The Red Shoes

The Goethean rupture, Ballet Russe treatment. The rush "into the jaws of Hell," that's the artist's duty, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger wouldn't have it any other way. (Their tabernacle is suspended between velvet balcony and orchestra pit, the stage separating them at one point stands before a churning sea.) The lordly impresario (Anton Walbrook) shares with the young dancer (Moira Shearer) the religion of aestheticism, the composer with a domestic side (Marius Goring) configures their notes without understanding their obsessive music. "Very pure and fine, but you can't change human nature." "No?" The company's labors are also cinema's, as later echoed by Wiseman and Altman, the camera tracks into the proscenium and suddenly there's Hans Christian Andersen's tale of possessed slippers as a screen full of spiraling images. (The tricks are there to be seen, demonic cellophane and Méliès cuts appreciated by Arthur Freed and Kenneth Anger alike.) The auteur basks in the success of his mise en scène, only to discover that his marionettes are in love—having learned of the romance between Shearer and Goring, Walbrook channels all the contempt of the universe into the word "charming." Exaltation of the muse, l'artiste et la mort: "Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the Red Shoes go on." The Archers' magnum opus on themes reaching back to The Edge of the World, the maiden's dilemma illuminated by Jack Cardiff's cinematography and Robert Helpmann's choreography. Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête for the ascension at the Monte Carlo Villa, Maya Deren for the pirouetting lenses. Swan Lake offers Shearer in a wide-eyed pre-Raphaelite close-up, Les Sylphides dissolves to the nude gargoyle perched by the maestro's window. "Only art promises immortality," says Diaghilev. An incomparable hallucination of fatale beauté absorbed by De Palma and Scorsese and Jarman, the perfect altar for the divine nymph in the blue gown last seen with red all over. With Léonid Massine, Albert Bassermann, Ludmilla Tchérina, and Esmond Knight.