The Red Shoes, directed by the marquee team of Michael Powell and Emeric Presssburger is an important film of British Cinema. One of the early exponents of Technicolor brilliance, the film is an exposition on use of light and colour for cinematic effect. Cinematographically the film is quite brilliant and a rich source for studying the art of mise-en-scene. But as far as the plot is concerned, it is quite ordinary and offers nothing new or interesting. The plot is based on the time-worn and tired theme of conflict between passion for art and romantic love. Central to the plot is the clash between Miss Victoria Page’s (played by Moira Shearer) artistic ambition and her love life. Tragedy looms large in this type of plot set up and inevitably Miss Page is ruined by this conflict. In this way the plot and the simple straightforward narrative do not match the creative and exuberant visual imagery. Despite the said flaws, the film is worth studying purely its picturization and visual aesthetics. This essay will is an endeavour to study the mise-en-scene of a handful of scenes from the film.
To be able to understand the principles being applied for constructing various shots, one has to keep in mind Michael Powell’s philosophy in filmmaking. Powell believed in the notion of the ‘composed film’, in which, “music, emotion and acting made a complete whole, of which the music was the master”. (Mayer, 2008, p.48) This philosophy is writ large in The Red Shoes, as well as Powell’s other notable films Black Narcissus (1947) and The Tales of Hoffmann (1951). As a matter of fact, in The Red Shoes, Lermontov says to Miss Page on more than one occasion that “music is everything”. This is perhaps a reflection of Powell’s own understanding of composing a film. (Grist, 2012) The importance given to the background score is evident in the manner in which scenes are paced – it is as if the visual action corresponds to the beat and texture of the background music. This is best exemplified in The Ballet of the Red Shoes (which is the story within the larger story The Red Shoes), the ballet’s lead dancer, Vicky Page “is pulled by her magical shoes away from the steps of a church, and the embrace of a priest (danced by Ivan Boleslawsky/Robert Helpmann), to an infernal, red-lit space that is inhabited by the ballet’s demonic shoemaker (danced by Ljubov/Leonid Massine).” (Grist, 2012, p.28) These sequences of events are synchronized to the tempo and prompt of the instrumental music. Just as the musical composition by Brian Easdale carries symmetry and repetitive structures within it, the performance of The Ballet of the Red Shoes display a similar arrangement. There is a conscious attempt on part of the directors to unite the strands of various media of art into one dramatic output. It is this accentuation of dramatic effect thus produced which accounts for the continuing remembrance of this film and its ballet performances by generations of film audiences. (Mclean, 2008, p. 135)
As a treatise on cinematic art, the film reveals its exceptional ability to exploit the medium and alter accepted boundaries. In its own implicit way, The Red Shoes goes on to shatter the myths surrounding fairytales, the world of classical ballet and the myths surrounding cinema itself. The notion that fairytales all end on a happy note is refuted in the film. Instead, the comforting aspects of Christen Anderson’s fairy tale (upon which the film is based) are disillusioned and the underlying horror is revealed. For example, the earlier part of the film has the audience believe that Vicky and Julian will live happily ever after. But as events unfold and take a dire turn, the aspirations of the couple are frustrated. In Anderson’s fairytale, a young girl, similar in age and disposition to Vicky Page, wishes to wear the red shoes. But upon wearing them, she cannot stop herself from dancing. This eventually leads to unbearable exhaustion she even resorts to ask the executioner to have mercy on her and chop off the shoes. Once this is done and she is released from the tyranny of the red shoes but not before acute suffering. Some of the metaphors employed by Anderson in her fairy tale are carried over to the film while the final tragic twist is the film’s invention. Though fairy tales are primarily written for children, both the written work and the film are rich in sexual metaphor. To bring out this element in the visual experience is a challenge well answered by Powell and Pressburger. For example,
“the colour red, so often used in fairytales to signify sexual awakening, is present: by willingly donning the red shoes the girl is compliant with her own sexual downfall, and suffers a horrific punishment. The appeal of The Red Shoes’ fairytale therefore relies very much on the combination of beauty and horror: the girl is beautiful, especially when she is dancing in her red shoes. The act of severance, however, also holds a twisted appeal in that it leads to her redemption—but it is nevertheless suggested as a suitable punishment for being tempted to dance in the first place.” (Street, 1997, p. 162)
In the final scene of the film, when the unbearable mental anguish pushes Vicky toward committing suicide, the directors construct rich symbolisms. In the aftermath of the moment of tragedy, when Vicky lies dying on the railway track, she asks Julian to remove her red shoes, which he promptly does. Meanwhile in the theatre, the eagerly awaiting audience are informed of the lead ballerina’s absence – a messaged delivered in a tone of suppressed emotions by the deeply saddened Lermontov. But Lermontov assures the audience that the show will go on, and in the place of the deceased Vicky, a spotlight is thrown to acknowledge her spiritual presence on stage. This is an inspired directorial idea from Powell and Pressburger, for they based it on a similar real life incident involving Russian ballerina Pavlova. Pavlova’s ‘final performance’ was conducted in 1931, ‘after’ her demise, by tracing her movements on stage using a spotlight. The skilful conception and construction of mise-en-scene in this final sequence lends emotionally richness to the climax. The valorous maxim of ‘the show must go on’ captures the true spirit of art, where individuals are secondary to the larger cause. (Swynnoe, 2002, p.56)
When one looks at the history of ballet films in three decades between 1920 and 1950, commercial failure is the norm. Added to this, British producers have previously failed in their attempts to use this genre. This makes the success of The Red Shoes an anomaly of sorts. Numerous interviews given by the directors and the lead actors in the film have helped compile an impressive archival documentation for this film. By tapping into this resource, we can learn the thought processes of the creative team, especially with regards to mise-en-scene. We learn that Michael Powell thought of ballet as
“a contradictory representation and ambiguously gendered embodiment of morbidity and ecstasy, life and death, achievement and failure, fulfillment and despair. Moreover, the production context of The Red Shoes functions as a sort of metanarrative about the relationship of ballet to the film industry and of the machinations and processes by which ballet’s theatrical identity and the subjectivities of its practitioners were manipulated and objectified (not always successfully, and never without resistance) to fit the measure of a full-length commercial film.” (Mclean, 2008, p. 137)
Each of the three main characters in the film – Lermontov, Page and Craster – are elevated and oppressed in equal measure by their artistic muses. For Lermontov, it is the compulsion to dominate and own all that he surveys, which leads to much despair. Yet, it is this ruthless and heartless trait in him which accounts for the stupendous success of his ballet company. For Page and Craster, it is the fundamental necessity to excel in their chosen art forms – dance and music respectively – which lead to much travail. Despite the rather tired storyline of the film, it is the thoughtful creation of these dichotomies and contradictions that add merit to the final product. The central contradiction is that art is life sustaining and destructive in equal measure. This tension is beautifully illustrated through the visual presentation. Nowhere is this better exemplified in the central ballet (The Ballet of the Red Shoes) which carries on for a good twenty minutes. This is an important artistic achievement in the history of cinema and is admired as much as a “cinedance” or “choreophotography” as it is treated as a big musical number. Variety magazine sums up this great aural-visual composition thus: “this superb ballet is staged with breath-taking beauty, out-classing anything that could be done on a stage. It is a colourful sequence, full of artistry, imagination and magnificence. The three principal dancers … are beyond criticism.” (Van Dyke, 2006, p.53)
The directorial team pull off the story-within-a-story plot device with élan. What’s more, the similarity and symmetry between the two layers of the story further enhance its aesthetic appeal. The adept handling of mise-en-scene is crucial to convey this layering, for it cannot be conveyed through dialogues or a voice-over. In other words the story-within-a-story device works best when it is implicitly illustrated than when it is explicitly spelt out. But there would be no meaning for employing this narrative device without carrying forward the content of the inner story to the outer one. Powell and Pressburger achieve this through skilful conception of mise-en-scene in the last half hour of the film. The important scene is the climax and the most important shot in this regard is that of the death of Vicky Page. Lying in disarray and approaching death, the badly wounded Miss Page requests her husband to remove the red shoes she is wearing. That one moment is the concrete union of the two layers of the story, which had till then operated at a conceptual level. Those were the last works of Vicky Page and that final shot of her is one of the most powerful dramatic moments in the film. The manner in which mise-en-scene is handled is largely responsible for the heightened pathos that it expresses. (Van Dyke, 2006, p.53)
While studying the thought processes that were behind mise-en-scene in The Red Shoes, one has to remember the socio-political atmosphere and the time-period of its making. Made in 1948, a few years after the end of the Second World War, this exuberant film is a contrast to the dire and depressing atmosphere of the war years that preceded it. Many critics from Britain reviewed the film negatively in light of its weak and predictable plotline, the grandeur of the sets, etc. Yet, the film was loved by audiences both in Britain as well as the United States. In fact, it was more successful commercially in the US than in Britain. What explains this division of opinion between critics and audiences is the state of the collective public mood in the aftermath of the war. People wanted relief and diversion from the most taxing war time experiences. The least they could care for is the complexity of plot or its novelty. It is a stroke of genius on part of Powell and Pressburger to have tapped into this general public craving. This understanding of what their market expects of their product is transferred to the development of each shot and each scene. Hence the directors paid much attention to showcasing grandeur, eloquence and an atmosphere of revelry for most part of the movie. How better to achieve this end than to marry the theatre of the ballet to the flexibility and dynamics of cinema? This underlying philosophy is evident in the way each scene was shot.
“One of the most famous and gorgeous sequences in the film is when Vicky is driven to and then climbs the steps to Lermontov’s villa above the Bay of Monaco, where she learns that she will star in “The Ballet of the Red Shoes”—she figuratively and almost literally rises, as Powell writes, “from obscurity to stardom.” The film is also full of inscrutable glances and veiled expressions (often literally, by dark glasses), still waters running deep. But generally it is the way the film is shot and edited, the frequent use of tight close-ups, a particular handling of the tools of cinema technique, that creates the drama; mystery resides in the film’s form rather than by anything inherent to the dramatic content of scenes about ballet dance and ballet dancers.” (Mclean, 2008, p. 160)
The mise-en-scene for the opening credits is well thought over and fits the theme of the film. It begins with a series of garish paintings – by painter Heckroth – that portray the journey of the red shoes. The opening credits merge seamlessly into the first shot of a garrulous and excited crowd of young people who have queued up for a Lermontov ballet. When the gates to the auditorium are unbarred at last, a flood of expectant audience pounds up the stairs to the upper balcony, and in no time, aural-visual elements build an atmosphere of foreboding. As the crowd rushes by in the claustrophobic stairwell, “the camera picks out a playbill on the wall advertising the Ballet Lermontov, and as soon as we are able to tell what it is, it is violently but carelessly torn from the wall by the teeming hoard of closely packed bodies.” (Phillips, 1996, p.334) This is a symbolic exhibition of the world of show business, where the same patronizing audience can in no time turn against a production and spell its doom. The next shot is that of the graceful and gorgeous Victoria Page, her aristocratic background writ in the tiny tiara that she wears in the shape of a crown. Her socio-economic background is again visually expressed by showing her in a box-seat with her aunt. She also holds binoculars in hand as a marker of her privilege. This sort of attention to visual detail is maintained throughout the film, even when the unfolding action onscreen is rather un-dramatic.
The framing and editing in the scene where Vicky realizes that she has been accepted as a ballerina into Lermontov’s company is a good illustration. Just before the scene cuts from her happy and dreamy face, “we hear what seems to be a terrible scream that turns out in the next shot to be a train whistle. The physical intensity of many of the scenes in The Red Shoes is startling even now, as is their formal beauty, the way that the mise-en-scène is crafted to make mysterious the world in which these people are supposed to operate.” (Phillips, 1996, p.334) This scream of the train whistle is important, for it recurs in two other places later in the film. The second occasion is when Vicky and Julian meet late in the evening when they were staying in the same hotel. The last occasion is when Vicky fatally falls on the approaching train and commits suicide. Hence, the train whistle appears at key moments in the narrative when something most eventful happens. First it is the achievement of inclusion into Ballet Lermontov. Second is when the romance between Vicky and Julian takes shape; and finally at the moment of Vicky’s suicide. Such use of symbols and motifs not only prove the excellence in screenplay and direction but also indicate the meritorious mise-en-scene of the film.
References
- Andersen, H. C. (2002). Stories and Tales(H. W. Dulcken, Trans.). London: Routledge.
- Grist, L. (2012). Powell Godard Scorsese: Influence-Genealogy-Intertextuality.CineAction, 89, 28+.
- Mayer, G. (2003). Guide to British Cinema. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
- Mclean, A. L. (2008). Dying Swans and Madmen: Ballet, the Body, and Narrative Cinema. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
- Phillips, G. (1996). British Cinema Re-Viewed. Literature/Film Quarterly, 24(3), 332+.
- Street, S. (1997). British National Cinema. London: Routledge.
- Swynnoe, J. G. (2002). The Best Years of British Film Music, 1936-1958. Rochester, NY: Boydell Press.
- Van Dyke, H. (2006, Winter). The Red Shoes: Bobby Short in the South of France. The Antioch Review, 64(1), 52+.