Week 15/2023

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.”