The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger · a film · 1948 · about 133 minutes · after the tale by Hans Christian Andersen
Mode
Backstage drama turned fable; a company chronicle, a love story and a ballet in one film
Mythos
Andersen’s red shoes, which will not let their wearer stop; the diabolic maker who offers the gift; the Faustian pact between the artist and the art
Phase
From a first night at Covent Garden through a season of a touring company in London, Paris and Monte Carlo to a revival in Monte Carlo after a marriage, with a ballet set at the centre
Presentation
Feature film in three-strip Technicolor, about 133 minutes; photography by Jack Cardiff, design by Hein Heckroth, music by Brian Easdale under Sir Thomas Beecham, editing by Reginald Mills; a ballet without dialogue set in the middle of the film
Register
From the comic grumbling of a company at work to a dance through painted worlds and a cellophane sea; a romantic register for the love story, a formal grief at the close
Scale
One dancer, two men and a ballet company, between the stage and a life
Governing Proposition
A young dancer is taken into a great ballet company by an impresario who lives for the art, dances the lead in a new ballet made from Andersen’s tale of shoes that dance a girl to death, and falls in love with the young composer who wrote its score. The wager of the film is that a vocation is an absolute claim, that each of the people who love the artist claims to own it, and that a fable told once as a ballet and once as a life can show, from inside, what it is to be danced by the dance.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a crowd of students running up the stairs to the gallery of Covent Garden for the first night of a new ballet. It is the first height of the film, and it is joy: the young pressing upward toward the art, the doors flung open, the scramble for places. Among them is Julian Craster, a student composer, played by Marius Goring, and as the ballet begins he hears in its score his own music. His teacher has stolen it.
That is the film’s first case of its law, and it comes before the heroine has been seen: the work devours its makers. A score passes from the man who wrote it to the man who signs it, and the theft brings Julian to the company that danced it, and to Boris Lermontov, its impresario, played by Anton Walbrook. The company takes what it needs, and the young man who has been robbed will soon be glad to give it more.
The Red Shoes was written, produced and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, The Archers, and released in Britain in 1948. The original story is Pressburger’s, after Hans Christian Andersen, with additional dialogue by Keith Winter. Jack Cardiff photographed it in three-strip Technicolor, Hein Heckroth designed it, Brian Easdale wrote the music, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham, and Reginald Mills edited it. It runs about 133 minutes, and it is seen now in the restoration completed by the UCLA Film and Television Archive with The Film Foundation and first shown at Cannes in 2009.
Movement II
After the performance there is a party at the house of Lady Neston, a rich aunt. Her niece is Victoria Page, played by Moira Shearer, a dancer. Lermontov talks to her, and asks why she wants to dance. She answers with a question of her own, why one wants to live. The film does not answer either question here. It answers them in its last reel, and the answer is the same for both.
He goes, all the same, to see her. She dances Swan Lake with the Ballet Rambert at a matinee at the Mercury Theatre, and he takes her into his company. Julian is taken on as répétiteur. The film then gives the company’s routine at length, in London and in Paris: the classes, the rehearsals, the touring, and the comedy of Sergei Ratov, played by Albert Bassermann, and of Livy, played by Esmond Knight, grumbling at everything they have given their lives to. Léonide Massine plays Grischa Ljubov and Robert Helpmann Ivan Boleslawsky.
The routine is the law at its daily pitch. Everyone here has given everything to the art and complains of the price, and no one would pay a different one. The film lets these passages run long; some of them, the business of the company and the travelling, make their point more than once. But the comedy and the coming tragedy are kept under one roof, and the roof is the company.
Movement III
In Monte Carlo the company’s leading dancer, Irina Boronskaja, played by Ludmilla Tchérina, announces her marriage. Lermontov dismisses her. A dancer who marries, in this company, has chosen something other than the dance, and he will not keep her. It is the second case of the law: it shows in advance what marriage will cost a dancer here, and it leaves open the place that Vicky will fill.
Lermontov decides to make a new ballet from Andersen’s tale, The Red Shoes, with a score by Julian and the lead for Vicky. Vicky climbs to his villa at dawn in evening dress and a crown, up a long stair overgrown with green, toward the man who holds her vocation. It is transport of a different kind from the ballet’s: a girl going up into her vocation as into a fairy tale, not knowing which tale it is.
Then the work is made. Julian writes, the company rehearses, and the designs are painted and built for a first night. The making of the ballet is shown as the company’s whole life narrowed onto one object, and everyone in it, the composer, the dancer, the choreographer and the impresario, gives that object more than it asks.
Movement IV
The ballet is danced, in the middle of the film, for a long passage without a word spoken, to Easdale’s through-composed score. It was choreographed by Robert Helpmann, Massine making his own part. A girl stands at a shop window and sees a pair of red shoes. The shoemaker leaps out with them. She puts them on and dances, and the shoes will not stop. They carry her through a fairground and over a sea of cellophane waves; her partner turns into a figure of newspaper; she comes to a church, and the door is barred against her.
It begins on a stage and does not stay there. Proscenium and footlights give way to a space only the camera can make, painted and built, through which the dancer is carried by her own feet into a world dissolving round her. In the middle of it the shoemaker’s face becomes Lermontov’s, and then Julian’s. What it is to be danced by the dance is shown not as an event on a stage but as a change of medium: the film becomes another thing while she is possessed, and returns to the theatre only when the dance is done.
At the end of the ballet the shoemaker offers the shoes again, and the girl dies. The ballet has been placed at the centre of the film and not at its end, and so the second half is lived under a prophecy the audience has already seen performed. From here on, every scene is known twice: once as itself, and once as a step the girl in the ballet has already taken.
Movement V
The ballet triumphs. Vicky and Julian fall in love, and Lermontov, who wants the dancer and not the woman, turns on Julian and dismisses him. Vicky leaves with him and marries him. The film compresses what follows into a few scenes: the marriage, Julian’s opera, a dancer away from the stage. The turn from triumph to collapse rests on fewer events than the first half spends on the company, and the love scenes, a carriage ride, a balcony, are told in a romantic register whose law is that love should win.
Lermontov brings her back for a revival of The Red Shoes in Monte Carlo. On the night Julian comes to her dressing room. There, with the woman between them in the red shoes, husband and impresario each claim her: one for the life, one for the dance, and Julian at the last demanding that she give up the dancing so that his own work can go on. She cannot go on stage and cannot stay. She runs from the theatre, the shoes carrying her, to a balcony above the railway, and falls in front of a train. Her last request is that the red shoes be taken off.
The ballet is given all the same. The company dances it round an empty place, a spotlight following where she would be, and the shoes lie in the light. Grief is made formal, and the death is known by an absence the film has taught its audience to read. The question asked at Lady Neston’s party has been answered: for this dancer, to dance and to live were the same, and the two men who loved her could not let them be the same.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine survives the subtractive test. Julian’s stolen music is the first case of the film’s law, that the work devours its makers, and it brings him to Lermontov. Lermontov’s question at the party, why she wants to dance, is answered only by the last reel. Boronskaja’s marriage and dismissal is required: it shows in advance what marriage costs a dancer in this company and opens the role Vicky will fill. The ballet is required, and so is the death that repeats it. What gives is the middle: the company’s routine, the comedy of Ratov and Livy, the Riviera and the long courtship passages make their point more than once, and the turn to collapse rests on fewer events.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: a vocation is an absolute claim, and the people who love the artist each claim to own it. Lermontov demands the dancer and refuses the woman; Julian demands the woman, and in the end demands that she give up dancing so that his opera can go on; Vicky is asked by both to choose between being and doing, and the choice is the destruction. The image discloses as much as the drama, and counts in full: the ballet shows from inside what it is to be danced by the dance. Held below the gate by the fable. Patronage, money and the company’s labour are a mood, and the film’s sympathy, divided, goes finally to the myth.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The elevation is high and recurs. The ballet is the summit: the girl at the shop window, the shoemaker’s leap, the shoes put on and the dance that will not stop, the fairground, the partner made of paper, the cellophane sea, the church door barred, the death; colour, scale and movement beyond what a stage could hold, wonder turning to terror. It is not the only height. Vicky’s climb in evening dress and crown up the overgrown stair to the villa at dawn is transport of another kind; the rush up the gallery stairs at Covent Garden is joy; the company dancing round an empty spotlight is grief made formal. Held below the top by the love scenes, flat by the film’s own standard.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The myth is built and bears the load. Andersen’s tale is told twice, once as a ballet and once as the life of the dancer who dances it, and the second telling is driven by the first: in the ballet she cannot take off the shoes, and at the end she can neither go on stage without them nor stay in the dressing room. The shoemaker is the diabolic maker who offers the gift, and the film maps him onto Lermontov, who offers a woman the art in exchange for her life. Without the pact there is no ending. The particular stays particular: an aunt’s party, a Rambert matinee, a train on a viaduct. Held from the top because Julian is a role in the myth rather than a man in it.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance is the backstage drama and the British studio picture of the 1940s, decorous and verbal, and the Archers’ own turn toward colour and design in A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and Black Narcissus (1947). The departure is real and was costly: a commercial feature that stops for a long ballet without a word spoken, in which the space of the theatre gives way to the space of the camera and of a mind; a score composed as the drama itself; a heroine who is a dancer, not an actress playing one; and a death at the end of a picture made to sell. Held at its figure by precedent: ballet on film and backstage tragedy were known, and the frame story keeps to its conventions.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The ballet is placed in the middle, not at the end, so the whole second half is lived under a prophecy already performed. Inside the ballet the form turns from stage to cinema: proscenium and footlights give way to a space only the camera can make, and possession by the dance is shown as a change of medium. The last performance reverses it: the camera stays in the theatre and shows the empty place in the light, and the death is known by an absence the form has taught us to read. Colour is knowledge too; red belongs to the shoes, to Vicky’s hair and to the stage. The cost: the frame story is told in a conventional theatrical register.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Seventy-eight years of return are evidence. The film has been read as a fable of art against life, as a portrait of the impresario, as a study of a woman’s vocation owned by two men, as a coded portrait of a man who cannot love women, and as the founding text of the dance film. The ballet, the colour design and the music are studied without end, and the restoration of 2009 renewed the attention. Return changes the people: each viewing makes Julian less sympathetic and Lermontov more so, a sign of depth. Held a step lower than its strongest axes because the readings turn round one question, the art and the life, and the people outside Lermontov do not deepen much on return.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Field: the cinema of the 1940s. The force is real: the film made the ballet a cinematic form in its own right, not a filmed performance, joined it to a full-length drama in which the dance carries the meaning, and brought British colour cinema to a degree of design no studio picture had attempted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a long run in New York and wide success in America; the extended ballet of An American in Paris (1951) and the dream ballets of the musicals after it; generations of dancers sent to the ballet by it; Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma among the filmmakers who name it; Black Swan (2010) in its line. It bent a genre more than it reorganised cinema.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole: the film as released stands, and no lost or altered version replaces it. Its presence over seventy-eight years is continuous, in repertory, on television, on every home format and in the teaching of film and of dance, renewed as Powell’s standing was restored and again by the restoration of 2009. The fabric was damaged: the Technicolor negatives suffered shrinkage and mould, and the restoration repaired them; repair is not loss, and the charge is small. The surface is more fixed to 1948 than the myth is, in the company’s manners and the stage diction, and some of the acting reads as period. The bar is cleared by two tenths.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears the load throughout. Jack Cardiff’s Technicolor is controlled to the point of meaning: the skin, the red, the Riviera light, the blue of the final night. Hein Heckroth’s design for the ballet, painted and built, is the ballet. Brian Easdale’s score holds the whole ballet without a word, played under Beecham. Reginald Mills cuts from stage to vision and back, and the run to the balcony, exactly. Anton Walbrook’s Lermontov, held, ironic and cold, is one of the great performances of its decade; Moira Shearer dances as the role requires and acts well enough. The costs: Marius Goring’s Julian is stiff, the frame story’s dialogue is stage English, and the love scenes are staged by convention.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Ratov’s complaints and Livy’s jokes, and the ballet’s cellophane sea with the death on the railway. One law governs both: the work consumes the people who make it, and they consent. The comedy is the company’s daily life under that law, people who have given everything to the art and grumble about it; the ballet is the law raised to myth; the death is the law applied to one life. Julian’s stolen music, Boronskaja’s marriage and Vicky’s fall are three cases of it, and the colour obeys it, red belonging to the art throughout. The seams: the love story keeps a romantic law, that love should win, and the train in the last minutes is a device rather than a consequence.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Several orders are held by one law. Vocation and art, at the centre; love and marriage; the company as a small society, with its hierarchy, its routines and its patrons; money and class, at Lady Neston’s party and among the students in the gallery; authorship and theft, in Julian’s stolen score; the sacred, in the church door barred against the dancer and in Lermontov’s religion of art; and death. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is everything outside the theatre. Labour is the labour of art only; the state, history and the natural order are absent, three years after the war; consciousness is rendered from outside except in the ballet, where it is rendered once. A backstage drama’s scope, raised by its myth, not widened by it.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.0, then The Sublime at 8.9, then The Archetypal Deep, The Living Form and The Imperishable at 8.7. A making in which Cardiff’s colour, Heckroth’s design and Easdale’s score are the ballet; an elevation that recurs, from the gallery stairs to the empty spotlight, with the ballet at its summit; and Andersen’s tale told twice, as a ballet and as a life, so that the ending depends on it.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6: vocation, love, the company, money, authorship, the sacred and death are held by one law, but the world outside the theatre is barely present, and the state, history and the natural order are absent. Above it, The Inevitable at 8.2, where the company’s middle repeats its point, and The Unconcealment at 8.3, a truth about vocation drawn as a fable, its social facts left as a mood.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.0, The Living Form at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Archetypal Deep at 8.7, The Imperishable at 8.7, The Swerve at 8.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.3 falls two tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.2, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate, at The Unconcealment, and by the aggregate, 8.5 from a sum of 102.2, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Red Shoes as released in Britain in 1948, about 133 minutes, from the students on the gallery stairs to the empty spotlight: written, produced and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, original story by Pressburger after Hans Christian Andersen, additional dialogue by Keith Winter; photographed in three-strip Technicolor by Jack Cardiff; designed by Hein Heckroth; music by Brian Easdale, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham; edited by Reginald Mills; the ballet choreographed by Robert Helpmann, with Léonide Massine making his own part. The film is seen in the restoration completed by the UCLA Film and Television Archive with The Film Foundation and first shown at Cannes in 2009; the restoration repaired damage to the Technicolor negatives and bears on The Imperishable only. No print, script or score was consulted. No line of dialogue is held to the word, so none is quoted, and speech is described. The record states plainly that the film won Academy Awards for its colour art direction, by Heckroth and Arthur Lawson, and for Easdale’s score, and was nominated for Best Picture, for its story and for its editing. Details that could not be verified are not given: the date of the London premiere, the exact length of the ballet, which is variously given, box office figures and the length of the New York run, the reception given the film by its distributor at home, whether the American release differed from the British, and the models proposed for Lermontov.