Bodies Sick with Exploitation, Consciences Unable to Rebel: Shoes (1916) and La petite marchande d’allumettes (1928)

Abstract

Although twelve years separate Shoes (Lois Weber, 1916) from La petite marchande d’allumettes (Jean Renoir, 1928), the two medium-length films have much in common. Although the North American director’s narrative is based on a realist story and the French director’s film is inspired by a fairy tale, both show the female body as an object, one used by progenitors in order to satisfy their material needs and to obtain benefits. They both depict working-class women as submissive recipients of misfortune who assume as natural the circumstances that lead them to illness, prostitution, and death. Through the poetics of the image and the materiality of the suffering body, the two directors concentrate the reflexive core of female exploitation of the body