The Red Shoes (1948)
Directed by Michael Powell
A fledgling ballerina falls in love with a brilliant composer, but the jealous head of the ballet company plots to drive them apart.
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What critics compared The Red Shoes to
Inspired by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1948 film, The Red Shoes (which, in turn, was inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen fable), Black Swan focuses on shy and serious Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), a ballet dancer with extraordinary technical ability, but little passion.
The Red Shoes and its theme of losing one’s self to a part is an obvious influence, but it’s another Powell and Pressburger film, Black Narcissus, with its sex-starved nuns, that hits closer to home.
Stark cinematography only emphasizes this to the point where it feels like Black Swan must be consciously attempting to counter the lurid but astounding palette of the original tragic ballerina film, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger’s masterpiece The Red Shoes.
The mere prospect of a film that in many senses crosses Powell and Pressburger 's " The Red Shoes " with Roman Polanski 's " The Tenant " is certainly enough to raise an eyebrow, as the very notion screams potential camp classic in this day and age.
If Roman Polanski had made The Red Shoes (1948), the results might have been something like Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan.
No backstage ballet story can be seen without " The Red Shoes " (1948) coming into mind.
His Magic Mike-style dance is an instant classic.
It’s almost impossible that a human could have Efron’s abs and his comic timing, and director Nicholas Stoller definitely makes use of both, even working in a Magic Mike–worthy dance scene.
Shot by Rogen regular Brandon Trost, "Neighbors 2" has more visual style than you might expect of a character-driven comedy, especially in a tailgate party heist sequence that sees Efron delivering a “Magic Mike”-esque dance performance as a means of distraction.
Efron as Teddy, the former frat guy who can't let go of his college lifestyle, is simply there to be objectified, a role he embraces by performing a "Magic Mike" style dance number while oiled up in barbecue grease.
It gets a bit outlandish—something of an ill-advised attempt to mimic the “Ballet of the Red Shoes” sequence in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger ‘s The Red Shoes—but there is no denying that the way the sequence begins, with Sebastian gently lifting Mia into the air when he realizes gravity no longer holds them, is pure magic.
See: The Red Shoes, every version of A Star Is Born; writer/director Damien Chazelle (Whiplash) definitely has.
In Whiplash, the attitude toward music is akin to that toward dance in Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948).
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A fiercely feminist vision of Powell and Pressburger (“The Red Shoes”) collaborating with Russ Meyer (“Beyond the Valley of the Dolls”)?
The duo's " The Red Shoes ," " I Know Where I'm Going! ," " A Canterbury Tale " and so many more were examples of what Powell called "the composed film," a movie in which each element was worked out to meticulously mesh with the other, a movie in which all of the art forms that inform movies -- painting, music, theater, sculpture, the whole lot -- are brought to bear with equal emphasis, a movie in which the contours of the real and the fantastic rub freely against each other to produce ... well, hopefully a kind of aesthetic alchemy.
There are moments when the movie seems desperate to approach the lyric surrealism of Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell's ''The Red Shoes" and Jean Cocteau's ''Beauty and the Beast," the foulness of Dario Argento's own Faustian ''Phantom" adaptation, or, at least, the insanity of Brian De Palma's ''The Phantom of the Paradise."
Influenced as much by The Red Shoes (1948) as by Rosemary’s Baby (1968), it tells the story of Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper), a young American ballet student who comes to a German dance academy directed by the kindly-seeming Mme Blanc (Joan Bennett) – where mysterious disappearances and murders are the order of the day (and more particularly the night).
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Del Toro’s wide-eyed cineaste fixation, meanwhile, is present in the finest technical details, with echoes of “The Red Shoes” in the design of Elisa’s apartment — itself situated above a struggling picture palace, where hoary Biblical epics play to a near-empty auditorium, the audiences kept home by their television sets.
The first five minutes is a spot the reference game for any cinephile, from Cleopatra , to The Little Colonel , to Beauty and the Beast , to The Red Shoes .
Even in the age of sprawling “cinematic universes,” it’s rare to see a movie that feels so comprehensively imagined and lived in: from its unsettling murals depicting bizarre rituals, to the realization of those rituals, from its elaborate Runic alphabet to a thrillingly choreographed dance number which unfolds like maypole bop by way of The Red Shoes.