The Red Shoes

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s collaboration with The Red Shoes (1948) is easily one of the most captivating experiences in cinema to me, serving as an exemplary account of formal mastery and ingenuity, yet the film is tied to a philosophical core that intrigues given what it advocates. Especially coming on the heels of World War II, this tale that affirms, though tragically, the beauty of sacrificing oneself for one’s art is challenging, since Powell would later note: “For ten years we had all been told to go out and die for freedom and democracy; but now the war was over, The Red Shoes told us to go out and die for art.” Yet this notion is itself problematized over the course of the film.

Simultaneously a more romantic and radical idea than dying for either freedom or democracy, this film considers the investment that goes hand in hand with a conscious desire to climb to the highest ranks of art. Yet this desire threatens to become hyperconscious, that is to say, understood as a desire that will consume life itself, and so it must be tempered lest one become a shell of a man. Thus, against these ideals lies the polarity of love, which could afflict and remove the single-mindedness of one’s art, yet could also ground one with a stabilizing force. The question, which Powell and Pressburger wisely leave open, is whether or not one is better suited to sacrificing all for the sake of their art, given that Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) has artistic success but no real personal life beyond his dedication to ballet, while Julian Craster (Marius Goring) has a love in Victoria Page (Moira Shearer) yet denies her the license to practice her ballet, adhering to a (unwitting) model of patriarchal oppression.

Fascinatingly, Lermontov would also clearly like to possess Page in some manner, but until the end this desire is unfulfilled. Yet his perspective embodies the third act, even if he’s relatively absent from the narrative itself. What is stake if one surrenders their single-mindedness to the arts but a surrendering of the transcendent heights into the pits of respectability if not absolute mediocrity. This fear haunts our heroine Victoria Page, and the film is attuned to her rise to fame, so that her ascendance into her imagination takes place solely on the stage, allowing Powell and Pressburger the opportunity to deliver a sequence that is full of haunting virtuosity and expressive metaphors. So we must arrive at the fundamental question—is Miss Page’s life, if denied her artistic expression, worth the same amount as it was formerly worth?

Beyond existing as an immaculately crafted melodrama, The Red Shoes also serves as a case study of the patriarchal oppression which comes at her doubly and from both sides, allowing us to sympathize with whole generations of (female) performers who have acquiesced to their dreams for the sake of a man. Yet what awaits those who do not conform but celebrate their art, in an ode to Hans Christian Anderson’s own tale, is not much better. Yet there is a sense of the sublime in the final dance sequence, where one’s absence underscores how important the presence truly is, and it is that sequence that allows this film to reach the rhapsodic heights as it concludes.

The Red Shoes: 10/10