"Art versus life"
A central theme to The Red Shoes is a performer's conflict between their art and personal life.[4] Commenting on this theme, Powell himself stated that the film is "about dying for art, that art is worth dying for."[4] Film scholar Adrienne McLean, however, notes that Victoria's final leap to her death does not adequately represent this idea.[4] Rather, McLean states that Victoria "seems pushed by those she loves who would rather possess her than support her," and that the film ultimately illustrates the impact that "ruthless personalities" can have on "the weaker or more demure."[4]
Scholar Peter Fraser, in Cinema Journal, observes of this tension between art and life that the film implodes its own "narrative and lyrical worlds... from the moment of recognition, when Vicky looks down at her red shoes and knows that she is then her lyrical persona, her two worlds collapse."[5] He further states that the interpenetration of the lyrical upon the narrative "alters the meaning of the fiction" itself.[5] This blurring of the lyrical and the narrative is represented at the end of the film, when Vicky jumps onto the train tracks; she is wearing the red shoes which she wore while preparing in her dressing room, despite the fact that in the performance her character does not put them on until part way through the ballet. Powell and Pressburger themselves discussed this idiosyncrasy[6] and it has been subject to significant critical analysis since.[7] Powell decided that it was artistically "right" for Vicky to be wearing the red shoes at that point because if she is not wearing them, it takes away the ambiguity over why she died.[6]
The Ballet of the Red Shoes
"We have tried to make our [ballet] sequence subjective as well as objective. When the girl is dancing, she feels she is a bird, a flower, a cloud; when the spotlight hits her, she feels she is alone on a small island with waves breaking around; the figure of the conductor melts in turn into the form of the impresario, the magician, the lover, and at last into a figure made of newspapers."
–Art director Hein Heckroth on the film's stylized central ballet sequence, 1947[8]
Publicity still showing a moment of the Ballet of the Red Shoes sequenceThe Red Shoes is famous for featuring a 17-minute ballet sequence (of a ballet entitled The Ballet of the Red Shoes) as its centrepiece.[9][10] The sequence uses a variety of filmic techniques to provide an "impressionistic link" to the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale on which it (and the ballet within the film) is based, as well as the personal struggles faced by the protagonist, Victoria Page, who is dancing the lead role.[11] McLean notes that the ballet not only duplicates Victoria's own story, but also foreshadows her love for Julian, the composer and conductor in the ballet's orchestra, as well as the contemptuous jealousy of Lermontov, its director.[12]
Throughout the ballet, visual metaphors and fantastical references to Victoria's own life come alive on the screen, including a portion in which she dances with a floating newspaper that alternates in form between mere paper and the human form of Helpmann's character; this is referential to a windblown newspaper that Victoria previously stepped on the night she discovered she had acquired the lead role in the ballet.[12]
Unlike in conventional filmed theatrical ballet, the ballet sequence in The Red Shoes is not one continuous, static shot, but instead employs a variety of editing techniques, close-ups, and special effects.[13] As the ballet progresses, McLean notes that the action of the sequence "rockets from stage right to stage left, a series of swiftly performed vignettes alternating with garishly decorated set pieces. Then, as Robert Helpmann, playing the girl's lover, is borne away into the distance by a crowd, leaving the girl alone in her cursed red shoes, the action reverses... into and through the ballerina's subconscious mind."[14] Because of its dynamic nature and excessive use of cinematic techniques, McLean contests that the ballet sequence is a "greater, or more characteristic, film experience than a dance one."[15]
Genre
The question of genre in relationship of The Red Shoes has been a recurrent preoccupation of both critics and scholars, as it does not neatly fit within the confines of a single genre.[16] While the film's extended ballet sequences led some to characterise the film as a musical, McLean notes that the "conventional signals that had allowed fantasy elements to occur in other [musical] films are missing in The Red Shoes."[16] Fraser contests that the film is not emblematic of the standard musical as it has a tragic and violent resolution, and that it is best understood as a "prototype of a generic variation" emerging from the musical film tradition.[17]
The 21st-century critic Peter Bradshaw identifies elements of horror in the film, particularly in its central, surreal ballet sequence, which he likens to "the surface of Lewis Carroll's looking-glass, through which the viewer is transported into a new world of amazement and occult horror."[18]
