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Charleston Parade is a
totally bonkers short silent film from Jean Renoir, a nutso little
experimental showcase for the animalistic eroticism of his wife,
Catherine Hessling. The short is set in the then-distant future of 2028,
a time in which, apparently, Europe has descended into apocalyptic
disrepair while Africa is ascendant, its people traveling in
globe-shaped UFO-like vehicles that hover through the air. Johnny
Huggins plays an African explorer visiting the wasteland of Paris in
just such a ship, and encountering the local savage Hessling, clad in
skimpy shreds of lingerie and leering at him with a frankly lascivious
interest. The film's conceit is especially interesting for its era since
it more or less reverses the typical depictions of black men and white
women in films of the time. Huggins plays in minstrel makeup, his big
white lips often the only part of his face that shows up in the
low-contrast images, but the film's narrative has the white woman
feverishly pursuing the frightened black man for a change. She chases
him with abandon and even ties him to a lamppost. The film doesn't
exactly overturn stereotypes — Huggins' performance is pure minstrel
show slapstick — but it does place them front and center for
examination.
None of which should imply that Charleston
Parade is a serious work about race, stereotypes, or anything else.
It is, more than anything, a deeply goofy, silly film, an opportunity
for Hessling to really cut loose and for Renoir to indulge in some of
his more playful sensibilities. The depictions of Hessling seducing
Huggins by performing a rough, sensual Charleston dance are particularly
fun, as Renoir subtly slows the images into a sinuous, snake-like
motion as Hessling sways and wiggles, kicking her legs high and leaping
into the air like a frog. At the climax, when Hessling and Huggins
perform the dance together, the images become frenzied and wild, as
Renoir cuts in shots of the dancers' feet as they twirl and encircle
each other, their feet bouncing wildly around.
There's also a
playful crudeness to many of the effects shots, from the opening model
shots of the explorer's aircraft taking off to the inserts of "angels"
portrayed as disembodied heads with small wings floating beneath them;
Renoir himself appears among the angels at one point, mugging broadly.
At one point, Hessling hears a phone ringing, so she draws a phone on
the wall in chalk, and when she's finished an actual phone fades into
view atop the drawing so she can answer it. Later, when she's preparing
to leave, her coat and umbrella sashay along the ground towards her, the
coat crawling up to wrap itself around her and the umbrella leaping
into her waiting hand. There's an offhand magic to these rough shots
that's charming; the same goes for Hessling's playmate, a man in a
grotesque ape costume who dances the Charleston along with her and weeps
when she's about to leave. These images reveal a spirit of play and
weird humor in Renoir that would later manifest itself in his kindred
spirit antiheroes like Boudu. Charleston Parade is an oddity
from Renoir, but it's a compelling and enjoyable oddity.
The Little Match Girl is
another short silent film from Jean Renoir, based on the Hans Christian
Anderson fable and starring Renoir's wife Catherine Hessling as a poor
match seller named Karen. She is sent out by her family on a cold night
to sell matches, but she can't find any business and she suffers in the
cold and the snow, assaulted by boys with snowballs, ignored by
potential upper-class customers, freezing in the dark as she peers into
bright, warm, lively shops and pubs where people laugh and eat and
drink. It is a maudlin but nonetheless effective piece of humanist
social realism, contrasting the suffering of the poor match girl, who no
one cares about, against the security and comfort of those who pass her
by in the snowy streets. There is one especially potent shot in which
Karen is scrambling around on the ground in front of a restaurant,
desperately gathering up her wares after they've been knocked away by
the boys who pelted her with snowballs. A policeman arrives and chases
the boys away, then walks towards Karen. Renoir remains at ground level
with Karen, on all fours in the snow, and behind her the policeman's
clean, shiny boots pass by, then stop, not to help Karen, but to talk
with the restaurant's owner, who had been hit with one snowball when she
briefly came outside to yell at the boys for hitting her windows. The
shot is utterly heartbreaking: Karen in despair on the ground, while the
figure of authority, his boots in the background of the shot, ignores
her to comfort the comparatively uninjured upper-class shop owner.
At
around the short's halfway mark, this mix of hard realism with broad
sentimentality — the match girl peering wistfully through the frosted
windows of a restaurant — gives way to the crude effects and whimsical
tone that Renoir also utilized in Charleston Parade. At this
point, it would seem, the film becomes a surreal fantasy, a dreamlike
imagining as the match girl, freezing in the snow, desperately trying to
warm herself with the tiny flickering flames of her matches, instead
dreams of happier things. She steps into a giant-sized toy shop, where
she wanders among the toys as they come to life: ballet dancers dance, a
shaggy stuffed dog balances a ball on its nose, and toy soldiers march
in formation. The rough stop-motion animation effects are compelling,
but what's really interesting and affecting about this diversion is that
Renoir doesn't allow the fantasy to be a complete escape from reality.
Although these animations are charming and playful, they are also
poignant; as Karen is dancing through gauzy white curtains or juggling,
or watching the toy soldiers march, it's impossible to forget that she's
actually lying in the snow, alone and forgotten, losing herself in
hallucinations brought on by starvation and frostbite.
In that
respect, even as the film becomes a fantastical farce on its surface, it
retains its edge of despairing realism: Karen has chosen to retreat
from reality rather than face it any longer. It is a film above giving
up, about losing one's grip on life, and this sobering undercurrent runs
through even the most playful moments of the fantasy segment. Towards
the end of this sequence, Renoir turns back to darker territory,
introducing a toy soldier with a skull and crossbones on his hat and
bone ribbing on his jacket. That's right: this film features Death as a
toy soldier, pursuing Karen and her protector, another soldier, in a
horse chase across the sky. The film's denouement transitions smoothly
from the whimsy and escapism of Karen's wistful fantasy into a
startlingly poignant depiction of the journey into the afterlife, as the
dark soldier, this icon of death, throws Karen's lifeless body across
his black mount and rides through the clouds with her. The rough
superimpositions of these images lend a quality of eerie minimalism to
the fantasy's final moments — culminating in Death, previously a
forbidding, villainous figure, tenderly laying Karen down on a cliff
edge beside a cross which then morphs into a budding bush. Then, the
return from fantasy to the cold harshness of reality in the film's final
moments only underscores that even this romantic vision of death is far
from reality: the truth is sadder, more pathetic, without the heroic
adventure of Karen's dream death. This is a poignant, moving, evocative
short from Renoir, the cinema's premier humanist delivering a powerful
depiction of how social class dictates life and death.
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