The Red Shoes in Clapham

It was the oddest thing. I had been invited to contribute to a panel discussion of The Red Shoes at the Central Film School in Clapham. Worried that I might miss the beginning of the movie, which was going to be screened beforehand, I was hurrying along the Merton Road to South Wimbledon tube station, when, miraculously, I came upon the Ballet Boutique.

A mother and her daughter (I assume) were coming out of the shop just as I approached it. The daughter gave her mum a hug of gratitude for the new pair of shoes that she had just put into in her pink bag. The mum then got her to pose for a picture outside the shop. Astonished by this little bit of happenstance, I thought to myself, I’ve got to get a photo of the mum taking a photo! I dashed across the road without looking and narrowly missed an on-coming 131 bus.

It made the moment all the more exhilarating. It reminded me of that comment that Michael Powell made about the movie in his memoirs: “I think that the real reason why The Red Shoes was such a success, was that we had all been told for ten years to go out and die for freedom and democracy, for this and for that, and now the war was over, The Red Shoes told us to go and die for art.”

But luckily, this time, I survived to get to Clapham in time for the movie. My brush with death was the prelude for what turned out to be one of those perfectly enjoyable afternoons. An endlessly satisfying film, The Red Shoes was performing particularly well, benefitting from an appreciative audience of film school students and a welcoming stage. The auditorium had once been a Victorian music hall.

There are famous showcase theatres – the Opéra de Monte Carlo, Covent Garden, the Palladium, the Odeon Leicester Square – but the most memorable performances require no grandeur and do not announce their whereabouts ahead of time. “I want you to dance tonight with the same ecstasy I’ve only seen once before,” Lermontov asks Vicky just before the first performance of The Red Shoes. “At the Mercury Theatre in London on a wet Saturday afternoon.”

What gave the Clapham performance of The Red Shoes a peculiarly 21st-century twist was the fact that it was taking place not only on a wet Sunday afternoon in Clapham but also at the Postane arts centre in Galata, Istanbul. The Passenger Cinema collective had organised a livestream link-up. It was in the spirit of the film: at the height of the Red Shoes Ballet Vicky is shown dancing beyond the normal limits of geographical space.

The event brought together not only two separate far-away gatherings into one audience, but also composed a panel out of three contributors who were in the old music hall in Clapham and one who was able to join us virtually from out of town via Google Meet.

And it was a good panel, in which Rory Curley, the CEO of the Central Film School – appropriately dressed in a pair of red shoes and a red shirt – made us all feel at home and able to relish the opportunity to share our enthusiasm for a wonderful film.

Ben Gibson spoke of the “incredibly insane” quality of the Powell & Pressburger films that had challenged the standards of conventional good taste. He had first seen The Red Shoes, he said, in his early twenties when he was doing an MA degree in film history. I had been a lot younger when I first saw it – aged about sixteen or seventeen – at the Ionic, I think, in Golders Green. But of all of us, it was surely Pamela Hutchinson who saw it at the most impressionable age.

When I read her BFI Film Classics book on The Red Shoes, I had been impressed by how well she had written about the passion for dance that drives Vicky. And it was Pamela’s own passion for ballet as a young girl of eight that had first led her to the film. She described how she used to look at the Ladybird Book of Ballet so hard that her eyes wore the images off the page.

The description made me think of Coppélius’s magic glasses in The Tales of Hoffmann, which enable Hoffmann to see the toy doll Olympia as human, but also of Helen, in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, telling Mark about the children’s book she has written: it was about a magic camera that photographs things that are impossible to photograph. Nothing’s impossible to photograph, Mark reassures her – or threatens her. In this respect, the two films share the same dark theme – how what you love can turn destructive.

Rory’s last question for the panel was to ask: if there was one thing that we would each want the audience to take from the film, what would it be? The question reminded me of nearly being flattened by that bus when I crossed the road to take the photo of the young girl who had received her first pair of ballet shoes. Great art can cast a demonic spell. So be careful!

And I was more careful when I walked home just before midnight past the Ballet Boutique, where there was a light still burning.