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Released in a decade often defined by stark neo-Realism in Europe and the gritty pessimism of film noir in Hollywood, Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948) is a film defined by a bright, rich color palette, gleeful artificiality and a decadent Romanticism that would seem more at home in 19th century Europe than post-war England. The film follows young dancer Vicky (real-life ballerina Moira Shearer), who is torn between her love of a composer and her dreams of becoming a prima ballerina. This life versus art narrative and the film’s melodramatic style recall 19th century Romanticism, but the film doesn’t merely hearken to that earlier era in tone and temperament. In its very construction, The Red Shoes engages with 19th century theories of art, specifically the Wagnerian ideal of the “Gesamtkunstwerk.”

The idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk was developed by composer Richard Wagner to describe a “total work of art,” or work that seamlessly combined a range of mediums into a singular voice in the service of artistic expression. For Wagner, the form that epitomized this notion was opera, which combines music, text, theater and visual arts in the production design. While documentary or realist film might conceive of the camera as merely a mechanical means of capturing objective reality, the self-consciously artificial cinema of Powell and Pressburger combined all of the elements that previously comprised the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk with the addition of the extra layer of artistry contributed by the camera and editing.

While most films make use of both text and music, a typical film employs music merely to create atmosphere or further explicate the text. The Red Shoes, on the other hand, comes closer to the operatic model in the way it combines words and music. While some of the music in the film is traditional scoring, the narrative, set in the world of dance and classical music, makes extensive use of diegetic music within the context of the story. Further, in the wordless fifteen-minute ballet sequence at the end of the film, music is elevated to an expressive level equal with dialogue.

The operatic conception of Gesamtkunstwerk included the visual art of production design as one of the central aspects of expression in the work, something that holds true in The Red Shoes. Frequent Powell and Pressburger production designer Hein Heckroth began his career as a painter and theatrical designer, experiences which clearly informed his work on their films. While a cinematic production designer’s work in a typical commercial film often entails attempting to recreate realistic environs, Heckroth’s work ranges from exquisitely artificial but essentially realistic interiors to the painterly, expressionistic sets of the ballet. Rather than attempting to make the craft of the production design invisible, The Red Shoes draws attention to it as another essential expressive element. Further, the visual art aspect of a theatrical or operatic work is limited to the sets, costumes, and lighting. Cinema, however, adds the additional element of the film stock on which the work is recorded. 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.

While movement is central to all cinema, the unique way in which The Red Shoes employs dance renders it as fundamental as dialogue or music in the expression of story and character. When the film was released in 1948, dance on-screen was hardly a new phenomenon. However, the way dance functions as a storytelling tool in this film is starkly different from the discrete dance numbers that can be found in Busby Berkeley films or the musical comedies of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The way the ballet probes the heroine’s psyche, as well as the sheer length of the sequence, set a new precedent for how dance could be used cinematically and its imprint can be seen clearly in later classics, like Vincente Minelli’s An American in Paris (1951). Where dance was once a diversion, The Red Shoes emphasizes the synthesis of story, text and dance in a way more akin to opera or Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals (with their famous dream ballets) than earlier film.

Although the film’s synthesis of music, text, visual art and movement demonstrates a mastery of the 19th century notion of a total work of art, what makes it revolutionary - and strikingly modern - is the grace with which it adds the additional layer of cinematic expression. With the addition of the camera, The Red Shoes is no longer bound by the physical limits of stagecraft. The filmmakers never shy away from an opportunity to employ cinematic tricks that would be impossible to execute onstage: for example, during the ballet sequence, they use double exposure to allow the audience to see Shearer’s character imagining herself dancing in the shoes. On an even more fundamental cinematic level, the camera allows for greater exploration of space and direction of focus than a theatrical work in a proscenium stage. Throughout the ballet sequence, the camera is able to weave among the dancers and follow them into the depths of the sound stage, creating a sense of space that places the viewer within a complete world. Further, when viewing an onstage work, the audience inevitably sees the entire stage throughout the performance - the artists only have the tools of light and blocking at their disposal to direct the viewer’s attention. In The Red Shoes, however, Powell and Pressburger employ the full vocabulary of cinematic language - from wideshots revealing large vistas to closeups mining the intensity of Moira Shearer’s expressions - to direct focus and create emotional meaning.

Although The Red Shoes has the sensibility of and pursues the ideals of 19th century theatrical art, it is by no means a relic. By bringing this sense of artistic synthesis and totality to cinema, the film achieves something boldly unique in cinematic history. Further, by skillfully employing the full arsenal of cinematic language to capture and elevate this cohesion of other mediums, it is also radical, essential and thoroughly modern.