Question

How is color used in the film The Red Shoes?

Answer 1

It’s probably the best ballet film ever made. But The Red Shoes is much more than that, it’s pure cinema making and an extraordinary portrayal of the obsession of creativity and of the artistic world. Created by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and their incredible production team, The Red Shoes (1948) changed the landscape of the world cinema. Through its magical use of colour, aesthetic, characters, design, choreography, camera movement, music and the extraordinary passion it transmits, the film was majestically woven into a cinema masterpiece, a compelling parable of the destructive demands made by art upon the artist: you live and die for your art.

Part of what makes The Red Shoes so memorable is its aesthetic. The film uses colour like you’ve never seen before. The stunning ballet costumes and layers of pan make-up transport us to another world, a world of dark fantasy. The dramatic effect of the ballet attire is further enhanced by the theatrical set decoration, the beautiful work of Hein Heckroth, the art director and costume designer, who was also a painter. It feels like his otherworldly, symbolically charged designs and vibrant colours lure us into Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, on which the film was based. And there are, of course, the red shoes, those magic shoes that force their wearer to dance eternally.

Moira Shearer, with her alabaster skin and flame red hair, was such a unique beauty. The colours of the film were in fact built around her hair colour and skin. Her non-ballet costumes, designed by one of the greatest French couturiers of the 20th Century, Jacques Fath, are most suggestive in this regard, as you can see in the set above.

The Red Shoes is famous, in particular, for its rich use of Technicolor, which adds another dimension of the interplay of light and color to the visual landscape of the piece.