Original at
Glasgow University
The Archers' The Red Shoes and MGM's An American in Paris
By Benedict Smith
An American in Paris (1951) and The Red Shoes (1948) arise from two distinctly
different schools of film-making. The former is a Hollywood musical, made
by the Freed unit at MGM. The latter a British film made by the semi-independent
Archer's production company, bank rolled by the Rank Organisation with a
production staff arising from a peculiar mix of British and European film-making
backgrounds. Ian Christie asserts that 'The Red Shoes was above all a work
of creative collaboration between artists and technicians in many fields,
on a scale rarely attempted in cinema', another of those rare attempts was
An American in Paris. The copious similarities that exist between these
two films, not the least of which is that they both feature seventeen minute
ballets sequences, are surprising given the different traditions from which
they appear to derive. That the two film units should produce similar texts
after strikingly different histories invites both historical and textual
analysis to determine what such a confluence of interests has to tell us
about the texts and their shared agenda. Moreover the films' preconcerns
with 'High Art', specifically painting and ballet, witness that a major
concern of that shared agenda is the development of the film medium as an
art-form, seeking artistic and social progression by wedding it with culturally
established forms of artistic expression.
According to Hugh Fordin's Movies Greatest Musicals the conception of An
American in Paris was entirely Arthur Freed's. '"How about selling me 'An
American in Paris'-the title?" he reputedly asked Ira Gershwin. "And I want
to take George's 'An American in Paris' and use it for a ballet, uncut,
to finish the picture,". Apparently Gene Kelly had only once 'mentioned
to Freed the idea for a story about an ex-GI, an aspiring painter who decides
to remain in Paris after the war.' The genesis of The Red Shoes is somewhat
different. The Archers had had a string of successes with the public and
critics alike. A Matter of Life and Death (1946) had received the first
ever Royal Command Performance, and Black Narcissus (1947) was about to
go on to receive a host of Oscar nominations. An adaptation of Hans Christian
Anderson's had been made by Emeric Pressburger before the war and in late
1946 he urged Michael Powell to read his script. Pressburger and Powell,
who agreed that it should be their next project, bought the rights to the
script back off Alexander Korda. Despite being a film about ballet, with
an actual twenty-minute ballet planned for the middle of the film Arthur
Rank and his business chief John Davis approved the Archers' largest budget
yet.
Powell wrote in his autobiography 'I think that the real reason why The
Red Shoes was such a success, was that we had all been told for years to
go and die for this and for that, and now that the war was over, The Red
Shoes told us to go and die for art.' In this passage Powell makes clear
the importance of a culturally determined value system to the agenda which
The Red Shoes addresses. The arts represented in the story are culturally
respectable, being 'sophisticated' entertainment. The status of ballet and
the associated arts of music and painting in the form of design had already
been determined independent of the film. Ginnette Vincendeau and Richard
Dyer suggest European film-makers persuade an engagement with the 'high
white tradition' of European art, as a means of gaining cultural legitimacy
and state subsidy from the 1950's onwards. The same notion of 'high cultural
prestige' is invoked by Powell. Pressburger and Powell appear to have been
attempting to purchase some of that respectability in two ways. Most obviously
ballet as the subject matter alone may be recognised as conferring some
the legitimacy of its traditional status within the arts on the medium through
which it is being represented. The received notion that ballet was a subject
and means of expression antithetical to that which film was supposed to
be capable of conveying, 'sublime' art versus mass entertainment, and that
movie audiences would react unfavourably to it was accepted by the Rank
Organisation. They received and distributed The Red Shoes without fanfare
or even a premiere and withdrew it from release after a few short weeks.
Wedded to the clear on-screen arts, were the labours of the production team,
who provided the original material of the ballet, music choreography, design
etc. in its entirety which represented those arts. In essence the second
method of achieving cultural kudos was to have film technicians perform
a technological ballet as well as Covent Garden were able to stage one.
Gene Kelly has said, 'we really tried to make a ballet, not just merely
a dance, not a series of beautiful moving tableaux, but an emotional whole,
consisting of the combined arts which spelt ballet, whether on the stage
or the screen'. The artistic agenda being addressed by Kelly is coincident
with the Archers'. A 'ballet, not just merely a dance', the expression reveals
the hierarchical perception of the arts, with Kelly's chosen means of expression
perceived as clearly residing at the lower end of scale. That hierarchy
invites an internal reorganisation of the musical genre, realigning its
affinities with culturally legitimate forms of expression. Wedded to Kelly
and Minnelli's ballet then, we find incontrovertible 'art' of painting.
Providing the glue to marry a film musical and the 'combined arts which
spelt musical' is the music of George Gershwin, a cultural hybrid in that
his music straddled the gap between what was popular and what was culturally
respectable.
'Gershwin's music seems a metaphor for democratic American creativity itself
. . . Alongside his success in the musical market-places of Broadway, Hollywood
and Tin Pan Alley are his achievements in those loftier realms of concert
hall and opera house. No concert or operatic music by any other American
composer is programmed, played, and sung so often by the world's most accomplished
orchestras and soloists in its most respected opera houses and concert halls.'
The terminology of Gerald Mast's praise encapsulates the aspirational quality
which suffused the aims of An American in Paris. To go beyond the 'musical
market-place' on to 'loftier heights' alongside 'the world's most accomplished'
and 'respected' artistes.
Thematically the films are inter-connected. Both narratives concern a creative
group of artistes pursuing their vocations. An American in Paris, in the
tradition of MGM musicals is light of heart, while The Red Shoes takes itself
far more seriously becoming at times melodramatic. In each film there is
a patron figure, providing the money and drive for the artist to fulfil
their potential, Lermontov and Vicky in The Red Shoes, Milo Roberts and
Jerry Mulligan in American in Paris. Both mentors are concerned with more
then their protégés potential. The romantic subtext is foregrounded
in the MGM picture, but the Lermontov character in the Archers' film is
more complicated and his passion is subsumed into the larger desire for
Vicky to devote himself to his Company. The gender roles are switched, as
are the endings. Jerry leaves his patron and exhibition for love and the
Leslie Caron character. Vicky flees the impossible choice between Julian
and Lermontov, carried away by the red shoes she jumps in front of a train
and 'dies for art'.
The ballet in An American in Paris was originally written to be performed
in the middle of the film, as in The Red Shoes, however it was moved to
the end so as to provide the climax. It is however, a purely visual climax,
the end result of the artistic allusions littering the film up till then
(for instance Jerry's assembly of an unseen portfolio). Narratively it is
isolated, like the Busby Berkeley sequences in the Golddiggers series for
instance, but here the ballet is entirely fantastical, without even the
suggestion of the sequence being part of a show, in extended or exploded
stage space. Its function as spectacle is to literally act as a 'show-stopper',
combining 'the arts which spelt ballet' and so completing the aims of the
film. With great brevity it recapitulates the plot so far; Jerry falling
for Lise but finding people in his way, but this is only a pretext for solo,
duo and company dance numbers. As a musical number however it is akin to
numbers in other Hollywood musicals in that as spectacle it is a celebration
of dance, the underlying theme of films from Top Hat (1935) to Singin' in
the Rain (1952), if with a more formal presentation in An American in Paris.
It forms no developmental part of the story, but rather is given a sequential
structure based on purely visual referents, an homage to the impressionist
painters who have inspired Kelly's character. In the sequence there is a
shift away from dialogue and the lyric to visual expression and impressionism.
The plot is recapitulated in images alone, fitted to Gershwin's pre-existing
score. What happens is that one layer of communication, language, is stripped
away emphasising what remains, communication through music, movement, line
and colour.
The designer of the ballet sequence, Irene Sharaff was told 'the end of
the picture would be drenched in impressionistic colour'. Until she came
on board 'the only reality for the ballet was the decor: Paris seen through
the eyes of Dufy, Renoir, Utrillo, Rousseau, Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec.'
'I did actually work out the sequence and the pompiers and the continuity
of the ballet. I think I did it from the point of view of colour. But the
painters themselves dictated the continuity.' That continuity doesn't respect
temporal boundaries as one time period is exchanged for another without
any chronological logic. Second world war uniforms are exchanged for jazz-age
striped jackets and straw boaters before proceeding to nineteenth-century
outfits from Toulouse Lautrec's Follies Bergeres. The effect of this historical/visual
discontinuity is to reassert the primacy of the dancers and the music, as
the entities giving the sequence coherence, the only constants among the
spatial and temporal discontinuity. Gauging the effect of transforming the
received visual arts tradition into cinematic spectacle is problematic.
It could be argued that the transformation trivialises the subjects of the
homage, turning the pictures and their characters into the background for
a Gene Kelly love affair. It is this tension between the performers and
the paintings that ballet is used to resolve. The performance of a ballet,
as opposed to a conventional musical number, with its inherent legitimacy
off-sets potential accusations of trivialisation, as one artistic expression
of the sublime is joined by another, the two wedded together by the means
of cinema.
The primacy of painting to both films, in particular to the ballet sequences
is revealed by Michael Powell's choice of production designer, a luminary
from the Bauhaus. For the first time, Powell maintains, a painter was given
total control over all aspects of a films design. Hein Heckroth had already
designed a popular thirties ballet, The Green Table, and remained associated
with many theatre and opera companies in Britain while practising as a painter.
Heckroth's design starts off in concrete stage-set reality before swiftly
moving into a surreal 'mindscape'. With matte paintings extending the darkened
dance floor into the distance and creating fireworks above the dancers'
heads, the Red Shoes ballet is also 'drenched in colour'. Neither film features
an audience seated before the dancers, the American in Paris ballet taking
place entirely in a fantasy Paris, while Powell and Pressburger conceived
the audience of their ballet as the cinema audience alone. They specifically
avoid the applauding crowds, reactions shots of which bookend and sometimes
are intercut with Berkeley's routines. Routines which, as beginning in stage
space, fore-run The Red Shoes transformation from 'reality' to imagined
space. Powell envisioned that 'once the curtain had gone up on the performance,
we would no longer be in a theatre, but inside the heads of two young people
who were falling in love [the ballerina Vicky Page and the composer/conductor
Julian Crastor]'.
The dances in the An American in Paris ballet are a series of performances
in different locales. The 'Red Shoes Ballet' was never a coherent performance
anywhere but on film. The sequence relies on the technology of cinema to
piece it together. For instance Vicky only has to see the red shoes in the
shoe-makers window at the side of the stage and reach out towards them for
them to magically appear on her feet, via a jump cut. As the shoes carry
her onwards and onwards Vicky must dance with anything and everything, even
a newspaper. A piece of newsprint is blown by the breeze, it begins to spin
faster and faster until it transforms into a man, his body covered with
headlines he spins impossibly fast before coming to a stop to dance a duet
with Vicky. The shot relies on hidden wires, fast-motion camera-work and
a jump cut. Later as Vicky is carried around the world a company of 'savages'
advance towards her, surrounding her, the movement is only comprehensible
from a Berkelyesque crane shot seeing the group encircle and engulf her
from above. The paint which has been daubed on the 'savages' bodies continues
and develops the motif of painting in the sequence. The fun-fair which Vicky
dances through is surreal, in both its shapes, the foreshortening of its
painted structures and in the choice colours. Vicky herself becomes daubed
with streaks of paint which we imagine to have rubbed off on her, the visible
signs of her terrible non-stop dance through the world.
As Powell's comment, 'once the curtain had gone up on the performance, we
would no longer be in a theatre, but inside the heads of two young people
falling in love', suggests the ballet, and its visual representation is
entirely rooted in the psychological motivation of the characters. Moreover
the immersion of the couple, and specifically Vicky, into the music drives
the narrative forward. It brings the two together, but also pushes Vicky
further down the road toward making a final choice between a life devoted
entirely to art without human contact or a second-rate (as Lermontov describes
it) career with a husband. The story as acted out in the ballet is prophetic,
the predetermined future it indicates suggests a mythic component to the
film-narrative. Dying for art being an unavoidable future for the committed
artist/dancer, registering the film's interpretation of art as a mythic
component in life akin to and tied together with the classical Greek notion
of fate. The structure of Sophocles' Oedipus, where fate is inescapable
even with the warning of a prophesy of the future, is redeployed in The
Red Shoes. The ballet is not only an intrinsic part of the plot but it is
also the metaphor for the whole story, not a recapitulation of it as the
'An American in Paris ballet' must be, located at the end of the film.
As the narrative revolves around the backstage world of Lermontov's company
'the combined arts which spell ballet' are foregrounded, so we not only
see the development of the choreography, but the set from sketches to full
realisation, the music from piano melody to complete orchestration. The
on-screen production team are the alter-egos of the Archers team, except
in the case of Robert Helpmann and Leonide Massine who filled the roles of
choreographers and dancers off-screen as well as on. The special matte-effect
work, trick photography and cutting in The Red Shoes ballet reveal the technical
involvement of the entire Archers production and post-production staff.
Proclaiming the spectacle on the screen as entirely non-naturalistic. This
is contrary to the musical tradition of naturalising the song and dance
number, foregrounding the process of its production and thus the medium
of film. The conventions of Hollywood musicals, where Paris is frequently
recreated on a studio backlot, predispose the suspension of disbelief in
the viewer to ignore the non-naturalism on display in the American in Paris
ballet. Moreover the technical virtuosity on display is less overt or self-proclaiming
than that of The Red Shoes. The only laboratory effect are dissolves that
shift the Paris of one painter to another and one 'trick' cut which removes
the ballet company from the square where Kelly dances at the end of the
dance. For the sequence the film's principle director of photography was
replaced by John Alton who abandoned the conventional studio method of lighting
a set with a bank of lights above the set and large numbers on the ground
with a more minimal approach using fewer lights but large numbers of colour
filters. 'The secret to the ballet's photography was the fumata (smoky)
quality, which changed all the colours to pastel.' Alton said. Vincente
Minneli asserted 'you needed someone who would be spectacular and daring
in his use of lights; there are so many light changes and effects in the
ballet movement that I wanted him.' Visual effects were largely orchestrated
and executed during the shooting, whereas 'The Red Shoes Ballet', taking
place in 'exploded stage space' was completed as a whole only in the cutting
room. With locale frequently changing in mid-step it is clear The Red Shoes'
appropriation of ballet is significantly different to that of An American
in Paris. There is no tension between the performers and the scenery, the
two are co-dependent, as the episode with the newsprint demonstrates. The
music is another indivisible agent of the ballet, composed by Brian Easdale
specifically for the film's ballet and story. Notions of its cultural legitimacy
are argued by its quality, but this is bolstered by the opening credit sequences
emphasis that Sir Thomas Beecham himself conducted the orchestra for the
ballet sequence.
The story behind The Red Shoes is a back-stage musical in the tradition
of classical Hollywood. The central component of 'putting on a show' is
significantly different. Jane Feuer suggests that Hollywood musicals sought
to disassociate their performers from professionals, who by virtue of pursuing
song and dance as a business somehow sully it, and therefore proclaimed
the nature of the performances as amateur. This was an obvious conceit since
film-making is an industrial process, but was a generic convention (the
epitome of which was the Andy Hardy series). The Red Shoes proclaims its
commitment to professionalism in the first reel with Lermontov complaining
about the awfulness of amateur performances. A serious attitude is all,
"Why do you want to dance?" Lermontov asks Vicky, "Why do you want to live?"
she earnestly replies. Putting on a show in this atmosphere is a highly
professional business. Operating within the Hollywood tradition An American
in Paris also features the generic obsession with putting on a show. Oscar
Levant is seen labouring over the piano trying to write symphony, the Georges
Guetary character Henri Baurel, is concerned with the first performance
of a new number in his stage show and Gene Kelly gets Parisian street kids
to help him perform an impromptu number, 'I Got Rhythm'. All three men join
together for the first number of the film, 'By Strauss' a dialectical debate
on the preference of jazz to Strauss. However the true 'backstage' the film
reveals is the painter's version of putting on a show, from finding a patron,
getting a studio, painting a large enough body of work and meeting sympathetic
critics. The irony of course is that Jerry throws all this away, abandoning
the support of his patron for the love of Lise. This does not matter to
the narrative however since Jerry's lack of critical success is displaced
by his transition from artist to subject. In the ballet he becomes part
of the work of great artists, moreover he is not a trapped subject of study
but is capable of transition between artists and pictures, thus exerting
some kind of control. Far from being the unwitting agent of fate his story
is completed outwith the ballet and the world of art, resolved by his relationship
with Lise.
This analysis has attempted to identify the shared concerns of An American
in Paris and The Red Shoes, the result of which is to have established the
bounds of an intertextual, or rather inter-media agenda, where the hierarchical
perception of the arts has been addressed. The two films sought to redefine
that perception both overtly and covertly. The films narrate the process
of an established artistic form's means of production. At the same time
they subvert them, 'The Red Shoes Ballet' is an entirely filmic production,
using all manner of effects impossible to reproduce on the stage. The An
American in Paris story ultimately rejects its chief protagonist's artistic
aspirations. The homage of the ballet however fulfils the demand of the
story to present a visual climax. An end result which subverts the misé-en-scéne
of impressionist paintings, manipulating their colour and subject matter
to purely filmic, and more specifically generic musical ends and movement
and dance. This essay has sought to uncover the agenda arrived at by two
separate schools of film-makers. A judgement of whether the films achieved
their aims can be made by following the criteria laid down by the films
themselves. In terms of fulfilling the its own agenda The Red Shoes clearly
succeeds, ducking none of the difficulties of meeting ballet and the 'high
white tradition' on its own ground. Operating within the musical genre,
nominally the backstage musical, it subverts the genre laying stresses on:
the ballet company's professionalism; the process behind the production
of art; the film's own position as cinema and with the ballet itself it
emphasises the integration of music, image, dance and montage as a legitimate
collective means of producing Art. An American in Paris is by no means a
failure, but the tension between its ingredients; art and the musical genre,
the use of ballet dancing as a bridge between the two instead of arising
from them; and the narrative disavowal of the pursuit of Art determines
that it remain problematic instead of successfully making 'an emotional
whole, consisting of the combined arts which spell ballet'.
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