A Film Canon

The Red Shoes integrates Black Narcissus' conjunction of horror and beauty into a sustained plea for film's inclusion in the pantheon of classical music, theatre and ballet. To this end, Powell and Pressburger attempt an idiosyncratic fusion of the four media that works best in the central ballet sequence - an adaptation, by Robert Helpmann, of the eponymous Hans Christian Andersen fairytale - which exhibits a transformation of theatrical into cinematic space unprecedented since 42nd Street, thanks to the use of superimpositions, unusual cutting, distorted angles, slow-motion, and a particular attention to minutiae unavailable to the eye of the individual audience member, all of which culminate with a series of increasingly eccentric comparisons between dancers and inanimate objects, providing an poetic corollary to producer Julian Craster's (Marius Goring) insistence that true dance is a process of systematic dehumanisation, paradoxically achieved "by a great agony of body and spirit". Unfortunately, the translation of theatricality back into the framing narrative is less elegant, tending either towards filmed theatre, or an overtly functional preparation for, and epilogue to, the central sequence. In the same way, the connection between Andersen's story - which turns on a pair of shoes that make their inhabitant dance to death - and the overarching narrative is slightly forced, albeit producing a conclusion that makes astonishing use of Technicolour's sensitivity to warm hues, and suggests that the marked disparities between on-location shooting and irrealistic, expressionistic sets may constitute a deliberate rupture, gesturing towards a residual slippage of film and theatre that it will take The Tales Of Hoffman to fully remedy.