Whit the films: Heidi of the Alps Heidi delle Alpi 5’, USA, 1920 Heidi. Zoccoletti olandesi Heidi. Dutch Clogs by Allan Dawn 88’, USA, 1937 Heidi. Sono tornata per te Heidi. I’ve Come Back for You by Luigi Comencini 100’, Svizzera, 1952 Heidi torna tra i monti Heidi Returns to the Mountains by Isao Takahata 104’, Giappone, 1976

Heidi returns to the mountains. While the alpine landscape is not that of her beloved Grigioni, the welcome that the Film Festival della Lessinia has prepared for her during its 15th edition cannot be bothered with sentimental nostalgia. On the contrary: surely the little shepherd girl will be pleased by the extra attention (films and an exhibition) that will add to the extraordinary, worldwide success that her tiny figure has achieved in the collective imagination of generations of readers – and not only children – in more than forty different languages.

The book in which Johanna Spyri (1829-1901) recounts the story of her childhood has sold over sixty million copies. And it is a well-known story indeed. Heidi is a five-year-old orphan who goes to live in an idyllic environment that is respectful of animals in the small hut in Maienfeld belonging to her grandfather. A solitary, gruff-seeming man, who is initially irritated by the intrusion, the grandfather quickly comes to love her completely, and openly expresses his feelings, which are joyfully reciprocated by little Heidi. There, Heidi becomes friends with Peter, a shepherd boy her own age. However, a sudden event brusquely interrupts the harmony in which Heidi is immersed, with her directness and serene optimism. Aunt Dete takes the child to the city, to a wealthy family in Frankfurt. There she must keep company with Clara, a girl her age who is confined to a wheelchair. Far from the mountains, the green fields, her grandfather, and her sheep and goats, she tries to keep up a good front but suffers terribly from nostalgia. However, her characteristic generosity toward others remains intact, so much that it helps Clara’s physical condition improve notably. Finally, Heidi can rejoin her grandfather up in the mountains.

A vast “biographic” bibliography has analyzed the writings of Johanna Spyri, who at the end of the nineteenth century wrote books both for children and devoted to the Swiss mountains. His writings reflect the realization of the Helvetic Confederation of the “first phase of the industrial revolution” and the didactic viewpoint of an “austere Protestant ethic”. His work contrasts the conditions of life in the outdoors, free in nature, even if without much material comfort or education, with the oppressive, gray atmosphere – though marked by wealth and culture – of life in the big city.

Heidi’s story was soon transformed by the cinema to a tale of images “in motion”. The first film dates to 1920: the U.S. production, Heidi of the Alps, starring Madge Evans. From the surviving fragments of this work that the Film Festival della Lessinia presents in its discerning mini-retrospective, along with three essential titles chosen from the abundant Heidian filmography discussed below, we know that the film was colored, frame by frame, using the painstaking pochoir technique that was used at the time only for the most highly regarded and widely distributed films, instead of the more common viraggio process.

The most famous cinematic rendering of Johanna Spyri’s story also comes from Hollywood. Distributed in Italy with the unlikely title Zoccoletti olandesi (literally, “Dutch clogs”), the director, Allan Dawn, cast Shirley Temple in the title role as Heidi and created a set-piece made to measure for the explosive personality of this perky child actress with the blond ringlets who danced and sang her way into the hearts of American and European audiences. Her Heidi hit the big screen in 1937 at the end of an unbelievably successful run of films: Bright Eyes, The Little Colonel, Curly Top, Captain January, and Poor Little Rich Girl. Shirley was already nine years old, almost twice the age of Heidi in the book. But it didn’t matter: the ability and command performance of this enfant prodige was such that no one noticed. In the end, with the tear-jerker moments and sentimentalism, it is the best film of the “clever” series starring Temple and was followed by gadgets of every kind: t-shirts, cups, ceramic figures, stamps, and even a colorful, figurative toilet seat for children!

Fifteen years later (1952) the director Luigi Comencini made an accurate, unprecedented socio-philosophical interpretation of Johanna Spyri’s novel. Produced in Switzerland, the film was titled Heidi but for the Italian theaters it became Son tornata per te (“I’ve Come Back for You”). Born of a Swiss mother, Comencini’s opportunity came with an offer from the production house Praesens to write the screenplay with Richard Schweizer and William Michael Trichlinger and to sit behind the camera. “I accepted,” said the director, “in part because I enjoyed working with child actors”. In fact, his oeuvre includes many captivating films featuring children, beginning with Proibito rubare (1948) and including the extraordinary Pinocchio starring the little Andrea Balestri. For Heidi, he found Elsbeth Sigmund in a school; she was dark haired, like Heidi in the book (Temple’s golden-haired Heidi was an exception), and thanks to the lighting directors Emil Berna and Peter Frischknecht, the story and characters emerge in an alpine landscape with a realistic-enchanted tone. Here the director allows Spyri’s literary sentiments to emerge, while at the same time softening – as Mereghetti writes in the 2008 Dizionario – “the austere Protestant ethic, strongly impregnated with Rousseau’s ideas” and “diluting the pedagogic schematism,” recounting “with moving and sincere accents the encounter of children with the repressive world of adults”. Among the actors were celebrated stars of contemporary German cinema: Willy Birgel, Clara’s rich father, and Theo Lingen, a light note in the film in the role of the butler Sebastian.

The fourth screening of the Film Festival series presents Heidi in the form of a Japanese animated cartoon that contributed, with its widespread television airing, to the truly global phenomenon of her character and story. Its original title was Alps no shojo Heidi. This serene interpretation, drawn by Isao Takahata and collaborators, was part of the wave of other Japanese productions that drew on nineteenth-century European literature, from De Amicis’ Marco of From the Apennines to the Andes to Collodi’s Pinocchio. Here is Heidi in the brunette version with huge round eyes and an infantile tone, located as in fairy tales in an idealized time, who modernizes with reassuring friendliness this timeless myth.

Piero Zanotto