Over the years, I’ve thought a lot about that exchange from The Red Shoes. [“Why do you want to dance?” “Why do you want to live?”] It expresses so much about the burning need for art, and I identified with that feeling the very first time I saw the picture with my father. I was so young then. It put me in contact with something in myself, a driving emotion I saw in the characters up there on the screen, and in the color, the rhythm, the sense of beauty—in the film-making. The opening scene, for instance. Two worried men, dressed in black, pacing in a corridor. Behind them, two doors. We start to hear a clamor from the other side. One of them signals that it’s time to open those doors, and when they do a herd of students bursts through and lunges up the stairs, grabbing for mezzanine seats to a ballet performance. They’re driven by that hunger, that passion, for art. To see it, to feel it, to be inspired by it and maybe to become artists themselves.
That passion drives every single, extraordinary moment of The Red Shoes, and it’s what makes the film’s glorious Technicolor images so forceful and moving, now restored to their full, shimmering beauty. The characters and their world are brought to life with the aching beauty they themselves long to create. The vivid reds and deep blues, the vibrant yellows and rich blacks, the lustrous fleshtones of the close-ups, some of them ecstatic and some agonizing, or both at once… so many moments, so many conflicting emotions, such a swirl of color and light and sound, all burned into my mind from that very first viewing, the first of many. The Red Shoes was the tenth collaboration between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and the seventh official production they made under the banner of their own company, The Archers. Powell and Pressburger—two great artists working side by side, sharing credit, in a unique and unprecedented creative partnership. As was the case on all their pictures, they worked with a team of extraordinary collaborators: the great Jack Cardiff, their cinematographer; Hein Heckroth, their production designer; Brian Easdale, their composer; the legendary Léonide Massine, who lent his presence to the film in the role of Ljubov, and created and danced the part of the Shoemaker in the glorious central ballet sequence; and the remarkable cast, including Anton Walbrook, Moira Shearer, Marius Goring, Ludmilla Tchérina, Albert Basserman, and Robert Helpmann, who was also the film’s choreographer; together, they created something enduring and enthralling. This is how important art is, they seemed to be saying from the first shot to the last—it’s so important that it’s worth living for, and dying for.
I’d like to thank Bob Gitt and his team at UCLA for their painstaking work, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for their generous funding, and the Louis B. Mayer Foundation for their support. Once you see this restoration of The Red Shoes, you’ll want to thank them too.

Martin Scorsese, “Why Do You Want to Dance?” “Why Do You Want to Live?”, UCLA FIlm & Television Archive, 2009

UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Film Foundation have been working on the current restoration of The Red Shoes from the fall of 2006 through the spring of 2009. Earlier, in the 1980s, the film had been optically copied from flammable nitrate to safety acetate film by the BFI and Rank Film Distributors, using the best celluloid technology then available. In undertaking this new restoration, our goal has been to build upon these past efforts, utilizing modern techniques to produce digital and film preservation elements of the highest possible quality. We were provided access to over two hundred reels of 35mm nitrate and acetate materials, including vintage Technicolor dye transfer prints, nitrate and acetate protection master positive copies, original soundtrack elements, and—most important of all—the still extant three-strip Technicolor camera negatives. For quality reasons, we chose these original negatives as our starting point even though they were afflicted with a daunting number of problems: sixty-five per cent of the film had bad color fringing caused by differential shrinkage and sometimes by mis-adjustment of the camera during shooting; 176 shots contained color flickering, mottling and “breathing” because of uneven development and chemical staining; seventy sequences contained harsh optical effects with excessive contrast; and throughout there were thousands of visible red, blue and green specks caused by embedded dirt and scratches. Worst of all, mold had attacked every reel and begun to eat away the emulsion, leaving behind thousands of visible tiny cracks and fissures. Extensive digital restoration was the only practical solution. Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging and Prasad Corporation Ltd. were chosen to undertake the immense task of digitally scanning 579,000 individual frames directly from the three-strip camera negatives, re-registering the colors, removing visible specks and scratches, mitigating color breathing, solving contrast issues, performing shot-to-shot color correction, and finally recording all 134 minutes back to 35mm Eastmancolor internegative stock. To obtain uniformly high quality results, 4K resolution was employed at every stage of the digital picture restoration work. Digital techniques were also employed by Audio Mechanics to remove pops, thumps, crackles and excessive background hiss from the film’s original variable density optical soundtrack. In the restoration process, the entire film was turned into ones and zeros, repaired, and then converted back into a motion picture again. In order to achieve a proper film look, we compared the new digital images with those in an original Technicolor dye transfer print and in a new Eastman color test print struck by Cinetech Laboratories directly from the YCM camera negatives. Careful adjustments were made in the finalized digital version to combine the best qualities of modern color film (greater image sharpness, more sparkle in highlights) with the most pleasing attributes of vintage Technicolor dye transfer prints (bold colors, deep blacks, gentle contrast with a pleasing range of tones in actors’ faces). We have even retained the familiar Technicolor changeover cues, with their distinctive magenta circle surrounded by a bright green ring. The end result is a restoration that combines the best of the past with our digital present.

Robert Gitt, Preservation Officer, UCLA Film & Television Archive