Shoes and Fairytales

One of my favourite Powell Pressburger films - The Red Shoes - staring Moira Shearer.  The original folk tale is a mataphor for addiction - a young peasant girl finds a pair of red shoes, puts them on and dances in them.  After a while she wants to rest, but the shoes carry on dancing of their own accord, and dance and dance untill she dies of exhaustion, her feet a bloody mess.  I particularly like Moira Shearers stage makeup in the above still.  Identifying with the girl in the folk tale, and torn between her dance career and lover, her red ballet shoes dance her to a tragic end.

The Powell Pressburger collaboration produced some beautiful films.  There is a scene in Black Narcissus, a film about a group of nuns losing their sanity in the steamy Hymalayas, where Kathleen Byron renounces her vows and puts on some lipstick.  The Monstrouse female going mad.  The link is to the trailer.  Both films are gloriously technicolour and old fashioned, but still fabulouse to watch.

I was going to research truly the monstrous shoes of Chineese women with bound feet, but Red Shoes will do for the moment.