The Red Shoes

[dremble wedge]

Ken Russell on The Red Shoes in The Times



How The Red Shoes prolonged my pointe-less career



I am 21. I have rushed like a maniac from my class, having only had time to pull on trousers over my tights, to make it to the first performance of a new film in Piccadilly. I’m on a scholarship with the International Ballet, living like a monk on an allowance from my dad in Southampton, who sent me off to my new career with the lament: “I’ll never be able to hold up my head in St Mary’s Street again.”



The curtains part on the first performance at the Carlton cinema on the Haymarket of The Red Shoes, about which I know nothing except that the duo Powell and Pressburger have written, produced and directed it, which is enough to recommend it. Here on screen is the great Massine of the Ballets Russes, whom Diaghilev handpicked to replace Nijinsky when Nijinsky got married against his wishes. (Later he replaced Massine for the same reason.) I’ve never seen a film in which ballet is the primary metaphor for life, art and death — rising and leaping and getting in all sorts of trouble and falling. I am beside myself. It’s the equivalent of ET spotting his home planet on a star map.



The Red Shoes was to blame for my pursuing five more years of mediocre success in the ballet before conceding I was no Nijinsky nor Massine. My Coppélia wasn’t bad, though to play a 40-year-old, ie, an elderly person, at 21 was something of a comedown in my mind.



See it you must, for The Red Shoes, having recently been shown again at the Edinburgh Festival, is now digitally remastered (a two-year ordeal) and available in a two-disc set from ITV, on DVD and Blu-ray. Both versions have interviews with Martin Scorsese, the late cinematographer Jack Cardiff and relatives of Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger and Hein Heckroth (a costumier who had never designed a production before, but agreed to try on the strength of Powell’s “hunch about him”). Brian Easdale’s original score for The Red Shoes is unforgettable: from frenetic and lighthearted, to sexy and swinging, to terror-filled and thunderous. Oddly, like the character of the young composer who is the romantic hero in The Red Shoes, Easdale never wrote as good a score again. Life imitating art.



At that premiere in 1948, some in the audience walked out in disgust. Moira Shearer’s hotpants were too minimal, her performance dress see-through. There was blood on her legs in one scene: not acceptable. The shocked saw only the dark and grittier elements of the film — too truthful, too passionate, too raw (too after my own heart). Ballet was shown as I knew it to be: an insular, obsessive environment full of desperate desire, impossible hopes, moments of transcendence, inner laceration, insider jokes, power plays and sacrifice costing everything.



No art has as rigorous a discipline as twisting the body into impossibly difficult postures for the sake of one day transforming (as the film says) “into a flower, a cloud, a bird”. It’s the practice of magic, and a kind of black magician dominates the film — Anton Walbrook, the Diaghilev figure, who wants to forge Ms Shearer into the greatest dancer of all time. The impresario’s rule is cruel, unpredictable and addictive as the dancers struggle to win his approval. No character in the film is wholly evil, though, nor wholly innocent.



The red ballet slippers seduce the ballerina into attempting the best for herself —the actualisation of her talent and pursuit of mastery. But the shoes come with a trap: they won’t let her stop. Her aspirational joy becomes a hunger that can’t be satiated. The shoes dance her into a succession of pairings with lusty matelots and posh escorts, past hookers under streetlights into graveyards where ghouls crown her queen. The ballet is mirrored in the film’s plot: excruciatingly pressured by the influential lovers who are her angels and demons, the ballerina finds that her art obeys only its own imperatives.



I gave up my ballet shoes. I took up film-making, another dogged endeavour, but with bigger margins for error and easier on the knees. I wear sandals to work now. Red ones.



The Red Shoes special restoration edition, ITV, £15.99

[billy bentley]

Heads Up, Thelma Schoonmaker will be discussing the restoration of "The Red Shoes' on WNYC's "Leonard Lopate Show" next week. His show runs Mon-Fri, I'm not sure which day, but WNYC does have a strong on line presence and I'm sure one of our Britmovie Tech Wizards can post something. The restored flick is also showing at the Film Forum here in Manhattan, in case anyone is within striking distance.

[billy bentley]

Also just noticed a review of the restoration in today's New York Times by Manohla Dargis. Available online and maybe posted here, by someone who knows how to.

[franfran]

Any forum members in Australia might want to know that The Red Shoes is on tonight (or should I say tomorrow morning?) at 12.45am on ABC1 - after a rerun of an old episode of Poirot...............

[Steve Crook]

The digitally restored print of The Red Shoes is on tour around the British Isles

London; BFI Southbank (NFT); Fri 11 - Wed 30 Dec 2009

Bristol; Watershed Cinema; Fri 11 - Thu 17 Dec 2009

Sheffield; Showroom Cinema; Fri 11 - Thu 30 Dec 2009

Norwich; Norwich Cinema City; Fri 11 - Thu 17 Dec 2009

Belfast; Queens Film Theatre; Fri 11 - Thu 17 Dec 2009

Edinburgh; Filmhouse Edinburgh; Fri 11 - Thu 17 Dec 2009

Dublin; Light House Cinema Smithfield; Fri 11 - Thu 17 Dec 2009

Cambridge; Arts Picturehouse Cambridge; Fri 11 - Thu 24 Dec 2009

London; Gate Cinema Notting Hill; Fri 11 - Thu 17 Dec 2009

London; Ritzy Brixton; Fri 11 - Thu 17 Dec 2009

London; Everyman Hampstead; Fri 11 - Thu 17 Dec 2009

Hawkhurst; Kino Digital Ltd; Thu 17 - Thu 24 Dec 2009

Croydon; David Lean Cinema Croydon; Fri 18 - Thu 24 Dec 2009

London; Curzon Mayfair; Fri 18 - Thu 24 Dec 2009

Richmond; Richmond Filmhouse; Fri 18 - Thu 24 Dec 2009

Totnes; Barn Theatre - Dartington Hall; Fri 18 - Wed 23 Dec 2009

Brighton; Duke of York's Picturehouse; Fri 18 - Thu 24 Dec 2009

Dundee; Dundee Contemporary Arts; Fri 18 - Thu 24 Dec 2009

Aberdeen; Belmont; Fri 18 - Thu 24 Dec 2009

Southampton; Harbour Lights Picturehouse; Fri 18 - Thu 24 Dec 2009

Oxford; Phoenix Oxford; Fri 18 - Thu 24 Dec 2009

London; Greenwich Picturehouse; Fri 18 - Thu 24 Dec 2009

Newcastle upon Tyne; Tyneside Cinema; Fri 18 - Thu 24 Dec 2009

Liverpool; Picturehouse at FACT Liverpool; Fri 18 - Thu 24 Dec 2009

London; Screen on the Green; Fri 18 - Thu 24 Dec 2009

Dublin; Irish Film Institute; Fri 18 - Thu 24 Dec 2009

Bath; Little Theatre; Fri 18 - Thu 24 Dec 2009

Glasgow; Glasgow Film Theatre; Sun 27 - Wed 30 Dec 2009

Coventry; Warwick Arts Centre; Sat 2 - Sun 3 Jan 2010

Manchester; Cornerhouse Cinema; Fri 8 - Thu 14 Jan 2010

Inverness; Eden Court; Sat 9 - Mon 11 Jan 2010

Berkhamstead; Rex Berkhamstead; Sat 9 - Mon 11 Jan 2010



Contact your nearest cinema for the exact dates, times & for tickets. Do try to see it, it really is stunning. If it's not showing at a cinema near you, ask them why they aren't showing it. It's worth travelling some distance to see it.



Steve

[Neil1889]

Sheffield's Showroom has it until the 30th December; on a Walbrook related note The Queen of Spades is on there from Boxing Day.

[Steve Crook]

name='Neil1889']Sheffield's Showroom has it until the 30th December; on a Walbrook related note The Queen of Spades is on there from Boxing Day.

Thanks Neil. I've edited the list in the message above and on the P&P web site



Steve

[DB7]

My favourite film: The Red Shoes

In our writers' favourite films series, Charlotte Higgins applauds a picture that jetés through the imagination's darkest recesses

I remember the first time I watched The Red Shoes. I was a child, it was on the television some rainy afternoon, and I watched it on my own. I think I was probably expecting a straightforward retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's fairytale, also called The Red Shoes – though why that would be reassuring viewing I don't know, since Andersen's story, like his disturbing tale The Little Mermaid, is a thoroughly disquieting piece of work.

Instead, this film – which I would later discover was made in 1948, by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger – was set in postwar London, with an aspiring ballerina at its heart, played by the luminous, flame-haired Moira Shearer. The Red Shoes of the title is the name of the ballet that is created for Shearer's character, Victoria Page. And one of the overwhelming triumphs of the film is the utterly original vision of that ballet, which we see at the centre of the film. Abandoning realism, this virtuoso passage, deeply influenced by mid-century surrealism, imagines the ballet as if projected direct from Page's subconscious. I was terrified.

When I rediscovered the film in my 30s, that central section had lost none of its power to disturb. If anything, I now find it more shocking than I did on that memorable first viewing: those red shoes, I now realise, are absolutely dripping with dark imagery about female sexuality (menstruation, loss of virginity) and creativity. But what draws me to the film, and moves me so much, is that it is an artwork about art. And it is not only about the intensity, excitement, camaraderie and brutal discipline involved in making art, but also about the act of loving it.

I find that I am lost to the film, every single time I see it, by the end of the opening sequence, in which a group of students burst through the entrance to the "gods" in the Royal Opera House then race up the stairs as if their very lives depended on it. They start to watch the ballet that unfolds before them with the kind of greed with which a condemned man might eat his last meal. It makes me cry, reliably, every time I see it, and I find I'm hard pressed to explain exactly why, except that it must chime profoundly with my own inarticulable feelings about the art I love.

The look of the film, especially in its glorious recent restoration, is compelling. For a start, the colours: the red ballet shoes, of course, but also Moira Shearer's fireburst of copper hair, her topaz-coloured ballgown as she ascends the steps of a crumbling south-of-France villa, a flash of delphiniums as they are conveyed across Covent Garden market. I love the vision of a half-destroyed yet intellectually alive postwar London that it conjures – a city in rubble and yet full of possibilities.

Individual scenes, too, loom large in the memory: the melodramatic passage in which the Svengali-like ballet company director, Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) paces his Parisian boudoir and smashes his rococo mirror in rage. Or, by contrast, the delightful section in which the company of dancers celebrates a birthday amid the balmy evening breezes of the Côte d'Azur. For if I have made the film sound grim, that is doing it a disservice – one of its achievements is its apparently wilful, but I suspect very carefully calibrated, tonal shifts, which see it moving from light-footed comedy to darkness in the blink of an eye (a quality it shares with other Powell and Pressburger films, including my colleague Xan Brooks's favourite film, A Canterbury Tale).

But what for me is breathtaking about the central ballet section it is its attempt to capture the "out-of-body", fugitive experience of an artist in performance, when the conscious mind is suppressed and the body and pure instinct take over. It makes us, the viewer, not merely see Victoria but become her. The passage is, in all kinds of ways, profoundly unsettling: the way it deploys scraps of visual imagery from the rest of the film is exactly like the way one sees detritus from one's waking life subtly and sometimes frighteningly distorted in dreams.

At the same time, of course, the ballet The Red Shoes, aside from being a fairytale about a pair of enchanted shoes, is a metaphor for the way Victoria becomes utterly possessed by her single-minded pursuit of art. And it is a story that, grimly, ends in destruction, for the red shoes cannot be taken off, but dance their wearer to death. It is a film that plumbs the dark recesses of all our imaginations: dangerous, glorious, absurd, vivid and terrifying by turns.