The Red Shoes: No Subtitle Needed

Subtitles do well with SEO, I’m told. So, there it is. But what can someone write it that Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948) doesn’t say about itself? The famed British directing duo adapt a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about an ambitious dancer driven to destruction by a pair of magical red shoes by following a couple years in the life of Victoria Page (Moira Shearer), an ambitious, troubled ballerina who finds breakout success starring in The Red Shoes.

Were this high school English class, I might write the themes on the board: art v. life, youth v. age, love v. success, tradwife v. professional—matters like that.

Does art require total self-immolation in the purifying flames of self-discipline? Sounds absurd, perhaps. Until you consider what Olympians go through, or models or painters or sculptors or writers. Practice makes perfect; practice also crushes and reforms, peels away time, hoards it for itself.

“Their words / Are natural breath” says Prospero in The Tempest (1610-1611). Does the artist, unlike the magician Prospero, need work at his artifice such that all breaths, all words, become unnatural, conditioned, deceiving, though appearing their opposite? As is said in the film (more-or-less):  agony marks the road to ease, or at least its appearance.

Does success matter when you’re lonely? Or, better put: can you love truly and unconditionally when you’re successful, or will your career falter, your attention diverted? Will you wink or smirk at your honey offstage? Get lost in thought? Perfection missed. Jack of a couple trades, master of neither.

But this is no high school English class. It’s an opportunity for me to share a simple fact: The Red Shoes, for the first time in my life, and philistine that I am, allowed me to appreciate ballet. The dancing of the titular ballet, which takes places about midway through the film, combines astonishing physical artistry with German Expressionist influenced sets, and a variety of camera and editing tricks. Fades transport Victoria Page from a town square to a snow-drenched churchyard or a nightmarish forest. Not a word is spoken. None need be.

Powell and Pressburger do not simply film a ballet; they elevate it. I say that with no animosity toward the form. Their tricks allowed an outsider like me to—relieved of trying to “understand” ballet—experience what unfolded before my eyes. I have glimpsed the beauty of a life given over to art.

Practice, practice, practice.