Documentary News Letter (1947-1949)

94 DOCUMENTARY FILM NEWS STAR FEATURE The Red Shoes this FILM had a quality of magic about it, which is common to most stories about the stage, perhaps because the theatre is concerned with the creation of another world, which can be either a faithful imitation of our own world, or a fantastic figment of an author's imagination, but which in any case is larger than life, more tragic, more humorous, more squalid or more beautiful. In this world it is possible to pick out the significant details and ignore the mass of insignificant ones which obscure them in everyday life, and the actors, while they walk the stage, are demi-gods, superhuman or sub-human, Prospero or Caliban, made of no common clay. There is a peculiar fascination in any story which shows you the backstage scene, the squabbles, rivalry, chaos, comradeship, hard work and creative genius which go to make up a finished production. This film has the further advantage of a subject, ballet, which is in itself beautiful to look at, and The Red Shoes is visually superb. Again and again in their ability to pick out the detail which sums up an emotion, such as a pair of red dancing slippers going at fantastic speed down a circular iron staircase, or the painted tragic face of Massine looking down at those same slippers after their owner has been killed, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger show their supreme ability to think in terms of the camera. The film also shows traces of a certain grandioseness which has a tendency to mar the otherwise finely imaginative work of these directors. The scene in the society drawing room, where Anton Walbrook finds his future ballerina assoluta, is singularly unconvincing, and one scene where Moira Shearer ascends what seems miles and miles of improbable steps in evening dress of a pretentiousness which seems out of place even in Monte Carlo, is cinematically bad and quite unnecessary to the action. The plot is likewise weak, being concerned with the conflict in a dancer's mind between the claims of her art and her desire for domestic bliss, which results in what seemed a somewhat unnecessary leap in front of a train. Anton Walbrook gives a beautiful performance, as the impressario who demands a single-minded devotion from his dancers, but the psychological climax of the film is unsatisfying and unconvincing, partly because the two minds behind the conflict, Lermontov's and the ballerina's, are insufficiently developed in the film and partly because Moira Shearer, who dances exquisitely but is no great actress, fails to compel in the audience that willing suspension of disbelief which alone could have redeemed the weak scripting of this part of the film. This may sound somewhat damning, but in actual fact it matters very little. The private lives of the characters which compose the ostensible plot of the film are not really important. The film is really about ballet, those who dance in it, those who make the music for it, those who design the sets and costumes, the man who controls and co-ordinates these activities, about the ballet. Whether it shows us the finished performance, the chaos which precedes it, the mad rush of the galleryites at Covent Garden pouring upstairs, or the ungainly, agile, Frenchly expressive high kick of one Paris porter demonstrating to another what this thing ballet is, Ballet is the subject, the plot and the hero, and as long as this was the case, there was never a dull moment. This is not to say, either, that this film is primarily intended for balletomanes, although it might possibly prepare the ground for balletomania in hitherto uninfected minds. It tells you incidentally a great deal about ballet, but in such a way that you do not realize that you are being instructed. Here there are several interesting comparisons to be drawn between this film intended for entertainment, and a recent Central Office of Information film, reviewed elsewhere in this issue, called Steps of the Ballet, which is meant to inform. Much of the basic material of ballet was explained, and finally a complete ballet was shown. It was photographed fiat, that is to say, the camera took up the position of the audience and stayed there throughout. This is no way'to bring ballet to the screen, for it is by its nature a live and fluid thing, just as film should be live and fluid. It is a great mistake to think, however, that because the subject is live it will keep that life automatically when it is transferred to celluloid. In The Red Shoes there is what must be the best part of twenty minutes of pure ballet, without a word of dialogue and without leaving the stage, and the interest never flagged. There was hardly any flat photography; some of the time you saw the actual ballet being danced, and here the camera was everywhere on the stage, forestalling the dancers' movements, leaping into the red shoes as Moira Shearer put them on, and closing up to them again as they are drawn off her feet at the end. Much of the time the camera was interpreting the dance in terms of the conflict in the dancer's mind between her love and her dancing, and sometimes it juxtaposed an image to heighten the movement of the dancers and the music, as when the sea surged in the auditorium as Moira Shearer spun across the stage in a wide spacious arc, and the music swelled to meet her. The dancing was magnificent, Moira Shearer, Robert Helpmann, who was responsible for the choreography of the Red Shoes ballet, and above all Leonide Massine, all playing their parts superbly. Massine, apart from his part in the dancing, stole the picture as far as I was concerned. Every time he appeared on the screen, everyone else appeared half alive beside his intense vitality. Every movement of his fingers or his feet talked more expressively than a couple of pages of dialogue, and he was largely responsible for the feeling of authenticity in this picture of the life behind the scenes. The picture may be heightened, as any dramatic representation, whether play or film, must be, but it is a \ i\ id and com incing one. The subject of The Red Shoes is ballet, and to put over this subject it has a plot. As in the case of many documentary films, where the> allow their audiences the sop of a fictional plot, this is weak. Nevertheless, although there are many minor flaws in the film, it makes its audience not only swallow a great deal of ballet but thoroughly enjoy doing it. and it succeeds in doing this because it approaches its subject through living things, through the people whose lives are in volved. The tendencyjfor documentary films is to approach their subjects through dead things, through figures and statistics and factory chimne\s. The very names applied to this type of filmmaking are indicative; documentary, factual. Documents and facts are dry things unless they are brought to life by showing the human beings whose lives are bound up in them. Two things are needed in documentary films, more humanity and more visual excitement. It is a very much easier thing to make a film about ballet and the people who dance it human and visually exciting, than to bring the same qualities into a film about factory workers, but it has been successfully done in documentary. Steps of the Ballet is a film intended for novices, made in the hope of interesting people in ballet by explaining the basic technique; well and good. I would not mind betting, however, that more people will come away from The Red Shoes with the idea that perhaps it would be worth finding out more about ballet than w ill be enthused by the more informative Steps of the Ballet. WHY SHOULD TRUTH GO DOWDY? (Continued from page 93) ton's illiterate peasant looking at the sky signs on Broadway? He would surely, said Chesterton, believe that those wonderful lights, speaking 'through the agency of the two most vivid and most mystical of the gifts of God, colour and fire' were conveying some such glorious message as 'Give me liberty or Give me Death'; he would be distressed to find that all that golden fire merely stood for 'Mr Bilge's Paradise Toothpaste". But because I know that Bilge is only Bilge, shall I stoop to the profanity of saying that fire is only fire?' For 'fire' read 'showmanship', 'sparkle', and the profanity's yours. So get off your knees. 'The truth drones on." said someone recently, 'with the muffled voice of one trulv speaking from a well.' If you have some truth to tell climb out. Tell it neat like a teacher, it vou will; but if you want to write it large then do h in the theatres. Don't think it's easj because in the hurly-burly of show business \ou have to be damned sure of yourself and your message You've got to be dead certain inside if you decide to muck about. Which are you? If you're the pamphleteer and the teacher then go ahead where you belong and good luck to voir, the world has need of thee. But don't clutter up the stage. You don't belong there Stand back and let the showmen among you come forward. Oh. and if you do decide at last that you're a showman after all. don't ponder too long as to whether you're about to sell \our soul. It nu\ well be a highly academic self-question. ^ Ml see. you have to find a buyer. 'The time is out of joint: 0 cursed spite That ever I was born to set it right . . . .' \w.iv with cussed spite, you Highlander Hamlets, you and set it right with a wisecrack!