Submitted by
Neal Lofthouse
In The Picture
Jayne Pilling steps out with "The Red Shoes"
Radio Times 28th Sept - 4th Oct 1985
One of the most enduringly popular of the writer-director team of Emeric
Pressburger and Michael Powell's collaborations, " The Red Shoes" was also
one of their most commercially sucessful films.
Like the ballet within the film, the story is of the human price to be paid
when life is sacrificed to art. Anton Walbrook, the Austrian actor who appears
in so many Powell-Pressburger films, is Lermontov, the ballet company's
director. He plays the demonic yet seductive impresario like a matinee idol
Mephistopheles, as he fastens on aspiring young ballerina Vicky Page (Moira
Shearer) as his new protegee. Her dedication is rewarded by sucess in "The
Red Shoes", the ballet created for her, which comes to symbolise her own
tragic fate.
The bitter-sweet flavour of Andersen's fairy-tale is caught as the romance,
developing amid the glowing Mediterranean landscapes of Monte Carlo where
much of the film is shot, is ultimately crushed by Lermantov's insistance
that she choose between life and art - those red shoes that will dance her
to death.
Weaving in and out of the central conflict is the everyday backstage life
of a ballet company, the routines of hard work and cameraderie subsuming
all the displays of temperament and artistic idiosyncrasies. But the film's
appeal is far wider than its subject matter. The narrative rhythms are as
carefully structured, the colour harmonies of its Technicolor images as
designed as for any ballet, but the effect is pure cinema. The ballet sequence
itself combines the grace of classical dance with a breath-taking mastery
of cinematic invention. It's a triumph of modernist fantasy, which won an
Oscar for designer Hein Heckroth.
The way in which it was made created a new term among professionals, "choreo-photography".
The sequence was sketched out in hundreds of life-size colour drawings,
which were photographed from the camera angles to be used in actual filming.
The original score, tailored to fit these photographs was then recorded,
reversing the usual process of adding music to the almost finished film.
Cinematographer Jack Cardiff had the difficult task of filming to fit the
music, with dancers performing to the playback. Many special effects were
devised, though subtly integrated to enhance the ballet rather than call
attention to themselves.
Even all these complex special effects had to be shot to music. The process
became a test of precision not just for the dancers but for the entire technical
crew. Their magnificent achievement, and the experience gained, was to lead
to another musical fantasy, "Tales of Hoffmann".
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