The Red Shoes commentary from Cupertino Library Winter Film Series
Mark walking tiptoed to the front of the room, when the film closes with an awed audience.
"The image was everything, the image drove the film. There was no plot any more. The image kept making the plot. The great set designed by Hein Heckroth, the ground-breaking ballet sequence in particular. The film suddenly became avant-garde experimental film. It became image upon image upon image, closer to music, closer to abstract painting. Raging Bull by Martin Scorsese is an acknowledgement to this film. I sometimes watched them double bill and crawled out in the end, drenched in sweat actually. (Laughter) It is a great revolutionary breakthrough in film making. Even today's The Wolf of Wall Street, image upon image upon image. It's boring selling a novel or a play when someone walks in and say I love you. It's the colors, shapes, each moving through time and space, which replaced dialogues, and become the inner world of the people involved, into the psychology of it. It's always an extraordinary thing.
On Technicolor: Lermontov is getting paler, almost like a vampire near the end, with that cool shades. Looks like Lermontov has a seduction thing going on probably. But what’s neat about the film is they don’t play quite broadly, uba uba you know. His demeanor throughout the whole film, very asexual, or polysexual, has an amorphous quality to his sexuality, through the great performance of Anton Walbrook. He wanted to possess her, may not be sexual, but the body and soul for dancing. It’s laid out in the end without habahaba, we are going to die together. We are going to create something. Life is boring. Life is stupid. It’s bills, ipads, who cares. You got to join the theatre, and dance and devote yourself to the thing. Because there is something greater, grander, bigger than you, that’s what seduction is all about.
I have tried so hard to be Lermontov in my life. Look at my hair, I got the hair thing going.(Laughter) He is the puppet master, the subtle little things he does to manipulate. My personal favorite, when Lermontov is making his way to Julian, doing a big speech of hiring and firing and you shouldn’t do that, he just goes “good morning gentlemen”. He got complete control of sixty guys in the pit, that little “good morning gentlemen”, as he is in the middle of a conversation. Anything I can copy and use in my life, I would recommend.
Audience, “Is he an artist? He has a view of art, but I don’t think…” As opposed to someone like Vicky. That’s a very good point and always debated about whether an impresario is an artist. Sergei Diaghilev, the impresario of The Rite of Spring, ‘Oh Picasso, let’s get Jean Cocteau, and Igor Stravinsky together’. He is an incredible guy who helped develop the art concept of modern art through his work, to put people together with a vision, all the different visions together, to create such ground-breaking work.
A wonderful territory,what is creativity, every one stole from everybody back then. And what is the price of it. I know from teaching students at Santa Clara, they are always confused by that, because we live in a world demanding a certain kind of behavior. It is exemplary utilitarian, to pay the bills. They have to deal with Mom and Dad, go through 3 programs like marketing, to justify the cost of a dance program at SCU. It’s almost glandular urge, you are born that way and to express yourself that way. And they pushed and pulled everything else, because they understand what it takes to create something.
The famous or infamous curtain speech of Lermontov, quite controversial, it even surprised Michael Powell, when they were shooting it. They didn’t even know whether to keep it, OMG, it’s so weird. But they realized the actor has discovered something, that he had to go to this place of hysteria. Suddenly there is no more difference between life and art. They are acting out, their passion, in front of us. And of course the film is structured that way, we come into the film with a roaring crowd. We are part of the roaring crowd, throughout the film we are the audience for everyone’s performance, the images they create. It’s a great movie that everyone is creating images and fighting them, who sees what and how people react to each other that way.