In this classic drama, Vicky Page is an aspiring ballerina torn between her dedication to dance and her desire to love. While her imperious instructor, Boris Lermontov, urges to her to forget anything but ballet, Vicky begins to fall for the charming young composer Julian Craster. Eventually Vicky, under great emotional stress, must choose to pursue either her art or her romance, a decision that carries serious consequences.
11 Dec The Red Shoes (1948)
No Constraints, Never Stops
Over the past two years, I’ve been working to see and understand what I think important in film. My primary value is in the exploration of self-referential storytelling. That’s where the story in the film is about the story of the film. The filmmakers have surrogates. The film is represented therein by a show or writing of some kind.
Another thing that I value is the self-aware, active camera. That’s one that participates in the action. Clearly, this an the self-referential construction can support each other. But the cinematic camera can go places not reducible in narrative terms.
The third thing surprised me. I’ve become enchanted with the role that redheaded women play in film. I believe their use can carry significant power, and that some sophisticated entanglement between reflecting and creating society is at work.
Well, this film has all three. It has a lovely redhead. She is the subject of the film and also the creator of the show within the show. She is the focus of the motion around her and the generator of motion which illuminates all. The film can be seen as her own fairytale, beginning in her dream with her in princess garb going up that marvellous stairway. And she is absolutely enchanting until the end where she has to act and can’t quite pull it off. But she is photographed as a person with a loving lens.
And this film is deeply, deeply self-referential. I think it springs from the similarly structured, French ‘Children of Paradise,’ of a couple years prior. The initial backstage scenes are strikingly similar as well.’Who’s in charge?’ The important similarities are the focus for multiple control over a girl, the nesting of performance within the performance and the mixing of the creation of the film with the creation of the performances displayed. The Hungarian producer has a surrogate in the impresario played by a Hungarian, the director in the composer. The girl is an actress, a character as dancer and the character within the dance. All three are cursed by the strength of the story to take over the reality in which it is placed. I love this stuff.
But there’s more: this is the first time to my knowledge where the camera self-consciously enters the action, changes reality, even creates new frames of reality> The camera dances. The camera allows the dancer and magical shoes to create their own realities. The camera is never a static audience, even in the framing sections that come before and after the ballet. This camera, in this film, changed our visual imagination forever.
And it has the best DVD extras I have ever seen. The Jeremy Irons/Humbert connection is delicious.
Posted in 2002
Ted’s Evaluation — 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.
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