“Why do you want to dance?”
(Lermontov)
“Why do you want to live?” (Victoria)
The complex relationship between Art and
Life is unravelled with spectacular extravagance in Powell and Pressburger’s
The Red Shoes (1948), which follows the plight of ballerina Victoria in the
Lermontov Company. The Red Shoes utterly subverts the tidy notion that
‘life’ and ‘art’ are mutually reflective, drawing the conclusion that
they are, and must remain, completely distinct entities.
The Archers made the film with Pilgrim
Productions, notable for their liberal approach to a director’s creativity.
The original story, by Hans Christian Anderson, functions at many levels
through the film. Firstly, Anderson’s fairy tale was adapted by the Archers
to make the film. Secondly, the story was adapted by Lermontov to make ‘The
Ballet of the Red Shoes’, and finally, the girl punished for succumbing to
the lure of the shoes is the narrative fate of Victoria (Shearer), both
literally and metaphorically.
The film is an artistic spectacle, drawing
together dance, music, visual art and filmmaking. The long ballet sequences
draw one away from the filmmaking process, and question the distinctions
between artistic forms. The Red Shoes was the first of such a venture in
Britain, although the hybrid of magic, music and mystery has been attributed
to the influence of Hoffman.
Lermontov himself represents
uncompromising art, in the both the film and his company. He believes that all
other aspects of life must be sacrificed for art and creativity, which must
remain untainted:
“Nobody can
have two lives, and yours is dancing”
One is aware, however, that such cold
fanaticism is itself an ideological taint upon the art it produces.
Victoria’s boyfriend Julian potentially
offers a compromise between art and life, in both producing an opera at Covent
Garden and loving Victoria, yet his art ultimately suffers when he misses his
opening night to find her. The two men represent these dual influences
on Victoria’s world (symbolised in the scene in her dressing room), yet the
confrontation is contained within the narrow framework of the artistic world.
The style of the film reflects the art
/life thematic tension. From the moment Victoria and Julian enter the
Lermontov Company the film enters a fantasy world - the dream-fantasy elements
of the ballet, the realisation of their artistic fantasies, and the
“otherness” of the world presented, which bears no relation to a 1940s
audience accustomed to films inspired by realism and the People’s War.
The red shoes themselves represent
Lermontov’s power over Victoria, from the moment he offers her the ballet
until she plunges to her death. The story of the shoes warns of the dangers of
stepping into the cruel and uncompromising world of art, for just as the shoes
take control of Victoria in the Ballet, so the heady illusion of success
allows Lermontov to take control of her life.
“I will do the
talking, you will do the dancing”
Thus she finally walks towards the stage
like a stiff, painted doll, and the camera shows the shoes leading her to
death. Or does she actually die? It matters not, for the moral of the film is,
surely, that without dancing she will no longer live.
Powell and Pressburger’s films had
always been critically marginalised, and in Britain The Red Shoes was
customarily received. In America, however, it was a success, and was
attributed with the popularisation of classical Ballet. The film is
incoherently enjoyable as one plunges between uncertainty and awe, but this is
surely the charm of Powell and Pressburger.
