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Abstract
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 film The Red Shoes, weaves an adaptation of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale into a story about contemporary dance, in the process pioneering the representation of ballet in cinema. It is a masterpiece of Technicolor film-making, deploying the creativity of cinematographer Jack Cardiff and Production Designer Hein Heckroth with award-winning results. The film's eponymous colour is central to its complex meditation on artistry, femininity and women's choices, most acutely focused on the divided character of Vicki (performed by prima ballerina Moira Shearer in her first film role).
Notes
1. Michael Powell addresses the passionate following for the film in Million Dollar Movie (Citation1992, 313). The film was also instrumental in enabling Gene Kelly to incorporate a ballet sequence into An American in Paris. The failed Broadway musical of the film, directed by legendary screen musical director Stanley Donen, which folded in a week in 1993, is also noted.
2. This is the opposite of the famous ‘Stroop effect,’ the neuroscientific test developed by John Ridley Stroop in 1935, which prints the words for colors in color, but mismatches color and word. See http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/109/2/163/.
3. Sometimes red exerts a more insistent, even violent influence: Higgins cites a 1935 discussion in American Cinematographer of red in Becky Sharp as ‘pulling your eye’ (Citation2006, 157).
4. In this Journal for May–June, 1947, as Philip Rasch comments, Dr. Hans von Hentig presented an article reinforcing the popular prejudiced stereotype, entitled ‘Redhead and Outlaw – A Study in Criminal Anthropology.’ Hentig suggested that a number of more or less prominent ‘bad men’ were red headed and surmised that: 1. ‘The number of red-headed men among the noted outlaws surpassed their rate in the normal population.’ 2. … ‘it seems that redheadedness is often combined with accelerated motor innervation.’ 3. The temperament of redheads is that of Jesse James. ‘“He is revengeful in nature,” we are told, “always sanguine, impetuous, almost heedless”’ (Hentig Citation1947; Rasch Citation1947).
5. The collaboration developed through their complimentary mediums, and Heckroth had to adapt paint to light and film: Connelly notes that when he realized ‘that the strong lights required for filming accentuated his colors so much that they obliterated the dancers’ Heckroth ‘toned them down by 50 percent in order to get the right effect’ (Citation2005, 30).
6. Technicolor has an illustrious history as a vehicle for cinematic dance; as Sarah Street points out, the company highlighted its technical achievements very early on ‘by using dance in one of its earliest three-strip films’ (Citation2012, 185). See also Street’s wider discussion of color in relation to music in The Red Shoes, one of the few analyses of the film which actually focuses on color design, particularly Hein Heckroth’s practice as analogous to musical composition, which became widely influential (Citation2012, 184–193).
7. Indeed, Engelke and Hochscherf argue that the whole film functions in this way: ‘One might feel justified in viewing the framing narrative as merely a device to lure audiences into appreciating the ballet’s audiovisual qualities for their own sake: a lavish color cinema for the post-war years of austerity’ (Citation2014, 57).
8. Though in India the red-wearing woman may be a bride.
9. In contrast to Frank Baum’s silver shoes in the original Oz stories; the color was changed to red for Victor Fleming’s film because red looked more striking in Technicolor.
10. The U.S. identification of red with Republicanism is surprising to Europeans, used to inflecting the color with left wing liberation movements.
11. For a fuller discussion of the psychology of color in relation to cinema see Kalmus (Citation2006).
12. Harper writes: ‘One can imagine a reading of The Red Shoes which argued that the film endorsed the excision of those females who aspired to the status of artists, and that the blood on the ballet shoes symbolized the authors’ desire that women return to an essential, menstrual femininity. But such an interpretation would severely underestimate the complexity of Powell and Pressburger’s sexual politics … [The Red Shoes] did not argue that women had to choose between marriage and a career, but that domesticity was inimical to any creative drive. Both sexes inside the artistic coterie had love affairs; what excluded them from it was domesticity … The film’s sexual politics were thus bohemian’ (Citation1996, 109–110). Mundy extrapolates from the dark ending a fundamental disjuncture between British and U.S. cinema: ‘This dystopian view of the conflict between love and career is something that marks a central distinction between the American classical musical and its British counterpart’ (Citation2007, 127). See also Thiéry for a discussion of Powell and Pressburger’s central women who are ‘less objects than subjects of desire’ (Citation2005, 225).
13. Quoted by Andrew Moor in ‘Gothic Riots: The Work of Hein Heckroth,’ an essay written for Criterion’s website for the DVD release of Powell and Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann. Archived at www.criterion.com/current/posts/404-gothic-riots-the-work-of-hein-heckroth. Engelke and Hochscherf argue that ‘Powell and Pressburger’s decision to fill the post of production designer with a painter chimes with contemporary debates on color film. In fact, they seem to predate the important considerations by filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer, who in the April 1955 issue of the American Films in Review demanded that the film industry, to improve on the creative use of color, ‘get assistance from those who can help – that is to say, from painters’ (55).