Composing film… The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), BFI, Cinema Unbound, Film on Film

 

There was no script… we simply followed the score.

 Michael Powell, Ecran (1979)

 

This is a spectacular, complex and unusual film from an extraordinary set of film makers, one that crosses boundaries and responded to the formality of opera and ballet with something like the improvisational techniques of silent film. The director, Michael Powell, was always at pains to highlight the contributions of his team too all of whom were among “the most talented artists in the World…” who brought “excellent ideas…” leaving him the job to “choose from them and to elaborate, little by little the film you saw.” ¹ So, some cinematic "jazz" with which to capture the dance and the song, with the finest players and with Pressburger and Powell exercising the kind of leadership that only true improv virtuosi can command. Powell's ambition was to "compose film" in the same as the score had been created and to do that, he started with that music and composed scenes, shots and segments in silence, working to the rhythms and the notations of the source material.

Based on Jacques Offenbach’s 1881 opera Les contes d’Hoffmann, which was itself inspired by the stories of E. T. A. Hoffmann a German writer, artist and musician from the turn of the nineteenth century who was very influential, also writing the story that became The Nutcracker. His stories were fantastic and this strangeness was as perfect for adaptation on stage as it is for film. Here The Archers recorded Offenbach’s music first with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by the mighty Sir Thomas Beecham and including world class singers from the Royal Opera House company and elsewhere.

 

This was a screening on a fresh 35mm print taken from the BFI’s national archive and the colours were good enough to eat although I was prevented from nibbling the screen by the diligence of the BFI’s long-suffering stewards. This was my first-time viewing Tales even though I’ve had the Blu-ray of the 2015 restoration for some time; some things just have to be done right and a packed NFT1 is the only way to experience one of the peaks of The Archers’ glory years.

 

Moira Shearer

The Tale of Moira

 

Yes. It was more daring but also rather clumsily put together. … Powell put all the action into the first third of his film and was then left with long static stretches almost to the end. For a man with such a gift for cinematic effect it seemed very odd. ²

 

Moira Shearer was never a women lacking opinion and you can imagine feisty discussions across the breakfast table with husband Ludovic Kennedy throughout their long marriage. Shearer had a complex relationship with ballet and film after her experience with the hugely successful The Red Shoes. Pressburger she liked, Powell much less so, and yet she respected his abilities working with him three times, the last on Peeping Tom when another actor had dropped out – according to Powell - with a cameo that fills the film with life and yet failed to prepare her for the end product; another example of “Michael’s sadistic streak” for her.

 

Here she was lured not only by the reassuring presence of Robert Helpmann and Leonide Massine but especially by the choreography of Frederick Ashton with Powell and his cameraman Christopher Challis filming with less editing and artifice than the director used, with Jack Cardiff, on The Red Shoes – and once again I can heartily recommend Pamela Hutchinson’s new book on that fascinating subject³. Here Fred was the director and as Shearer said in 1994, “This was purely dance - it was choreography... It was very enjoyable - we had to hit a few marks for the lighting and there was a certain amount of stopping and starting for technical reasons, but working with Fred was such a pleasure and relief.”

 

 Moira 3, Ludmilla 1

There is certainly more uninterrupted footage of Shearer’s abilities and, as she said herself, her technique is not only better than three years’ earlier but she is allowed more room for expression by Ashton. The Red Shoes may be the best ballet film but these sequences are the best of Shearer’s ballet on screen; incredible energy and control even on perfect point as she whirls around flicking her legs in high step with the metronomic quality of an automaton during the Olympia/Doll sequence and so expressive during the opening segment set in a theatre for The Ballet of the Enchanted Dragonfly.

 

She has three main dances and dominates the film’s first hour  and exhibits the honed physique of a top-level prima, almost painfully thin but with the leg strength of a professional footballer. Ballet is surely the most demanding of the arts hence the confusions surrounding her life and that of her character in The Red Shoes. Art for art’s sake is the aim with both films but none of these players got here without the thousands of hours isolated dedication. No imposters here, just world-class practitioners as Powell said.

 

Robert Helpmann as Lindorf

“Helpmann’s theatrical persona is almost more than an ordinary film could bear…” ⁴

Which brings me to the genius known as Robert Helpmann who is also freed up by this film compared with The Red Shoes, he plays Hoffmann’s nemesis Councillor Lindorf and various other characters throughout – Coppélius, Dapertutto, Dr Miracle - who attempt to thwart the writer’s romantic ambition. He’s so dynamic both as an actor and dancer, having worked with the Royal Ballet - the Vic-Wells Ballet as it began - and acted through most of his career in mainly Shakespearean roles as well as other classic theatre. He is so expressive and fits in perfectly with the mad make-up of Connie Reeve and the eye-popping Oscar-nominated designs of Hein Heckroth.

Helpmann was lauded on stage and occasionally on screen, he danced with Margot Fonteyn in Frederick Ashton's Façade and many more and, of course with Shearer as her star rose. You have to wonder again at why there was so much of a reaction to her and not him. As ballet critic Clive Barnes wrote after a full and frank exchange with Shearer for a Dance Magazine interview in 1962: I wonder how much we in British ballet circles were prejudiced, consciously or subconsciously, against the glamorous Shearer. 

Let the regaling commence... Robert Rounseville starts singing...

The Tales of Hoffman

 

The story begins in Nurnberg in the Opera House where a young writer, Hoffmann (the opera singer, Robert Rounseville, later to sing You’ll Never Walk Alone in Carousel) is watching Stella (Shearer) a ballet dancer performing The Ballet of the Enchanted Dragonfly. Watching also is Lindorf who intercepts a note she has written to the writer on a doily setting the scene for another romantic disappointment. In his BFI Classics book on the film, William Germano, describes this six minute sequence as acting as an introduction to the style of the film, with Challis' camerawork, Reginald Mills' editing and Frederick Ashton's choreography - all dynamism and laced with erotic intent - all working together to "...give the audience a view of Moira Shearer doing what they came to see her do: dance". ⁴ 

Would you hear the three tales of my folly of love?

 

In scenes eerily reminiscent of our school trip to see King Lear at the Liverpool Playhouse in 1979 during which we took a half-time drink in the Shakespeare public house, never to return to the play… Hoffmann joins his pals in Luther’s Tavern during the intermission and, as the drink flows and the ornate pipes are passed around, Hoffmann, already moody and disheartened, decides to regale his pals with three stories of his thwarted love. Whilst Lindorf is traditionally played by the same actor, this section of the opera normally involves three different singers or, in this case, two dancers miming and one singer singing.

 

Leonide Massine and Moira Shearer

The Tale of Olympia

 

Shearer returns in the remarkable puppet dance of Olympia, an automaton devised by scientist Spalanzani (Grahame Clifford) and magic spectacle maker Coppélius (Helpmann) who proves that animated beauty is in the eye of the beholder after all, as they try to convince Hoffmann that not only her intentions but her entire being is true… Shearer’s movement as the puppet is technically superb and she holds the eye with her control, precision and bounce; she snaps into positions and out again with an almost contemptuous ease; she's here to show what she can do encouraged by the best choreographer in the business. She's matched by Helpmann's charismatic energy as well as the verve and skill of Ashton himself playing the half human/half puppet, Cochenille.

 

The Tale of Giulietta

 

A completely different style is required for this take as we find Hoffmann in Venice pursuing the heart of Giulietta as danced by Ludmilla Tchérina another Red Shoes alumnus and another prima ballerina who danced across Europe but primarily as principal dancer with the Ballet des Champs-Élysées. She is earthier than Shearer and well able to play the femme fatale in this battle for soul and sensuality as, under the influence of the magician Dapertutto (Helpmann) Giulietta captures Hoffmann’s reflection and gains possession of his soul. The writer must duel with her former paramour, Schlemil (another Red Shoes star, Léonide Massine) to get the key to free her but is it just another ruse… your guess, it is after all, an opera based on a fantasy.

 

Helpmann and Ludmilla Tchérina

The Tale of Antonia

 

This final segment is, in the restored version, the longest and most purely operatic with Hoffman in love with Antonia played and sung by the American opera singer, and future Dr Kildare star, Ann Ayars. Antonia’s mother, also a singer, has already died young as a result of consumption and her father hides her away on a Greek island – a magnificent setting again from Heckroth – in an attempt to prevent her from singing and also succumbing to the same fate.

 

This time Helpmann plays Dr Miracle who was actually responsible for the death of Antonia’s mother and who claims to channel the spirit of her mother in encouraging her to sing and die. There is magnificent duet between Ayars and Miracle (sung by Bruce Dargavel) as the spectral conclusion is reached among some of the film’s most powerful imagery utilising more in camera trickery than the rest of the film combined. It almost does for pure opera what The Red Shoes did for cinematic ballet and no doubt there was a similar dislocation of certain snobby noses.

 

Ann Ayars and Robert Rounseville

After the fatal climax it’s back to the opera’s gorgeous main theme and multiple Shearer’s converging into one as she completes the dance at the Opera House before heading to find her lover in a most dishevelled state at the cellar; having told and drunk too much, forever to be unlucky in love and outmanoeuvred by Lindorf…

 

The film cuts to Sir Thomas Beecham conducting the last few notes and closing the book as a Made in England stamp is thumped down – The Archer’s pride in helping to establish an English operatic tradition just as Shearer’s boss, Dame Ninette de Valois, the Irish-born, Russian trained former dancer who was aiming to create an English tradition in ballet through the Royal Ballet.

 

Again, this underlines the creative and improvisational power of Powell and Pressburger, the former may have known more about ballet than he let on but it was the latter who understood opera. The fact that they could take all of these high-powered talents and produce this coherent whole says so much. Perhaps shooting the film as a silent was liberating with Thelma Schoonmaker says in the Studio Canal Blu-ray interview, that her former husband kept on saying how free he felt. Maybe not amongst their greatest films Hoffmann is surely the finest example of their abilities as collaborators.

 

It's also an eminently rewatchable film as more details of dance, design and direction are revealed with every viewing. A film for life and love.

  

1.       Interview by Bertrand Tavenier in Midi-Minuit Fantastique, October 1968

2.       An Autobiography of British Cinema (1997), Brian McFarlane, Methuen/BFI

3.       The Red Shoes (2023), Pamela Hutchinson, BFI/Palgrave Macmillan

4.       The Tales of Hoffmann (2013), William Germano, BFI/Palgrave Macmillan

Sir Thomas Beecham

Ludmilla Tchérina and the woman she mimes for, Margherita Grandi

Pamela Brown

Shearer dancing with Edmond Audran (Tchérina's husband)

An orchestra of Helpmanns... 50 years before The Matrix!

Simply red? The Red Shoes (1948), BFI, 100 Greatest Films

You have to take that film with a huge tin of salt, because there was never a ballet company anywhere which was like that. I'm sure no dancer of any generation ever had this supposedly appalling problem ending in suicide, if you please - between real life and the ballet.

Moira Shearer*

 

What is there to say about this film that hasn’t already been said? Something you could say for pretty much the rest of the Sight and Sound 100 Greatest Films the BFI are showing across January and February, a once a decade opportunity to re-explore the cannon as reinvented or reinforced by some 1600 film critics (almost as many Tory Party members it takes to elect a new leader...). Powell and Pressburger have to be in there and it’s impossible to rank their films although clearly, the electorate have…

I watched the screening at the BFI and then watched it again with wife, daughter and mother-in-law who remembered her impressions on seeing it on screen in 1948 when she was just 16. Two different audiences and it was fascinating to compare over the day. I’m not sure how many of the packed audience watching on NFT 3 had previously seen the film but, after a chatty disturbed start with some early laughs at the quaintness of the dialogue we settled down in silence as the film engaged minds and sensibilities.

It's hard not to become engrossed in this film as Powell and Pressburger create such an intense atmosphere with dialogue from the latter that challenges our norms of polite discourse. Anton Walbrook’s Boris Lermontov manages to be extraordinarily rude, maniacally controlling and also strangely vulnerable. He carries natural authority and with trademark restraint manages to underplay a role that could so easily fall flat through an excess of grim single-mindedness. Boris just needs to find beauty in his art and even the prospect of being danced to in the inappropriate surroundings of an after-show party is too much for him to bear. He reminds me so much of Jose Mourinho.

Lermontov is not the only jarring character; even Moira Shearer’s Vicky Page is frank and awkwardly single minded, first in the way she talks back to Boris after he disapproves of her being asked to “audition” for him at an after show party and then as she insists on greeting him personally on stage during her first day at the ballet, she’s young but she’s strong. Walbrook may well give a star turn but in Shearer’s cinematic debut she is the centre piece, the star who is to be born and the focus not only our attention but also admiration; she is a ballerina acting the role of a ballerina and her dancing is not something you can “act”.

Powell had seen Shearer performing with the Sadlers Wells Ballet (later the Royal Ballet) aged 20 and had pursued her for his film for something like a year. The dancer herself was less than impressed with the idea especially as she saw the story as a bit daft. She was on her way up, dancing in the shadow of Margot Fontaine and about to get her first prima roles, how could this film help her with her ambition?

Powell eventually got his woman but only after he hired a group of leading ballet dancers to form the core cast and after the Royal Ballet said that Shearer would be welcomed back after the filming. After she came back she felt the film didn’t help her in what was already a highly competitive corps de ballet but, interestingly, her stature increased as she continued to develop technically and to be offered not only the classic leading roles but also a ballet written especially for her, created by the great British choreographer Frederick Ashton. She danced the title role in the premiere of his Cinderella in 1948 having already ed his seminal neoclassical ballet Symphonic Variations in 1946, along with and along with Pamela May and Fonteyn.

Anton encourages

She soon found that filming ballet is quite different from performing on stage, and this was not all to her taste. Firstly there were the stages which had concrete floors, “… death to the calf muscles!”, then there was the disjointed nature of filming and “…the long waiting while cameras, lights, playbacks, etc, were organised. Eventually they would be ready and expect us to leap instantly into the air, but we were now cold and had to limber up yet again. No - filming ballet is not easy.” Quoting a lecture she gave in 1949, The Daily Express had her complaining The chopped-up sequences allowing perhaps only half a minute's dancing at a time made it very difficult and a very miserable experience. You can see how the film-making experience would have been completely counter to her ingrained discipline and practice. And yet, she made it.

Another deciding factor in her decision to do so was the casting of Robert Helpmann, Léonide Massine and Ludmilla Tchérina, three ballet dancers with impressive pedigrees. Shearer had worked with Helpmann and Massine a number of times and also with several of the corps de ballet dancers and this familiarity shows in certain moments when they practice, rehearse and put in the hours with professional commitment. All of this makes the film stronger and the reality of the dance sustains the fantasy all around.

I had been a more rounded performer at the time I made it or that I would have done it two or three years later, when I think I would have done justice to it. Still, I've seen 'The Red Shoes' a couple of times in the past 10 years, and I must say that for all the creakiness of the dialogue and situations, it has a certain period charm… Moira Shearer, The New York Times, 1988

Powell had cast a young ballerina on the way up as, a young ballerina on the way up… he also cast the most extraordinary cinematic hair… Jack Cardiff’s cinematography is stratospherically good as usual but he achieves so much in being able to capture the natural tone of the actor’s golden strands as well as her Scottish freckles and powerful pale skin. These observations are made after a comparison of said tones with those of my wife Catherine, a Grade 6 ballerina in her day and no less fierce than Ms Shearer in her opinion and drive!

Powell may well have been cold, but Pressburger was not and the cast and crew created something far greater than the sum of the parts… despite himself, in Moira’s view he was cold, lacking warmth and humanity, and yet the director led in this wonderful cinematic creation with his crew excelling from painter Hein Heckroth, completely out of his comfort zone and yet providing astonishing production design along with costumes, and Arthur Lewis art direction. As with the gaggle of real dancers on set, the real filmmakers gelled and teamworked a gem.

It's tempting to draw a line from the film to Shearer’s eventual career choices but she really does sound like a no nonsense lass from Dumfries … the offers continued for years, including unlikely ones like El Cid with Charlton Heston. But I've always found my marriage and my children infinitely more important than any career, so no great decision had to be made…

Robert Helpmann and Moira Shearer

No red shoes were to compel Moira away from the path she had chosen. That’s the reality but there is still so much to unpick from the fantasy. Red Shoes remains one of the greatest cult films of all time and part of that, a big part, is because of the sheer skill and humanity that Shearer bought to the film. She was to dance for Powell twice more, once in The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) and with a light-hearted cameo in the otherwise sinister Peeping Tom (1960) but she had four children by then and had found a different life.

Red Shoes is such an enduring fable, dramatizing the choices we make in life and its darker corners are mysterious enough to reward repeated viewing. Although, each time, I’m not the one who has to watch myself dance, but, in many ways, that is the heart of the film’s meaning even if, from the start, the star herself had such mixed feelings.

Let’s leave it to The Daily Express to add some of it’s now famed balance to Moira’s view of her film  with Emeric Pressburger responding to comments she made in 1949, I will make no comment. Miss Shearer has the right to criticise like everyone else. I don't know why she is doing it. But she must have a reason.

So much to unpick and I look forward to Pamela Hutchinson’s book on The Red Shoes being published later this years. There’s so much more to learn for a film that never grows old and wins over every new generation.

You can pre-order the book now direct from Bloomsbury, there will be more opportunities to see and discuss this film as the year unfolds.

*From a 1994 interview reproduced in An Autobiography of British Cinema, Brian McFarlane (1997), Methuen/BFI (pp 532-5)

**Quotes sourced from the excellent Powell and PressburgerPages site. 

Léonide Massine offers you a choice...

Be careful what you wish for… The Red Shoes (1948)

 
`Why do you want to dance?' `Why do you want to live?'

A film about ballet for people who don’t necessarily like ballet, a populist “art” film and a fairy tale where the magic is provided by human drive and imagination… The Red Shoes isn’t straightforward at all but then what Powell and Pressburger film ever is?

The centre piece of the film is the 17 minute Red Shoes ballet which abandons any pretence at theatrical reality by taking off into a cinematic flight of fantasy that Gene Kelly could only dream of. The film is magically real – perhaps the very peak of The Archers’ trademark style and one that confused their distributors so much that they never gave it a proper premier in the UK. Unable to reconcile the adult content in what they presumed was a family film, Eagle Lion all but buried The Red Shoes until a record-breaking response in New York lifted it to international success and eventual recognition as one of the greatest films ever made.

From this distance you can still understand their response and this film isn’t as far away from Peeping Tom as you might think, as Moira Shearer’s presence in the latter may well prove. Miss Shearer was a prima ballerina with the Royal Ballet, perhaps second only to Margot Fontayne in London at the time. So, unlike Black Swan for example, here we have a actress who can actually - really - dance and who moves with the dangerous grace founded on the bruised flesh and cracked ankles of a thousands days’ practice. She is authentic and fascinating: a delicate beauty, whose sensitive features are crowned by a mass of rust-red curls and set atop a body perfectly poised: you can really only be this way if you have no other choice.

Moira Shearer,

Moira may also be simply one of the most beautifully-filmed redheads in cinema history. Jack Cardiff was the man and his cinematography is revealed by the recent Criterion Blu-ray to be even better than I had imagined. The extremes of porcelain white and red are almost impossible to photograph sympathetically, especially against the sumptuous backgrounds used by Powell but Cardiff’s depth of field reveals even Shearer’s freckles.

My wife, a redhead herself and no mean ballet dancer in her youth, was suitably impressed – solidarity of colour and tone. The reds… they know more than they let on.

Robert Helpmann, Moira Shearer and Léonide Massine

Shearer is not the only dancer in the film and there are notable parts for Ludmilla Tchérina as Irina Boronskaja, Robert Helpmann as Ivan Boleslawsky and Léonide Massine as Grischa Ljubov. Powell effectively put together his own company for the film and this plays a major part in the authenticity: these characters knew how to act around each other.

But the non-dancing cast was also well-chosen and none more so than Anton Walbrook who’s Boris Lermontov manages to be maniacally controlling and also strangely vulnerable. He carries a natural authority and with trademark restraint manages to underplay a role that could so easily fall flat through an excess of grim single-mindedness. Boris just needs to find beauty in his art and even the prospect of being danced to in the inappropriate surroundings of an after-show party is too much for him to bear.

Anton Walbrook and Léonide Massine

But the dancer in question is one Vicky Page (Shearer) who has already caught his eye over a ladle of punch: she agrees with him and impresses with her own determination to perfect her craft – as the above quote reveals, she has no option but to dance. Is she really as single-minded as her statement suggests: is dancing all she can do with her life?

Vicky’s inevitable rise is held back by Powell as she joins the ranks of hopefuls in Lermontov’s troop and we’re immersed in the life of the ballet. Also involved is a young composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring) who has impressed the great director with a composition that has been ruthlessly stolen by his music teacher. Lermontov points out that it is better to be capable of producing such a work than to have to steal another’s creation and commissions him to write a new ballet, The Red Shoes…

Marius Goring

The ballet is based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale which provides the perfect metaphor for the broader story of creativity versus life and other interests. Pressburger had originally drafted a treatment in the late thirties and now, after the changes in tone made necessary by their wartime cinematic service, the Archers were ready to make such an escapist film. Being them, this fantasy focused on the reasons we make art: is it possible to share a passion for creation with love or can attainment only be achieved through sacrifice?

Simple enough questions on the face of it but Powell and Pressburger succeed in walking the line between clarity and complexity and, in Moira Shearer, they have an acting presence capable of expressing actual hard-won genius on screen. Everyone else is posturing (albeit skilfully) but she demonstrates the end product… she’s the real deal.

The music by Brian Easdale is another element that has to be as good as the story demands: his music is the soul of Craster and an expression of his love for Vicky. Brian takes this near impossible brief  in his stride though and his compositions are wonderful, especially for the Red Shoes ballet itself – the only section he didn’t conduct, that was left to the mighty Sir Thomas Beecham. Easdale went on to win the Oscar for Best Original Music Score: the first Britain to do so.

Some films get lodged in the “canon” by reputation alone but The Red Shoes is one in which every major component is no less than excellent… it’s a film about ballet sure enough but also the most basic questions of life: this is why it continues to resonate and to retain its power.

 If you don’t already have it and you probably do… the Criterion Collection version is superb and the UK Blu-Ray uses the same transfer (I think?). Movie Mail has the latter plus DVDs whilst you’ll need Amazon.com for the former. You can also buy Brian Easdale's soundtrack on CD.

“Why do you want to watch classic film…?'  because they're entertaining. Not quite as good is it...?