The Red Shoes: “It’s cinema as music”
The great man on the town; checking out that old Powell/Pressburger flick yet again. That other guy is familiar, presumably a fellow cinephile...
Quoting an Indiewire post:
“This film is music,” Martin Scorsese said on Tuesday night at the DGA theater in New York, introducing a screening of the film, “It’s cinema as music.”
“I don’t mean a musical—musical is a genre that I love,” Scorsese said of “The Red Shoes,” “[But] this is a film that I love. Every aspect of it [the design, the color], 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,” he gushed, excitedly, in that fast-paced way that he speaks, “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.”
This is the umpteenth time I see the maestro gushing about The Red Shoes. I’ve still got to see it. Maybe that’s a good thing. This film remains for me one of the mysteries of cinema, yet to be unravelled.
