The Ballet Created Around Cinematic Technique

Turner Classic Movies now has rights to the digital restoration of one of the most imaginative films structured around ballet choreography. The restoration began at the UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles) Film and Television Archive in 2006 and was first screened at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. The film, for those that have not yet guessed, is The Red Shoes, first released in both the United Kingdom and the United States in 1948.

The overall plot was basically an extended trope on the Hans Christian Andersen tale with the same title. At the core of the narrative is the creation and performance of a ballet based on that tale. That narrative, in turn, is embedded in a narrative of the tension between devotion to one’s art and devotion to other people. That “outer narrative” tends to be melodramatic unto an extreme; but the ballet itself marked a significant turning point in cinematography.

The most important characteristic is that the choreography conceived by Léonide Massine can never be executed on the stage. There are too many cinematic effects that define and advance the narrative that are far beyond mere gimmickry. This should not be surprising. The premise behind the original tale is basically supernatural: shoes that turn the dancer into their vehicle, rather than the other way around. Thus, the narrative can advance smoothly across physically impossible events without the viewer feeling that (s)he is viewing mere special effects.

In that respect the restoration of the original stock is more than just a matter of dutifully cleaning up decayed media. In the restored version, the viewer can more readily give in to the world of illusion on film that goes far beyond what one can expected from dancers on a theater stage. One can also appreciate how ballet dancers that were not particularly familiar with movie-making (specifically, Moira Shearer as the girl in the red shoes, Massine as the shoemaker, and Robert Helpmann in roles of several men she encounters) knew how to synthesize the two art forms:

Moira Shearer, Robert Helpmann, and Léonide Massine in the final episode of the “Red Shoes” ballet (image for a publicity still for The Red Shoes film, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

Many viewers are likely to find the narrative in which the ballet is embedded to be a bit on the hokey side, but the restoration of the entire film allows for much richer opportunities to appreciate Massine’s talents as both choreographer and dancer.