Powell and Pressburger's magnum opus is a testament to creative collaboration.
I wholeheartedly believe that,
The Red Shoes,
Powell and Pressburger’s magnum opus, is one of the most successful collaborative feats ever put to celluloid. Based on the
fairy tale of the same name, by
Hans Christian Andersen, about a young girl who’s cursed shoes won’t allow her to stop dancing, Powell and Pressburger turned the short story into ballet, and weaved it into a larger behind-the-scenes theatrical drama about neurotic obsession, and a love triangle between the ballet’s lead dancer, composer and producer.
The filmmakers seemed to create a perfect utopian biome for gifted artists to incubate and burst forth into a spellbinding symbiosis of talent; everyone - writers, directors, cinematographer, camera operators, editors, choreographers, dancers, actors, composer, musicians, designers, stylists, technicians, engineers, painters, draughtsmen, fabricators, etc. - working together as one, feeding off of each other, nourishing each other, inspiring each other, pushing each other beyond their previously thought limits, to create absolute cinematic magic.
It’s one of those movies where within minutes you know you’re watching something special. It bleeds into us with a near-tangible surging excitement; an unbridled energy waiting to be unleashed. There’s a definable romantic-ness to to such films and the feelings they arouse in us. The personal vulnerability of unfiltered artistic expression feels romantic almost by nature. Even when experienced in a public space or discussed in a public forum, our connections to these works feel private, as if you and the artist(s) hit a secret wavelength, shared only by yourselves, intertwining in mind and spirit.
The 15-minute hallucinatory odyssey of the Red Shoes ballet scene stands as a testament to human expression, using film to build on and extend the possibilities of the art forms that preceded it: painting and crafting create moods and backdrops, performance gives visual representation to both storytelling and music, and all of it is set on the stage of a theater, which has its boundaries shattered by film.
Art forms of all kinds have always been able to conquer space and time in our heads - our imaginations taking us to other worlds - but the exclusive ability of filmmaking is to make that triumph physical (as opposed to books), visual (as opposed to music), and present (as opposed to painting). Theater had long been our most visual art form, and film extended its stage and potential endlessly, creating a canvass for our dreamscapes to live. Places where a stage seemingly stretches for miles, throwing plausible dimensions out the window. Places where characters and locations appear out of thin air before fading away back into the ether. Places where in the blink of an eye one character can become another, or dancers can transform into flowers, birds, clouds.
With the ballet scene, Powell and Pressburger used the film form as a demonstration of; a commentary on; and a tribute to the transformative, transcendental power of art, where reality and possibility submit to the boundless capacity of human imagination, and the infinite ways we’re able to tell stories, and express emotions and ideas.
For Powell and Pressburger - as is with many artists - living is synonymous with creation, with artistic expression, acts that are as necessary for them to live as breathing: a feeling they communicate to us in an exchange between the ballet’s producer, Boris, and lead dancer, Victoria.
Boris: “Why do you want to dance?”
Victoria: “Why do you want to live?”
Boris: “Well I don’t know exactly why, er, but I must.”
Victoria: “That’s my answer too.”
The Red Shoes is their sublime, inexhaustible monument to art and creation: to life itself.
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