The Red Shoes

The Red Shoes

1948. Great Britain. Written and directed by Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger. With Anton Walbrook, Marius Goring, Moira Shearer. Drawing from the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of the same name and, it has been suggested, the tumultuous relationship between Ballets Russes founder Sergei Diaghilev and Vaslav Nijinsky, The Red Shoes is a saga about a talented ballerina torn between love and aesthetic commitment. Famous for the beauty of its Technicolor images, the film has been hailed by Scorsese as one of the greatest ever made. He once wrote that “there’s no other picture that dramatizes and visualizes the overwhelming obsession of art, the way it can take over your life. But on a deeper level, in the movement and energy of the filmmaking itself, is a deep and abiding love of art, a belief in art as a genuinely transcendent state.” Restored print courtesy UCLA Film & Television Archive, with funding provided by The Film Foundation and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. 133 min.