The Little Match Girl
(La Petite Marchande d'Allumettes)
Renoir's early films were experimental in nature. To make The Little Match Girl, a fairytale in modern dress starring Catherine Hessling, he and co-director Jean Tedesco built a studio--generating electricity from an automobile motor and battery--built lamps and reflectors, painted sets and developed their own film. “The Little Match Girl is one of Renoir's earliest and simplest films.... He was to return to its subject and its theme in a segment of his last work, La Petite Theatre de Jean Renoir.... In (The Little Match Girl) we see Renoir's childlike soul in perhaps its purest expression.” (Charles Silver, Museum of Modern Art)