Worthing celebrates film-makers Powell & Pressburger's genius

This autumn, BFI and cinemas across the UK have been celebrating the works of the iconic film-making duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Their creative partnership produced some of the most stylistically ambitious, subversive and sensual British films ever made. To draw the season to a close, The Connaught Cinema is screening The Red Shoes (1948), regarded as one of the best films of the duo’s collaboration, followed by an extra-special Q&A with Sight and Sound's Pamela Hutchinson. A Worthing local, Pamela has recently released a BFI Film Classics book on The Red Shoes. She will be taking audience questions on the film, her book and all things related to The Red Shoes. The screening of The Red Shoes on Sunday, December 17 at 2pm followed by the Q&A with Pamela. For more information visit www.wtm.uk or call the WTM box office on 01903 206206.

As Pamela says, the feverish Technicolor and astonishing ballet sequences for which this film is so renowned are as spellbinding and as disturbing now as ever. In the film a young ballerina is torn between the demands of love and art. Like the heroine of Hans Christian Andersen’s source fairytale, whose magic shoes compel her to dance, Victoria Page (Moira Shearer) finds herself driven to breaking point by obsessive Russian impresario Lermontov when she’s cast in his ballet The Red Shoes.

“The Red Shoes is the most beautiful of all the ballet films ever made but also the most dangerous. As co-director Michael Powell said it was a film about dying for art. It is a film which ends with a terrible choice between life and love and marriage or high art and the ability to dance. It is a contradictory film. Many young people across the generations have gone into the arts because of it but it is also a film that comes with a warning.

“I saw the film when I was young and I had long since realised that the ballet lessons in the church hall were not going to lead to Covent Garden but I was completely enthralled by every frame of the film and then completely shocked and appalled by the ending. I think mine was a typical reaction to be absolutely enchanted and then horrified as you then experience the terrible finality of the danger in the film. It's a really devastating ending. I don't want to give anything away but once you have seen it you never forget it. There is an inevitability about the central image in The Red Shoes that means we are all dancing towards doom. With this book I wanted to give a sense of the film and its long history but I also wanted to unentangle the deep and dark references and just try to come to terms with the ending of the film. It is also this bloody and terrible warning and I wanted to explore the contradiction – that it is such a beautiful film but also such a dangerous film.”