The one movie that is always “new” to Martin Scorsese
You don’t have to look far to find Martin Scorsese going into complete fanboy mode over Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 drama The Red Shoes. Whether it’s during interviews or official “Best Of” lists, Scorsese always has time to sing the praises of the British ballet drama. In fact, when Scorsese assembled his most recent top ten for the Criterion Collection in 2014, he acknowledged how often he had name-checked.
“I’ve said and written so much about this picture over the years; for me it’s always been one of the very greatest ever made, and every time I go back to look at it—about once a year—it’s new: it reveals another side, another level, and it goes deeper,” Scorsese said. Scorsese acknowledged how rare it was to find a film that you could go back to and find something different in time and time again.
“What is it that’s so special about The Red Shoes? Of course, it’s beautiful, one of the most beautiful Technicolor films ever made; it has such an extraordinary sense of magic—look again at the scene where Moira Shearer is walking up the steps to Anton Walbrook’s villa, especially in the new restoration: it seems like she’s floating on currents of sparkling light and air,” Scorsese adds.
“And there’s no other picture that dramatises and visualizes the overwhelming obsession of art, the way it can take over your life.”
“But on a deeper level, in the movement and energy of the filmmaking itself, is a deep and abiding love of art, a belief in art as a genuinely transcendent state,” Scorsese concludes. His 2014 assessment echoes the same sentiments that Scorsese shared about the film in 2009 while introducing the film during a special screening that unfolded into a lengthy discussion
“This film is music. It’s cinema as music,” Scorsese explained about the film. “I don’t mean a musical — musical is a genre that I love. [But] this is a film that I love. Every aspect of it [the design, the colour], the way the film’s edited, the movement within the frame and the movement of the frame, the dialogue, the milieu.”
“It isn’t as simple as music intercut with images,” Scorsese added. “It has something else that makes it a piece of music, in a way. That you can run the film through your head and through your mind and your soul like music — images come to mind and perceptions of dialogue.”
See the official trailer below.
