The Red Shoes
Important Information for your Safety
So here we are, in this very rare time, when the show mustn’t go on.
In response to Covid-19 (Coronavirus) and its growing impact in the UK, the Film Club along with our guardian angels, Sydenham Arts, have been following the advice and precautions set out by public health experts and the government, and monitoring developments daily.
On Monday 16th March, the government announced measures that everyone in the UK should refrain from all “non-essential” travel and contact with others.
To that end we had no choice but to cancel our March screening of ‘The Red Shoes’ and temporarily postpone the amazing program of films we were planning for you after that.
As your safety is our top priority, we will take the red shoes off for now, and save this cinematic dance we promised you for later.
Please take care of yourselves and each other, even if it means, in this very rare time, keep your distances.
One way or another we shall come together again. Watch this space!
Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1948, UK, Colour, 135 mins, Certificate: U
This is an ageless, unsurpassed masterpiece that is still very much alive – a dancing slice of cinematic History that is always a wonder to experience on the big screen.
As they tell the story of a young, prodigiously talented ballerina as she struggles to balance her all consuming passion for her art with her love for a young composer, and her difficult professional relationship with her demanding impresario, directors Powell and Pressburger deliver one of the greatest, most gorgeous masterpieces of both British and world cinema.
One of Martin Scorsese’s favourites films (he owns a large, priceless collection of memorabilia related to it) ‘The Red Shoes’ became and remains one of the most influential, commercially and artistically successful films ever made.
It achieved success despite the long, turbulent and uncertain path to its theatrical release: it went massively over-budget, its dancer star in her acting debut, Moira Shearer, described making it as a “terrible ordeal”, calling Powell “distant and aloof”, and upon completion its producer, J. Arthur Rank believed so little in its potential that he decided not to immediately release or distribute it.
Nevertheless, it built such a positive and enthusiastic reception by audiences upon its delayed, quiet, late night screenings at a cinema in London, that Rank realised his mistake and afforded it a proper, wider release. It ended up being a huge hit on both sides of the Atlantic, but particularly in the US, where it also won two Oscars (Best Art Direction – Set Decoration, Colour and Best Music, Scoring for a Dramatic or Comedy Picture).
In other words, this is the stuff of legend that changed film and culture forever.
Reviews:
★★★★★ “The Red Shoes, the 1948 classic by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, has now been vividly restored for a cinema rerelease and it just blazes out of the screen: profoundly serious, sublimely innocent, yet deeply and mysteriously erotic. ” Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
“One of Powell and Pressburger‘s best-loved films, The Red Shoes, released in 1948, is perhaps the definitive ballet movie. The film interweaves the story of an ambitious young ballerina, Vicky (Moira Shearer), with that of The Red Shoes ballet (inspired by Hans Christian Andersen) which forms its centrepiece – the most dazzling flight of fantasy in Powell‘s career, and scarcely matched in British cinema.” Mark Duguit, BFI Screenonline
“”The Red Shoes” is a film of haunting beauty.” Almar Haflidason, BBC – Films – Reviews
★★★★ “The film is voluptuous in its beauty and passionate in its storytelling. You don’t watch it, you bathe in it.” Roger Ebert, rogerebert.com