The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948) (Patreon)

Among this film's many virtues is it strange, remarkable opening scene. The Red Shoes begins with a large group of college-aged men and women clamoring at a gate. You'd think they were waiting for admission to see Elvis or Sinatra at the height of their fame, but in fact these are rush-ticket holders climbing over each other to see a ballet. Up in the nosebleed section, one group of friends chats excitedly about the composer of the evening's ballet accompaniment. He is their composition professor, and they are quite literally there to cheer him on. About a row away, two balletomanes are shushing them. They are there to see world-renowned ballerina Irina Boronskaya (Ludmilla Tchérina), the lead dancer for the Lermontov Ballet Company. A brief argument ensues over which is the superior art, music or dance.

As it happens, only one of the characters in this scene, music student Julian Craster (Marius Goring) will even factor into the eventual narrative. But watching the scene, you could start to believe the legends of modernist artworks such as The Rite of Spring or L'Age d'ôr actually causing riots. Powell and Pressburger are depicting a somewhat counterfactual world in which nothing is more important that highbrow aesthetics. And although we don't know it quite yet, The Red Shoes has introduced one of the critical problems underpinning its human drama. Is ballet truly a great art, worth one's complete devotion? 

More specifically, Craster and the ballet company's founder, Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) argue whether ballet or music is the greater artform. Through a bit of circumstantial narrative plotting, Lermontov hires Craster to work as his second orchestra conductor, and eventually as a composer. In a parallel story, a London dancer named Victoria Page (Moira Shearer) is trying to get a job in Lermontov's company. Soon she has risen through the ranks and has become the company's prima ballerina. Lermontov tells her she has the capability to be one of the all-time greats. But he counsels her that she must forsake any and all other desires, especially love and family, in order to achieve this. (Lermontov, who is subtly coded as gay, presumably never had the chance to attain such comforts.) By the middle of the film, Vicky and Julian have fallen in love, which makes the dancer practically dead in the eyes of Lermontov.

Lermontov fires Craster, who returns to London and is set of mount an opera at the prestigious Covent Garden. At first, Page leaves Lermontov, and the dance world generally, to support Craster and have the life with him that she wants. Soon, though, she is coaxed back into the company, offered the chance to reprise her lead role in The Red Shoes, the Hans Christian Andersen-based ballet that made her a star. She is set to open in Monte Carlo on the same night as Craster's opera in London, and it is somehow understood that Vicky is supposed to give up her chance at greatness in order to remain by Julian's side. By the end of the film, she is almost physically pulled in two, with Craster demanding she abandon the performance moments before curtain, and Lermontov imploring her to stay.

Powell and Pressburger have created a complex, multi-tiered fictional apparatus, rich with side plots and minor characters, but we eventually realize that nothing was ever really a digression. Instead, all of the various components have been assembled in absolute harmony in order to explore one vital problem. While there is the ostensible rivalry between two artforms -- dance and music -- this is actually a front for a much deeper human crisis. After all, ballet is an art that places the female performer and her body at the center of its creations, while (even today) the composition of symphonic music is an overwhelmingly male pursuit. The crux and the tragedy of The Red Shoes is the fact that Julian, who does truly love Vicky, can never believe that her capacity to be a great artist (quite possibly even greater than him) could matter all that much.

After all, music is an abstract artform, one in which the intellectual composer generates sounds in his/her head and then channels them through the bodies of musicians. Dance, of course, is the work of choreographers. But even the greatest dances in history (until the advent of cinema) are mostly lost to history, because there is no standard notation system for movement. This means that it is the dancer's body and its spectacle that is front and center, in the moment and in the recorded history of dance. Anyone who has taken Philosophy 101 understands how this maps quite conveniently onto gender. Women have traditionally been considered more "embodied," and less cerebral than men, so an artform that foregrounds women's physical achievements must be an inferior mode of expression.

For their part, Powell and Pressburger are firmly on the side of Victoria Page. It's not just that Shearer acts circles around her costars, a fact that is all the more impressive when you consider that The Red Shoes was the Scottish ballerina's debut film role. Shearer never fails to convey the sheer labor of classical dance, in contrast to the ideal of "effortlessness", chiefly through her sharp lines and strong, muscular gestures. (By contrast, Craster's more "intellectual" work seems not only effortless but almost lazy, his compositions organized by existing genre forms and conventional orchestration.) More than all this, there is the startlingly modern, phantasmagoric performance and staging of the ballet at the center of the film. It begins as a cinematic transcription of ballet as it might be witnessed by an audience, but soon combines Vicky's hallucinations and Powell and Pressburger's strictly filmic interventions -- the red slippers lacing themselves onto Vicky's feet, or her dancing partners morphing into Julian and Boris. Even when The Red Shoes (film and ballet) becomes a material expression of Page's impending madness, the filmmakers remain committed to her vision, placing all of their artistic resources at her disposal.

In addition to this, the Archers' direction, along with (once again) the peerless cinematography of Jack Cardiff, consistently drenched even some of the most mundane sequences with bright, saturated color. This not only heightens the otherworldly effect of Vicky's world, making all facets of her life -- stage, romance, struggle -- essentially coextensive, dissolving the art / life distinction. The only real exceptions to this rule are the rehearsals, which display the dance studio as a space of intense work and a constant pursuit of perfection. 

While it is certainly understood that the ballet -- in which an enchanted pair of ballet slippers "dance" a young woman to death -- is a material metaphor for the struggle between artistic creation and mortality -- the entirely of The Red Shoes as a film is formally mirroring this metaphor on a broader scale. From the disconnected vignettes at the beginning, and with painstaking effort that is displayed onscreen, a text is produced: a ballet, a career, a legend. From the end of the ballet to the final reel of the film, Powell and Pressburger meticulous unwind that creation, until nothing is left but an empty spotlight, a small pocket of the universe where greatness once stood.