The Red Shoes is one of the best dance films ever made.
Filmed in lush Technicolor of the late 1940s, the film has been gloriously restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Film Foundation. Get the Blue-Ray copy and be sure to watch the special features which describe the process.
I first saw this film when I was about eight and remember being enthralled by the world of theatre and dance that the film depicts. While the film essentially is about Victoria Page, a beautiful aristocratic red-haired dancer (Moira Shearer), the film equally centers on her discover and mentor, who owns his own dance company, Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook).
Boris tells Victoria that he will make her a legendary dancer if she concentrates her life only on dance. She falls in love with the company's composer, Julian Craster (Marius Goring), and has to choose between her career and her love for him.
As Boris sets up Victoria's career, he has Craster write the score to a ballet based on Hans Christian Anderson's short story about The Red Shoes--one in which a girl is made a gift of red dancing shoes which once she has on refuse to allow her to rest until she dies from exhaustion.
The ballet sequence which makes Victoria famous is one of the magical film moments onscreen. Going into a dreamworld unhampered by a real world theatre production, directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger allow us to experience what the music and the dance wants us to feel by allowing such things as instantaneous cuts from scene to scene. At one point Shearer dances with a live dancer and that dancer becomes a large piece of newprint cut into the shape of the dancer. At another point, we look from the stage toward the audience and as they applaud, they become an ocean which Victoria hears. The dance sequence alone is a reason to see the film.
While the plot remains 1940s melodrama, the lush colors and theatrical world shown draw us deeply into its story. With everything that proceeds it, the ending seems totally fated.
As a side note, I find the characters and situations of the film remind me very much of the Russian Ballet owner Sergei Diaghilev and his relationship with ballet dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky. Walbrook, with his moustache, even looks like a thin Diaghilev.
The Red Shoes (1948) ****
Filmed in lush Technicolor of the late 1940s, the film has been gloriously restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Film Foundation. Get the Blue-Ray copy and be sure to watch the special features which describe the process.
I first saw this film when I was about eight and remember being enthralled by the world of theatre and dance that the film depicts. While the film essentially is about Victoria Page, a beautiful aristocratic red-haired dancer (Moira Shearer), the film equally centers on her discover and mentor, who owns his own dance company, Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook).
Boris tells Victoria that he will make her a legendary dancer if she concentrates her life only on dance. She falls in love with the company's composer, Julian Craster (Marius Goring), and has to choose between her career and her love for him.
As Boris sets up Victoria's career, he has Craster write the score to a ballet based on Hans Christian Anderson's short story about The Red Shoes--one in which a girl is made a gift of red dancing shoes which once she has on refuse to allow her to rest until she dies from exhaustion.
The ballet sequence which makes Victoria famous is one of the magical film moments onscreen. Going into a dreamworld unhampered by a real world theatre production, directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger allow us to experience what the music and the dance wants us to feel by allowing such things as instantaneous cuts from scene to scene. At one point Shearer dances with a live dancer and that dancer becomes a large piece of newprint cut into the shape of the dancer. At another point, we look from the stage toward the audience and as they applaud, they become an ocean which Victoria hears. The dance sequence alone is a reason to see the film.
While the plot remains 1940s melodrama, the lush colors and theatrical world shown draw us deeply into its story. With everything that proceeds it, the ending seems totally fated.
As a side note, I find the characters and situations of the film remind me very much of the Russian Ballet owner Sergei Diaghilev and his relationship with ballet dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky. Walbrook, with his moustache, even looks like a thin Diaghilev.
The Red Shoes (1948) ****
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