Some of my favorite artforms, including the classical guitar, are characterized by subtlety and shyness. Another of my favourite art-forms is film, which is known and loved for its glamour and grandiosity.
Whether a flamenco guitarist or a filmmaker, almost all artists experience a conflict between being passionate about their art and being a member of civilised society. One of the most entertaining and emotionally wrenching portrayals of this conflict ever put to page or screen is the 1948 backstage drama ‘The Red Shoes’.
Powell and Pressburger
Through the 1940s, the filmmaking team of director Michael Powell and screenwriter Emeric Pressburger had a streak of consecutive classics that is almost unrivalled in cinematic history. This included ‘The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp’ (1943), a lifetime-spanning comedy of manners that observed the technological changes in warfare and whether they left any room for gentlemanly conduct in military life. ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ (released in the United States as ‘Stairway to Heaven’) (1946) is a love story and courtroom drama that takes place between wartime Britain and Heaven. There was also ‘Black Narcissus’ (1947), an ambitious take on orientalism and repressed sexuality.
These films all told timeless stories while being specific to the zeitgeist. Everyone from Martin Scorsese, to Steven Spielberg, to the Coen Brothers cites them as a major influence.
In 1999, four of Powell and Pressburger’s works were named in the British Film Institute’s all-time Top 100 British movies. As someone who has always experienced conflict between paid work and personal passion projects, the one for which I have the most affection is ‘The Red Shoes’.
The Price of Greatness
On the surface, ‘The Red Shoes’, filmed in technicolor and set in various exotic locations, provided escapism to postwar audiences, still suffering from bombed-out cities and rationing. However, like the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale that inspired it, the film is much darker than it seems.
Aspiring ballerina Vicky Page (Moira Shearer) gets the chance to impress impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook). After getting her big break, she is on course to achieve greatness under Lermontov’s guidance, but her romance with composer Julian Kraster (Marius Göring) becomes an obstacle. Lermontov had earlier ranted that “you cannot have it both ways. A dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love can never be a great dancer. Never!”
The centre-piece is a seventeen-minute ballet sequence in which Vicky finally fulfils her potential as a ballerina by playing the lead in an adaptation of the fairy tale for Lermontov’s company. Though the sequence and the movie itself met with mixed reviews at the time, consensus has since congealed around the opinion of contemporary critic Dilys Powell, who described it as ‘brilliantly experimental’.
The theme that grabs me the most is that of how artistic ambitions inevitably pull people out of mainstream society. During her first encounter with Lermontov, Page compares the need to dance with the need to live: “Well I don't know exactly why … but I must.”
There is a poem by Marge Piercy titled ‘For the young who want to’, that contains the line “every artist lacks
a license to hang on the wall
like your optician, your vet”
In the movie, artists Vicky and Julian both defy Lermontov and lose their jobs by marrying each other. There are scenes of them enjoying married life, suggesting maybe normality is compatible with the creative life. In the end, life imitates fairy tale, and not in a win-win way.
An artist’s sad ending
The next collaboration between Powell and Shearer was on the 1960 thriller ‘Peeping Tom.’ Like Hollywood’s most successful thriller of 1960, ‘Psycho’, it was about a likeable young man with an irrepressible urge to kill, caused by an abusive parent.
It was daring and groundbreaking, but for British audiences still stuck in the socially conservative 1950s, it was a step too far. Although the film is now recognised as a classic, and in many ways has aged better than ‘Psycho’ (whose closing sequence is jarringly didactic), it ruined Powell’s career.
This is a sadly common fate for artists who, like some of the characters in Powell’s movies, are uncompromising in their vision. As well as his cinematic legacy, Powell is survived by his widow Thelma Schoonmaker, who has been Scorsese’s editor for decades. Though maybe just short of being household names, Powell and Pressburger are adored and admired by many people who are.
The passage of time sorts the gimmicks from the game-changers, and the spirit of ‘The Red Shoes’ and what it has to say about being an artist is further encapsulated by another quote from Marge Piercy’s poem:
Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.
“ The theme that grabs me the most is that of how artistic ambitions inevitably pull people out of mainstream society”
Yes!
I don’t know these ones, I’m surprised. Lately I’m rewatching some Ozu films, he’s the greatest to me. I want to write an essay about why everyone should watch them at some point.