A Quick Look At The Red Shoes

Whilst unlikely to beat out any film with ‘chainsaw’, ‘massacre’ or ‘slumber party’ in the title, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948) is nevertheless classic Horror cinema made manifest.

A defining moment in the ‘A Star Is Born’ film type, The Red Shoes is perhaps most curious for its relationship towards style and excess. Herein, the British penchant for cinematic realism finds itself uncharacteristically, violently endowed with crazed, expressionistic passion - exemplified best in its fifteen-minute-long depiction of the titular ballet performance. It is a sequence that delights in shadow-play, montage and throwing reality itself into question. But it is in that inner turmoil between styles that the film is most engaging; where its characters maintain that recognisably restrained affect, so coveted by contemporary David Lean, the macabre world they are thrust into takes those internal conflicts of the soul and forces them to emerge in malevolent spectacle. Victoria Page’s dual longing for love of a man and the love of ballet, a conflict between a life of normalcy and one of expression, is this internal style conflict writ large. She dies in want of an unattainable solution.

The dark fairy tale was born from a post-war Britain, one whose national optimism belied a time of austerity, toil and drudgery. On the horizon, Britons could see the promise of self-actualisation. But it would not yet be theirs to take. That the film’s conflict emerges so violently, its consequences so fatal, speaks to that prime function of the great horror pictures - to bring out and confront us with that which we deny in ourselves.

Lost Highway: Rejections Of Realism

In David Lynch's 1997 film, Lost Highway, curious characters give way to expressionist horror as an abstract, mystery unfolds. Described as a 'psychogenic fugue', the film works from a blueprint, or bible, that Lynch has since often referred back to; one where he is concerned as much with rejection as he is with statement: a rejection of the realist cultural tendencies that declared immersion as the ultimate ambition of cinema.

Prognosticating postmodern anxieties, Siegfried Kracauer’s realism emphasised the stern hand of an auteur in deciding upon a singular reality. This monolithic vision would grant purpose, artistic or political, to narratives untarnished by ambiguity, eccentricity and fantasy. Where the neorealists and kitchen sink realists would take up this mantle and reject relativism, Lost Highway is a film that rejects clear patterns of meaning, or singular interpretations. As such, Lynch, as auteur, instead prioritises the total devolution of meaning, inviting not strict purpose but subjective abstraction. It is an almost entirely relativist film. In the realist sense, it is worthless. 

Yet, I can't help but find connective tissue between these disparate schools of cinema. Particularly regarding the technological element which affects them. Again, immersion is the operative word. To have been immersed in Kracauer’s time was an altered state. Within such a state, we can be taken on empathetic journeys in much the same way as reading a novel. To be immersed today is our default. Digital media culture has us so ingrained with fiction and story that the lines between our own dimensions of reality are constantly blurred. 

In a telling Lost Highway scene, Bill Pullman's character, Fred Madison, refutes video recordings. It echoes the "what if phone but too much" sentiment, where our cyborg-esque relationship with modern technology is considered to have a dehumanising effect, serving as a barrier between our perspectives and reality. The complaint that no one has authentically experienced an event, often a concert or live performance of some kind, because it has been filtered through a phone screen first.

However, it comes with an important distinction: Fred despises not the inaccuracy of filmed life, but rather its innate truthfulness. He cites a preference to remember things as they took place, not to see them perfectly re-represented. At its core, this suggests an authenticity that relies on subjectivity itself- that objective truth is in fact alien and inauthentic, contrary to the human experience. 

Fred will go on to be haunted by these inauthentic authentic video recordings for the film's duration- whilst, simultaneously, the audience are faced with nonlinear, abstract imagery that breaks them out of the stupor of filmic illusion; Fred and audience alike clamour for closure and the restoration of the repressed, but the wild, surrealist subjectivity of Lost Highway runs free. 

In this sense, it is the anti-realist nature of the film that emulates, for the audience, that dreadful impact of realist, authentic film on the subject, Fred. That is all to say that I think when we look back on film movements and the ambitions of cinema, they then demand a certain contextual relativism, in place of aesthetic absolutism. We study shifting technologies and peoples as much as the content within, and, as meaning has shifted, it is the very rejection of immersion which lends surrealism its affecting power in an age of digital ubiquity.