The Little Match Girl

Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Little Match Girl" has proven a powerful allegory for screen adaptations. The earliest I've seen is the single-scene 1902 film "The Little Match Seller" by James Williamson, which employed multiple-exposure photography for the girl's visions. On Edition Filmmuseum's two-disc set "Screening the Poor," there's a reconstruction of a 1905 American color-painted magic lantern show that employs dissolving and lighting effects for the visions. It also featured a couple different scenes and went into some background on the girl's family situation as a narrator reads Andersen's poem, as opposed to the wordless Williamson picture. This 1914 version is also a multi-scene narrative, including a subplot of a teetotaler lecture regarding the father's abusive drunkenness. It, too, features multiple-exposure photography for the visions, as well changes in tinting, from the blue winter to the red flame of the matchsticks.

Less effective are the visible strings for the poultry in one of the hallucinations. There are also too many intertitles. There's especially no need for any in between the visions; they only blunt the visual allegory of films-within-films or a kind of magic lantern projected by the girl's dreams and matchsticks. I don't mind that the snow and ice-covered set is obviously fake; it still looks good, and there's some decent cutting for the continuity. Although I prefer the 1902 version, this one is still mostly effective, and that final shot is quite the figurative gut punch.

I'm going to check out some other versions of this powerful tale next: Jean Renoir's late silent film, the 1937 cartoon, and the more recent 2008 computer-animated Disney one (there are also feature-length Colombian and Korean reworkings, among other screen adaptations). It seems as good a time as any what with the pictures' depressing Christmas theme as we head towards that holiday and a wintry pandemic surge in 2020 and into the new year. Moreover, it goes to something I was saying in my review of Lumière's "Dancing Skeleton" (1897/1898), that cinema is as much, if not more so, about the illusion of death as it's one of life.

(From EYE Film Institute Netherlands 35mm print)

When we think of fairy tales, we think of improbable stories with happy endings: Jack and the beanstalk, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel. But the reason that the fairy tale has survived is that it reflects so well the real concerns of its audiences. No one knew this better than Hans Christian Andersen, who wrote so many of them, filled with pain and hope. We may have mutated them to fit a namby -pamby image of adults who think that children are not filled with fears and despise being talked down to. Andersen never wrote down to his audience, and Disney was never concerned about hitting those notes in his movies.

I agree with them. There's no way to tell this story without embracing the misery of an unloved child. This film does not fail that remit.