can easily brush this off as crude and incompetent, especially in the first overwrought scenes as the girl is trying to sell her matches, but that's missing the point. Renoir wasn't making a slick movie with high production values and therefore a kind of technical invisibility. He wants the movie-making itself to show. (This parallels the Germans, but Remoir's style is soft and surreal, not expressive and angular.)
And so from an American perspective this is almost an experimental film. But Renoir of course is on his way to some of the masterpiece of French cinema, like "Rules of the Game," and we are seeing his brilliant and original feeling for the medium unfold before our eyes here.
If you like difference (for its own sake) or like Renoir (the son, the moviemaker), or like to see a late silent short that has some wonderful ideas going on, watch this. It's clumsy and imperfect, no doubt. But how much is intentional is up to the viewer.
A forty minute silent film by Jean Renoir.
Oddly gripping and almost gruesome, this short fable based on a Hans Christian Anderson story, is almost impressionistic in its black and white crudeness. We will assume it's all intentional, the odd cuts, the simple effects, the lack of focus and generally rough textures. Certainly from 2014 this is what makes the movie distinctive and at times remarkable.
The story taken literally is simple—a poor girl trying to sell matches is a failure, and cold, and as the snow falls she is shivering and hallucinating and eventually she falls asleep. We enter her head along the way (we see her hallucinations, then her dreams) and have a little girl's notions of being rescued, of her idea of being happy, run up against Death itself.
Much of this last third of the film is made of layered images, double exposures of different kinds, and it's quite a mind trip, and a visual astonishment. The liberties Renoir takes are fabulous, and totally refreshing. If you compare to films made by Hollywood or by the German Expressionists in 1928 or so you'll see such a difference in attitude and style it's breathtaking. Or shocking, at least.
You can easily brush this off as crude and incompetent, especially in the first overwrought scenes as the girl is trying to sell her matches, but that's missing the point. Renoir wasn't making a slick movie with high production values and therefore a kind of technical invisibility. He wants the movie-making itself to show. (This parallels the Germans, but Remoir's style is soft and surreal, not expressive and angular.)
And so from an American perspective this is almost an experimental film. But Renoir of course is on his way to some of the masterpiece of French cinema, like "Rules of the Game," and we are seeing his brilliant and original feeling for the medium unfold before our eyes here.
If you like difference (for its own sake) or like Renoir (the son, the moviemaker), or like to see a late silent short that has some wonderful ideas going on, watch this. It's clumsy and imperfect, no doubt. But how much is intentional is up to the viewer.