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Victoria Page (Moira Shearer), a fiercely dedicated young ballerina, is taken on by the impresario Boris Lermontov and molded into a star. When she falls for the company's young composer, Lermontov forces her to choose between the man she loves and the calling that defines her. Written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and shot in blazing Technicolor by Jack Cardiff, The Red Shoes builds to an extended, hallucinatory ballet sequence unlike anything committed to film before it. It is a film about what art demands of the people who serve it.
Pamela Hutchinson is a freelance critic and film historian who writes for Sight & Sound, The Guardian, Empire, and the Criterion Collection, specializing in silent and classic cinema. She is the author of the BFI Film Classics volume on The Red Shoes and founded the silent-cinema website Silent London.
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