C’est Magnifique - The Red Shoes Wows Cannes May 20, 2009
Posted by John Hodson in : Film General, DVD News & Info, British Film , trackbackIn my previous post, I mentioned that Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger and (it would be churlish not to give him equal billing) Jack Cardiff’s The Red Shoes had been meticulously restored and was set for a special screening at the 62nd Cannes International Film Festival earlier this month.
The Guardian’s report accurately sums up the reception this eye-popping British masterpiece was accorded. Charlotte Higgins wrote:
…I had never seen The Red Shoes on the big screen, leave alone like this. The restoration is stupendous. Its director of photography, the late Jack Cardiff, was a stickler for colour – he even, according to the man sitting next to me at the screening, mixed his own house paint.
The colours of the restored Red Shoes absolutely leap from the screen. Moira Shearer is all icy skin, palely freckled. And then there is her hair, that miraculous sheet of red-gold fire. As she walks towards the Royal Opera House in an early scene, that vivid shade is visually echoed by a bunch of amber chrysanthemums from the flower market briefly seen at the front of the shot. Then, dramatically backlit during the extended, surrealistic scene in which she dances the ballet The Red Shoes, it suddenly flames a shocking scarlet.
There are a couple of scenes on the railway station at Monte Carlo, and the restoration shows us just how carefully they were made – a woman in a crimson coat here, a burst of purest blue delphiniums there. Dressed in a cloud of tulle in a shade somewhere between peacock and ocean green, Shearer mounts the steps of a Monte Carlo villa, the sky hotly Mediterranean, transformed into a kind of sea goddess. Imagine you possess a faded, tattered photograph of someone you love, and then, quite unexpectedly, you see them again, solid, living and breathing. That was what watching the restored Red Shoes felt like…
Be sure to watch the Thelma Schoonmaker interview video on that page linked above; fascinating stuff, and you get a few glimpses of the finished restoration.
The news piece at the Film Foundation website - here - also makes for interesting reading, especially the roster of just who was in involved in the project. Three cheers for the press… Also, check out ‘The Red Shoes’ shines anew from The Los Angeles Times in which Robert Gitt of UCLA fame appears, I’m sure inadvertently, to give a good kicking to the BFI, who provided the original elements from which his digital restoration was made:
…Not that restoring those colors to their original brilliance was easy. First, it turned out that every reel of the original negative, which had been stored in Great Britain, had been attacked by mold, causing what Gitt describes as “thousands of visible tiny cracks and fissures…”
By the way, at the bottom of that Film Foundation page, you’ll find a link to the Film Foundation’s lush Preservation Booklet on The Red Shoes in PDF format, presumably the same booklet handed round to the audience at Cannes, and containing some interesting notes from Martin Scorsese and Ian Christie (plus the confirmation that The Life & Death of Colonel Blimp is also on the slate for a similar full wash and brush up). Says Christie:
…Seen in full-scale projection, The Red Shoes is not only one of cinema’s great sensuous experiences, but a profound meditation on the power and the price of all-consuming spectacle. Beyond the intensity of its performances and the beauty of its images, it is this reflexive quality, shared with other masterpieces of the 1940s, that makes it a true classic, capable of being endlessly re-interpreted and rediscovered…
Incidentally, Scorsese, of course the driving force behind this as so many restoration projects, earned himself a standing ovation at Cannes for his impassioned pre-screening eulogy to Powell, Pressburger and The Red Shoes:
…passion drives every single, extraordinary moment of The Red Shoes, and it’s what makes the film’s glorious Technicolor images so forceful and moving, now restored to their full, shimmering beauty. The characters and their world are brought to life with the aching beauty they themselves long to create. The vivid reds and deep blues, the vibrant yellows and rich blacks, the lustrous fleshtones of the close-ups, some of them ecstatic and some agonizing, or both at once…so many moments, so many conflicting emotions, such a swirl of color and light and sound, all burned into my mind from that very first viewing, the first of many…
And the restoration will be seen all over the world. ITV Global Entertainment (who were, you may recall, Granada International, who merged with Carlton; oh, do keep up…) is said to have struck more than 20 international home entertainment licenses for the digital restoration of The Red Shoes since the Cannes screening. The licenses include: Atlantic Films AB (Scandinavia), Magna Pacific (Australia), Filmax (Spain) and (of course, being their own home entertainment division) ITV DVD (U.K.).
ITV Global Entertainment director of home entertainment & digital Steve Gallant said “We’re delighted to be announcing these new international deals for Michael Powell’s brilliant and lovingly restored The Red Shoes. This is part of our ongoing film restoration commitment, preserving our critically acclaimed and hugely popular library of landmark British film titles for a new generation of film lovers.”
ITV DVD is set to release the new restoration on both DVD and Blu-ray on June 29 in the U.K., though the BD of The Red Shoes looks to be, at least initially, a HMV exclusive; with Janus credited with helping the project, a Criterion ‘do-over’ can’t be far behind. Don’t forget to look out for digital screenings of The Red Shoes in the U.K. from this December.
Rule Britannia - Scorsese and Schoonmaker on British Cinema
While we’re on the subject of P&P and S&S, there’s excellent news from Screendaily.com on Scorsese and Schoonmaker’s long-gestating feature documentary about the history of British cinema:
…Speaking to ScreenDaily as he took a thee-day break from post-production on his new feature, Shutter Island, to attend tonight’s (May 20) Cannes Classics screening of The Red Shoes, Scorsese said: “As soon we finish mixing Shutter Island, which will be in August, Thelma and I are going to go back and take up where we were in the British documentary and hopefully construct a rough cut by the time I shoot my next picture.”
Scorsese is a passionate fan of many British films and he cites such movies as Basil Dearden’s The Blue Lamp, Guy Hamilton’s An Inspector Calls as well as work by Joseph Losey, Seth Holt, Ronald Neame and John Gilling as important early influences on him. He also acknowledges that his own approach to using voice-over in his own movies was directly influenced by Robert Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets.“Kind Hearts and Coronets was a big favourite among my family and people who were watching television in the early 1950s. It’s a film that influences a great deal what I do with voice-over,” Scorsese added…
Two posts in a month; I’m in danger of becoming prolific…
Comments»
It’s wonderful that Scorsese is doing so much to highlight and promote older classics and movies that are in serious danger of being forgotten.
As for your return to blogging, just keep ‘em coming John.
Thank you Colin; gently does it…
Wouldn’t it be equally churlish not to give Hein Heckroth and Brian Easdale equal billing? After all, their contribution was certainly as essential as Jack Cardiff’s!
I met Brian Easdale a few times towards the end of his life - when I was at the Everyman Cinema, I invited him onto a Powell panel discussion, and he’d pay regular visits thereafter.
Once I even spotted him in the queue for a triple bill of Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes and Gone to Earth (all of which he scored) and naturally refused to take his money: it says something about what a truly sweet man he was that he didn’t even think of asking me upfront if I could let him in free. Sadly, he died not long afterwards.
I must confess the thought (with particular regard to Easdale) crossed my mind as I typed, but it made for clumsy syntax in my intro, so…
I was stood opposite Cardiff in the cafe at Bradford not that long ago, and was in two minds whether to dash over and gush, or just let him have his tea in peace. I do wish now that I’d gushed.