Art, Life and Death: Three Films by The Archers

The first film in the College of St. Scholastica’s “Art, Life and Death” series is the 1948 British dance drama The Red Shoes.

Moira Shearer stars as Vicky Page in this update to the Hans Christian Andersen story. Page, an aspiring ballerina, is torn between complete artistic dedication to her craft and the desire for romance and a normal life.

“The Archers” was a unique filmmaking partnership formed by British film director Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, a Hungarian writer who fled Nazi Germany and emigrated to England. Powell worked through the 1920s learning his craft by way of creating a series of short “quota quickies,” before being matched up with Pressburger by legendary film producer Alexander Korda. From the mid-1930s through the mid-1950s the two were inseparable as a creative team, creating their own production company, The Archers, and collaborating on some of Britain’s most renowned films of the period. Along with a regular troupe of actors, Director of Photography Jack Cardiff, Production Designer Alfred Junge and Art Director Hein Heckroth, The Archers’ cinema embraced fantasy, subjectivity and artificiality as ironic means to create what Powell termed “Total Cinema,” a concept born in the search for artistic truth. Often bathed in three-strip Technicolor and staged with sublime effects, their regularly astonishing films of this period include the three chosen for this film festival.