Starting off the week on Monday is The Red Shoes (1948), directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The film follows a young ballet dancer torn between her love for a composer and her dedication to becoming a prima ballerina. Martin Scorsese, who counts the film among his greatest inspirations, once said of the film: “The ballet sequence itself was like an encyclopedia of the history of cinema. They used every possible means of expression, going back to the earliest of silent cinema.”
Fittingly, the next selected film is Martin Scorsese’s own After Hours (1985), a film that blends screwball comedy and film noir to tell the surreal story of a man’s wild journey through the streets of New York City after a chance encounter with a woman. Made in the wake of The Last Temptation’s cancelation, it remains one of Scorsese’s lesser-known films.
Also screening on Saturday is India Song, directed by Marguerite Duras in 1975, a film that defied traditional cinema with its unconventional aesthetic and anachronistic setting. The film tells the story of a married French ambassador who becomes infatuated with a mysterious woman in India. As described by Ivone Margulies, India Song is a “hypnotic chant d’amour” in which she subverts traditional cinematic techniques by using dialogue that “hangs as if in doubt, creating a sort of echo chamber where the present is continually being troubled.”
A young ballet dancer is torn between the man she loves and her pursuit to become a prima ballerina.
Boris Lermontov: Why do you want to dance? Victoria Page: Why do you want to live? Boris Lermontov: Well I don’t know exactly why, but I must. Victoria Page: That’s my answer too.
“I saw The Red Shoes (1948) aged nine or ten. My father took me. Seeing it that first time was an overwhelming experience for me. My father, who worked in the garment district in New York, certainly wasn't an educated man but he did like films. For some reason, he took me to see The Red Shoes. I certainly don't think he was a ballet enthusiast. I believe that the film had picked up an audience here in America. Everyone was talking about it and so he wanted to see it. [...] The colour, the way the film was photographed by the great Jack Cardiff, stayed in my mind for years. The film would be shown every Christmas on American television in black and white, but it didn’t matter – we watched it. Even though it was in black and white on TV, we saw it in colour. We knew the colour. We still felt the passion – I used to call it brush-strokes – in the way Michael Powell used the camera in that film. Also, the ballet sequence itself was like an encyclopedia of the history of cinema. They used every possible means of expression, going back to the earliest of silent cinema.”
“At a time when ‘realism’ was the fetish of so many filmmakers and critics throughout the world, this was a bold gamble. It was the same gamble that Eisenstein had taken in his operatic Ivan the Terrible, that Ophüls would soon take in La ronde (also with Anton Walbrook), and that Kelly and Donen took in Singin’ in the Rain. None of these received their critical due when they first appeared. But the passage of time has shown them to be among the most powerful and evocative of all films. The Red Shoes belongs in their company: a parable about the demands of art, as well as a stunning demonstration of cinema’s claim to have united the traditional arts in a new synthesis.”
“Because I lived in the country during the war, I saw films for the first time in London circa 1945/1946 . . . I saw Nanook of the North and The River around this time and both left distinct images in my memory. But, in common with many other girls at the time and, indeed, ever since, I would choose The Red Shoes as my first formative film.”
Laura Mulvey
“Over the years, there have been several movies in which attempts have been made to capture the spirit and the beauty, the romance and the enchantment of the ballet. And, inevitably, in these pictures, ballets have been performed, a few times with charm and sincerity but more often - and unfortunately - without. However, there has never been a picture in which the ballet and its special, magic world have been so beautifully and dreamily presented as the new British film, The Red Shoes.
Here, in this unrestricted romance, which opened at the Bijou yesterday, is a visual and emotional comprehension of all the grace and rhythm and power of the ballet. Here is the color and the excitement, the strange intoxication of the dancer's life. And here is the rapture and the heartbreak which only the passionate and the devoted can know.”
“I think as a filmmaker, [The Red Shoes] speaks to anyone who is very devoted to an artistic pursuit, that you are drawn in into this addictive world and it takes you over. You become obsessed with it and it's very difficult on your personal life. So for me, it was the dilemma that Moira Shearer is in, that she's torn between the desire to be with her husband and also to be a great ballet dancer, is very relevant to me, personally. And also the portrayal of how artists work together to create a great work of art is beautiful laid down in the film. I don't think anyone has done it better, the way many people contribute and how one person has to sort of guide them and lead them, and something beautiful comes out of it. [...] Well Michael Powell always said: ‘All art is selfish, it has to be. It has to draw you in completely. You have to fully engage your very being in order to make good art.’ I think there is no question that art is a wonderful thing to commit yourself to but it's a little hard on the people you live with. [...] Making a film is like being in a small war. You're all fighting together, something beautiful laid down on film. You're often fighting the people who are funding it because they want you to change it and you think they are going to ruin it. You're constantly fighting and struggling together as a wonderful team. So it’s a great experience and we make livelong friendships in the way people do in war.”
“By now, reader, it can be no secret between you and me that The Red Shoes was another step, or was planned by me as another step, in my search for a perfect film, on other words for a ‘composed’ film.”
Anne-Marie Stretter, wife of a French diplomat, lives in 1930s India. She takes many lovers as systems of oppression decay around her.
“As savvy spectators of today, we need to remind ourselves of the strangeness of India Song in this regard – and how radical a gesture it must have been in 1975. This is a film in which the act of representing the past – recreating it, evoking and conjuring it, building it on screen – undergoes a massive process of dematerialisation. There are costumes and sets that more or less evoke that past, and music participating in the historical mood… but very little else.
Is the costume-drama flimsiness of India Song a matter of economy, production expedience? On the contrary, it was, from the outset, a fundamental aesthetic decision. The past is gone, cannot be represented, is lost in the mists of its re-mediation and narrativisation; personal experience can only be reconstructed accordingly, at the risk of what Bickerton calls an extreme (and, for her, crippling) ‘sense of otherness from the world’. This is the type of writing or art-making, from the cliff-edge of oblivion, deliberately riddled with absences and impossibilities, that is familiar from the work of Duras’ literary comrade, Maurice Blanchot.”
“The film opens at dusk. The sun exudes a mesmerizing orange glow before receding into the foggy night. We hear the crackling voice of a woman singing in an unknown language before two disembodied voices, servants perhaps, whisper stories about this raucous beggar woman who lives among the lepers. No one knows how she found her way to Calcutta, this woman who comes originally from Savannakhet, Laos, but here she is, “together/ she and the white woman/ during the same years.” Sound in the film is entirely non-diegetic, and loose strands of conversation from unidentified speakers both male and female, privileged and poor, come together like incantations joining two, unlike experiences and people in a shared stream of recollections. At such a remove from the image, speech plunges us into a heightened state of dissociation, yet stray observations about the smell, and sound of India and its colonized inhabitants ground these phantom characters in palpable sensations.”
“Tant qu’une image est vivante, tant qu’elle a de l’impact (idéologiquement dangereuse ou utile), tant qu’elle interpelle un public, tant qu’elle lui fait plaisir, cela signifie que fonctionne dans cette image, autour d’elle, derrière elle, quelque chose qui est du domaine de rénonciation (pouvoir + événement = « Voici »). Admirable à cet égard est le dernier film de M. Duras (India Song) qui nous donne à saisir (à entendre) d’où vient ce qui nous donne les images.”
“Dans le film India Song qu’annonce La Femme du Gange (1974), il y a déjà, toujours déjà la littérature de Marguerite Duras, un labyrinthe-gigogne qui s’ouvre avec un roman, Le Vice-Consul (1966), qui se poursuit avec la pièce de théâtre India Song (1973), qui s’entretient encore des échos mêlés de L’Amour (1972) comme du Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964). Avec la chambre noire du cinéma, le musique silencieuse de l’écriture peut enfin s’ouvrir à l’incantation des voix sans corps et à la chorégraphie ralentie des corps sans voix. La radicale séparation des plaques tectoniques de l’image et du son est plus qu’un décalage pour un démarquage. Plus qu’un décollement, c’est une profonde dislocation dont la modernité, alors partagée avec Jean-Luc Godard et Jean-Marie Straub et Danièle Huillet, arrache à la synchronisation, qui est une double capture de l’image et du son au service technique de la représentation mimétique, des puissances d’expression et d’autonomie nouvelles. L’éden cinéma est celui d’un grand refus, d’un souverain non à la reconstitution. Un non destituant même le régime dominant de la représentation.”
“In Café de Flore, sat with Duras and her friend Raúl Escari, I remember having asked, out of the blue, what it was that really made her laugh. Duras looked at me, smiled, finished off her cigarette and said: ‘Banana skins. People slipping and breaking their noses. I’m very classic.’”
3Serge Daney, "Un tombeau pour l’oeil (En marge de ‘L’Introduction à la musique d’accompagnement pour une scène de film d’Arnold Schoenberg’ de J.-M. Straub)," Cahiers du Cinéma 258-259 (July-August 1975).
Paul, a quiet, ordely and solitary young man, works in a large New-York City bank. One evening, he meets a mysterious young woman, Marcy, who leads him into the bohemian neighbourhood on a strange and dangerous adventure…
EN
“How can a film about the night’s seduction become a film about the nightmare of the unknown? How can a film about relief become a film about anguish? After Hours is a movie (as Stern saw well) full of tiny, complicated patterns: networks of exchange, spirals of circulating objects, hallucinatory substitutions. It’s The Earrings of Madame de… (1953) gone berserk, off its leash. The simplest thing becomes a problem – a big problem – for Paul. Keys fall from the sky, multiply, and create more problems once they let him in somewhere. Push-buttons, coin slots, doorbells, toilet flushers trigger cascades of unstoppable stuff. Getting in and getting out of anything, anywhere, becomes nightmarish. The normally coded zones of social space, public or private, switch without warning: entrance ways lead to prisons; illicit havens become potential tombs.”
