The Red Shoes tells the dramatic story of a young ballerina, Victoria Page, who is torn between two opposing forces: the composer who loves her and the impresario determined to fashion her into a great dancer. The sequence of shots that I have chosen portrays the young Victoria Page dancing for a small, crowded audience at the Mercury Theatre before her claim to fame. The great ballet impresario, Boris Lermontov sits amongst the crowd, watching Victoria’s every dance step with critical intensity as she dances in a production/reproduction of Swan Lake. This moment is significant to the rest of the movie in two ways—1. It marks the first time Boris acknowledges Victoria, and takes her under his wing, and 2. It marks the last time we see the audience in the ballet performances. This sequence of shots not only reveals the suture of the audience into the performance, but also Michael Powell’s critique of mechanical reproduction and the loss of what Walter Benjamin refers to as the auratic experience.
Shot 1 is a slow zoom in on a poster outside the Mercury Theatre advertising a limited performance of Swan Lake given by Victoria Page. The shot shows two poster images pasted on top of the other. The poster on top reads: “Reappearance of Victoria Page in Lac des Cygnes, for one performance only by special permission of “The Ballet Lermontov.” The shot zooms into the center of the shot in which the words “Royal Philharmonic Orchestra” are daintily placed. The diegetic sound of rain slowly fades into the background as the music of Swan Lake fades in.
Shot 2 is a close up of a record player in which the musical record is spinning in a continuously circular motion. Shot 3 shows a ceiling fan spinning similarly in a circular way and displays a large loudspeaker placed next to the ceiling fan.
These first three shots are extremely significant in showing Walter Benjamin’s idea of Mechanical Reproduction. Shot one uses a zoom—a function that the camera, a piece of mechanical equipment can perform easily, but one that our human eye cannot easily imitate. The zoom conditions our eye to a certain place on the screen, it forces our human eye to look where the camera wants us to look, and forces us to see in the same manner that it sees. And just what is it that Powell would like us to see? Our vision is pulled towards the zooming point, or the shot’s center of gravity—in this case, the words on the poster that come to our attention are: “Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.” As the sounds of the rain fade out and the music of the orchestra fade in, we, the audience, are temporarily tricked into thinking that we are hearing the music played by an orchestra. The words on the poster mislead us. Instead, the immediate transition to shot 2 reveals that we are actually hearing the music from a record, a mechanical reproduction of the original live piece of music. The presence of music and the immediate transition to the source of the music is an interesting play on the shot reverse shot. In this case, instead of being a shot reverse shot, it is a bit like a sound reverse shot where the source of the music is revealed by replacing the absent one (the music during shot 1) with the signifier (the record player in shot two) .
Shot three further emphasizes the mechanical reproduction with the spinning fan and centered shot of the loudspeaker. The repetitive motion of the record player indicates mechanical motion in shot 2, and this motion is echoed in shot three with the spinning fan. The centered shot of the loudspeaker reveals again where the sound is coming from—a machine. With these first three shots, Powell reveals the increasing industrialization of society, and the result of increasing art productions and reproductions. Walter Benjamin talks of reproductions and their depreciating value from the original, “One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art…One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition.(668)” In a later part of the same scene, Powell dedicates a segment in which the record player conspicuously skips a beat. The mistake is caused by increasingly new technology, and the increasing mechanization of art. This mistake brings to our attention to the production aspect of the performance, and emphasizes Benjamin’s point of loss in the aura of an art piece with its reproductions. Powell hits home, that the reproduction of music will never be as good as the original live performance.
Shot 4 is a centered wide shot of an audience looking towards the camera. The room is dimly lit and the theatre feels small, rustic, and slightly claustrophobic with its dingy blue walls and worn out rugs. The audience consists of men, women, children, with various expressions on their faces as they observe the spectacle in front of them.
The fullness of the image—the fact that it is a wide shot filled to the brim with a diverse amount of people, emphasizes machinery and art as a product of the proletariat. Benjamin writes, “By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listening in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements. (668)” Throughout history, art has been only enjoyed by the elite few, yet art reproduction has bought its product to the common crowd, the masses—men, women, children, rich and poor sit in the Mercury theatre awaiting the art spectacle in shot 4. Powell is commenting that though there is auratic loss in art reproduction, there is also increasing equality in bringing art to the masses.
Shot 5 is a wide shot of the stage following the solo performance of Victoria Page on stage through a series of unobvious pans. The painted backdrop is of a blue moonlit lake at night, as Victoria dances light and gracefully onto the stage in a white swan costume.
The immediate cut from the crowd to Victoria’s solo entrance on stage indicates what the audience is watching. The careful framing keeps Victoria at the center throughout the entire shot. The contrast of the blue backdrop to her glowing white costume creates an aura about her—she is the object of beauty in our gaze (which is really the camera’s gaze). She is the art signifier. This idea that Victoria is merely an art product is hinted at in shot 1 when the poster announces, “Reappearance of Victoria Page in Lac des Cygnes, for one performance only by special permission of “The Ballet Lermontov.” The production company, The Ballet Lermontov is the obvious patron of art—it owns Victoria as an art product—it has power over what she performs and who she performs for. Shot 5 is extremely significant not only in that Victoria is seen as the art product, but also the fact that we, the audience of the film, are forced to reflect on our own viewing of Victoria through the art product of film, a media of the masses. We realize that we are watching an audience watching Victoria—in other words, we are watching a reproduction of Swan Lake through a mechanical reproduction of film. It allows us to question, have we experienced doubly the auratic loss?
Shot 6 is a medium shot of Victoria pirouetting across the stage as the music becomes increasingly sharp and dramatic.
Shot 7 is a reverse shot of what Victoria sees as she spins across the stage. The shot consists of several fast pans that imitate the spinning motion of the pirouettes while showing glimpses of the crowd observing.
These two shots function together as a shot reverse shot sequence. We instantly connect the idea that the fast pans are from Victoria’s perspective. We, the audience of the film are then sutured into the dancer’s mind, the dancer’s world—we see what they see, we experience what they experience. The end of this scene signifies the last time that we ever see the audience as a mass. From here on out, we see the story on the production side of things. We see everything from their training, to love lives, set design, music to choreography; we become sutured into their worlds. The absence of the audience in the final dramatic performances hints at the fact that we have replaced that imaginary audience in their role as spectators, that we are those missing masses—that we are the new proletariat.
The composition, mise-en-scene, movement, and cutting of this series of shots reflect on Walter Benjamin’s idea of the increasing mechanization of art as well as the suture of the audience into the production.
