The Red Shoes

One place that I’m tempted to start is an episode of Sex and the City, in which Samantha (played melodramatically by the wonderful Kim Cattrall) is watching a beautiful man watch the Knicks game, and slowly aroused by his fervor. Nick watched this episode months ago, alone. He told me that as the camera held on Cattrall’s face, he couldn’t help himself but stand up and applaud, actually say “bravo” aloud. He demonstrated to me. Then, later, he told Emma the same story and demonstrated again. Later still, we were watching random episodes of the show and the Knicks episode came on, and Nick stood and applauded and said “bravo!” Not, as was true the first time, because he was simply so taken by the artistry of Cattrall’s performance in bringing to life Samantha’s hungry, independent, sensuality. This time he applauded because his telling the story had attached his telling of the story to our understanding of the art. Therefore that shot of Kim Cattrall’s face will now always be accompanied by applause when I watch it, and whether that applause is real or imagined doesn’t matter at all.

Another place I’m tempted to start is Michael Snow’s Seated Figures which I watched today. This is a film comprised of shots from a camera affixed to the rear of a pickup truck and aimed at the ground. Images are abstract and then are very small and intimate, flowers swaying, a creek running. Occasionally, Snow will provide a still image that isn’t just the truck at rest. He will instead hold on a frame in motion. And the abstraction of the camera, frozen in time, will reveal itself slowly. My favorite thing about these shots is how light looks, reflected off of shiny stones, running water, puddles on the road. Sunlight, at this speed, on this film, forms into these thin yellow rectangles, which emphasize the geometry of all of the movement surrounding them. Where other things blur, the light is given shape. The camera creates new possibilities for light on water. Cinema is a great transformative art. It shows its skeleton and also performs tricks like a magician.

I have written several times about subjective perspective in film as a limiter, a thing to be overcome. I’m afraid that I focus too much on the limitations and not as much on the beautiful advantages. I was sitting in the theater two days ago, watching The Red Shoes, and realizing that the film was far better than I remembered. And then we got to the ballet, which was of course my favorite part the first time I watched it, and I thought that surely at least that would be roughly what I remembered it being. But I forgot that beyond being comprised of some of the most beautiful images of all time, the ballet is some of the Archers’ most thoughtful and intricately considered filmmaking. The film perfectly modulates the realities of the performance happening on stage and the feelings the performance is creating. The sequence opens with the curtains opening, the artifice clearly visible. But as soon as the camera’s purview shrinks, it allows itself to expand. We are intellectually aware that the stage has limits, but we never see them, and so we can watch Vicky dance into forevers, spin and jump everywhere. And very quickly the film makes use of this, as she dances at herself in a mirror, twice on stage, twice elegant.

The significance of this isn’t just that it allows us into Vicky’s experience, or even that it allows for the big emotions of the ballet to be materialized stunningly in technicolor. The magic of this sequence is precluded by my favorite scene, the first lunch that Vicky has to spend listening to Julian play. They discuss the ballroom scene, which has been cut from the ballet. The music Julian wrote for a ballroom is still in the score, and so Julian says that anyone listening will see a ballroom. And so we do, when the ballet itself is performed. But Vicky says, definitively, that she won’t imagine anything but a war between herself and the audience. This is the first trick; the subjective perspective that is captured in the ballroom is not Vicky’s. It is the subjective perspective of the audience. An audience which we never see, only once hear (a quick affirmation of Boris’ promise that they won’t wait til the end to applaud ( an unnecessary affirmation since every one of us has in their hearts already stood to clap) ), but throughout the performance are invited to sit beside. So the ballet sequence is a magical vision of what it is like to experience great art. It is a paean to the experience of experiencing.

The second trick is smaller and subtler, and lies somewhere in the perfect warmth of the late afternoon light, the color of backlit parchment or tree sap, and the reds and browns and grays that make it up. Vicky says that she will imagine a war. And Julian plays a few chords and then declaims “my music will pull you through it!” Powell and Pressburger afford those few chords as much discursivity as the dialogue. We see Vicky’s face, reacting to his music. And so when he says that his music will pull her through it, we believe him. And we believe that the relationship she is forming with his music is discursive. And that it’s intimate. And that before, when Vicky says “if you were a dancer you would know that” and Julian completes her sentence “nothing matters but the music” they mean something different than they might have meant individually.

Julian is watching her of course. And seeing his music change her into a bird/flower/cloud. Knowing whoever else’s arms are lifting her, the arms are compelled by him. Seeing his music erect a ballroom around her. Seeing her spin and always return to face him, and everyone else with their eyes on her.

The third trick is that applause and that “bravo” that Nick added to Sex and the City. The simple way of reading this film’s engagement with the story of the red shoes is that it’s a retelling, with Boris representing the red shoes and Julian representing the rest of life. But that is the significance they afford to the ballet. They, in forming deep and unassailable love for Vicky through her performance of the ballet, imprint the story on her and her on the story. This is the danger of art and audienceship, and the beauty, it’s a creative force, it’s capable of making things different, permanently and irrevocably. The first half of the film has nothing in common with the story of the red shoes, Vicky starts a dancer and continues to be a dancer, she lives her life and continues to live her life. But both men ascribe this dichotomy to her, the dichotomy that she dances so beautifully, and they can’t separate it from her. When she says she lives to dance, those to states (living and dancing) are syntactically inextricable. For Boris and Julian to each ascribe themselves one of those states is for them to rip Vicky apart. The camera holds on her shoes as she runs from her dressing room to the balcony but her shoes come off very easily.

Boris’ tribute to her is then stunningly complex, because despite how legitimately moving it is, it is hollow. It ascribes her the role that he forced on her, demands her memorial be for the woman he created. And it’s very clear that his emotion is sincere. He calls his company his family, and they are, and each and every one of them is formed around him, like bark on a tree. And the first half of the film illustrates so delicately and perfectly how his vision of family, of love, of art, can all come together into a cacophanous interdependent beating heart. How when everyone cares about art more than they could care about anything else they make each other more beautiful, make everything around them shine. We watch that lonely spotlight and wonder, what if Boris understood the way that Vicky has tied art and love to each other and lost where one ends and the other begins? Wonder what a memorial for that Vicky could be.

Big things are great because small things are great. Every person in this movie feels like a real person. Their realness makes the painted skies behind them feel real, and the emotions that swell with the music feel earned. And so everything in the ballet feels real, because I’m already ready to trust an actor, a painting, a piano. Feelings are so rich. When Irina announces her engagement, Boris is furious, of course. When she realizes that he’s left, she walks to where he had been standing moments before, and looks to the other side of the curtain, where he went. She collapses into the curtain. She says “he has…no heart…that man,” just like a ballerina would say it, with all the dramatic sweep. She can’t chase him past the curtain. Then, of course, she’d be offstage.