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Durga Chew-Bose
11/03/2009 02:05 PM
Consummating a two and half year restoration process lead by Robert Gitt and assisted by Barbara Whitehead of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes debuted, so to speak, in all its Technicolor brilliance at this year's Cannes. Presenting the revived version was Martin Scorsese, who'd seen the film as a child, and who has described the experience as being formative, recalling the prismatic whorl of colors "burning" into his mind and fostering his passion for film and for art. (PHOTO: ITV GLOBAL ENTERTAINMENT)
The story is that of a promising dancer, Victoria Page (Moira Shearer), pushed to choose between her romance with a young composer, Julian Craster (Marius Goring), and her lead part in a prominent ballet company. The film is an exploration of the artist's implicit plight: to create art is to live. When company head Lermontov asks Page "Why do you want to dance?" her response appears bold at first, but also invokes a fatal and unyielding pledge to one's passion. She replies, "Why do you want to live?"
The giddy elements of ballet–backstage camaraderie, the fellowship of a crew, the orchestra’s tweaking, tuning sounds in the pit, the comically disgruntled ballet master, the riot of students racing up the Royal Opera stairs to secure their seats before the show–are further enlivened through the framing of the film. Saturated in color, each frame of the 1948 British classic has been restored with immense care and precision, with a dreamy look that amplifies Jack Cardiff's original photography. Shearer's ashy skin, unmistakably freckled and glass-like, and her cherry-copper hair, lend surreal elements to her performance. In the film's famous seventeen minute ballet of The Red Shoes, a Hans Christian Andersen story about a woman who cannot stop dancing, Cardiff's optical tricks with light and motion transform the stage into a hallucinatory nightmare, where the darker recesses of artistic obsession and devotion lay claim. Culminating in a moment of unbridled craze–eyes gaping, brow sparkling with sweat–Shearer's charge is evident. In this newly restored print, her performance appears more possessed and tortured than ever.
The Red Shoes plays at Film Forum November 6-19. Film Forum is located at 209 W. Houston Street in New York.
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10/14/2009 01:30 PM
They agree to meet six months later on the top of the Empire State Building; Stuck in a wheelchair, spying on his Greenwich Village neighbours, he witnesses a murder; The epic car chase culminates on the stairs of the subway; Accompanied by Gershwin’s Rhapsody, the story begins. He’s dating a high-school girl; they go on a carriage ride in Central Park. He falls in love with his friend’s mistress; they stay up until dawn, sitting beside the Queensboro Bridge...
These scenes, pulled from vintage New York movies, are iconic in that they deliver the character and conventions of the city, its “animal buoyancy,” as Anais Nin calls it. But forget for a moment the countless Annie Halls, the Johnny Boys, the various takes on the Sharks vs. the Jets. Forget the too-easy charm of the diner, of the movies set against disco’s subculture, and of the patent romance of autumn in New York. In anticipation of this Friday's release of Emmanuel Benbihy and Tristan Carné's glittery New York, I Love You, we recall three other love letters to the city. Despite varying pursuits and persuasions, they get to the marrow of the place, its spirit, by admitting the influence of the ineffable; no songs or dance numbers celebrating the city’s glory, no tender epiphanies at twilight.
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