In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

Life is genuinely a bit quieter for me at the moment than it has been for a while, and (touch wood) should stay that way until the end of August, so I'm taking the opportunity to try to get back on top of things a bit. I've been tidying and cleaning my house so far today, and now turn my attention to my unblogged film list - not that I am really likely to make great inroads into it today, given that I am probably going out to see another film this evening. ladylugosi1313 will appreciate just how far I am going back to review this one, although luckily I did take some notes on it at the time, so I have at least something of a starting point.

Anyway, this is a classic and very famous Powell and Pressburger film which centres around the lives and loves of a ballet company engaged in putting on an adaptation of 'The Red Shoes' by Hans Christian Anderson. The story tells of a young girl who yearns for a pair of beautiful red shoes, but when she acquires them through the manipulative machinations of the evil shoemaker, she finds that they compel her to dance on and on until she dies. Roughly two-thirds of the way through the film, we are treated to an amazing sequence, probably some 15-20 minutes long, which is just the company performing the ballet. The relevant cast members were all actual professional dancers, so it is essentially a filmed version of an actual ballet performance, but enhanced also by the potential of what film allows them to do. This ranges from the relatively simple and obvious business of close-ups and camera tracking, which a static audience in a real theatre can't benefit from, to special effects such as the girl seeing a vision of herself already dancing in the shoes when she peers in to the shop window to wonder over them, and then her dancing through fantastical landscapes using an early version of what's now green-screen when she is first experiencing the joy of having acquired them.

Around this, the story of the ballet company echoes the narrative of feeling compelled to dance with tragic consequences in a real-world setting. The lead role in the ballet is played by Vicky Page, who is just emerging into the ballet world as a new rising star, and feels a strong vocational compulsion within herself to make her way in the profession and be the best dancer she can be. This is externally personified by Boris Lermontov, the ballet company's director, who takes her as his protégé and demands of her to devote her entire life to dancing. But meanwhile she also falls in love with the company's composer, Julian Custer, and runs off to marry him - only to discover and admit to a jealous Boris some months later that his career as a composer has taken over, and she has barely danced since their marriage. It is tragic and terrible and very emotively played, but it does essentially boil down to a very gendered story about how a woman can't have both love and career success. Even worse, because Vicky's own internal conflict about this is externally personified into the two men, it is largely framed as a conflict between them within which she has no real agency. Vicky's response is thus to run in tears from the theatre, horribly compelled by the red shoes she is wearing, and jump from a terrace into the path of an oncoming train. That is, two men fight over a woman until she breaks.

It was a visually very beautiful film, beyond the ballet scenes I've already mentioned. The colour was over-saturated, but with a taupe tint - probably largely because that was what they could achieve using still quite early colour technology, but it looked amazing anyway, with the red shoes themselves incredibly rich. Some of the cinematography also reminded me of Fellini's films - especially shots of people looking smallish and isolated in large, splendid rooms which accentuated their fragility. Some of the dialogue struck me the same way, too. Fellini's characters often make very simple, even banal, statements which acquire a lot of their meaning from context, and these characters quite often did the same. Fellini was in his late 20s and just getting started in the film industry at this time, so maybe he saw it and picked up some ideas?

Anyway, very beautiful and effective overall, as long as you can look around the inherently rather misogynistic central conceit.

‘Kay, so I’m on a train to London, and I’m going to try to use the time to catch up with some film reviews. We’re going back to January for this one, which I saw with glitzfrau at the Hyde Park Picture House. Anyway, I probably don’t need to say a great deal about it, given that everyone in the world has seen this one, and indeed that it has won multiple awards including an Oscar since.

Anyway, it’s great. It is a story all about women maximising the power available to them in a male-dominated world complete with explicit lesbianism, and everything about the production at every level is superbly well-executed. Olivia Colman deserved her Oscar for how well she acted having had a stroke alone. The moment we saw her, before anyone said or did anything, I recognise straight away what was supposed to have happened. The lighting was also brilliant – one of the most natural-looking depictions of candle-lit interiors I have ever seen, which are very hard to do on film. And Rachel Weisz looked so amazing in her breeches during the shooting scenes, that was worth the entrance price on its own.

As a historian, though, I think the thing I’ll appreciate it for most long-term was its overt creative anachronism, as seen in e.g. many of the clothes, the awesomely-funny dance-off, the music (Baroque Greatest Hits but with a modern twist), etc. No production is ever going to be 100% historically accurate – only actual history was ever that – and attempting to do so can ham-string a good story that would otherwise resonate strongly with its modern audience. So lampshading it by making it clear that for all the truthiness, this isn’t actually the ‘truth’ seems like a good solution. Maybe there’s a general drift in that direction in the creative industries at the moment? It’s certainly what the TV series Britannia has been doing for example. Anyway, I like it and I hope the immense success of this film will encourage more in the same vein.

I still have a veeerryy long list of book, film and TV reviews to write up, and maybe I'll get to some of those later today. But first, I want to write about the thing I saw last night while it's all fresh in my mind, and that is a contemporary dance production of Dracula by the Mark Bruce Company. As ever for these things, my companion for the evening was the lovely ms_siobhan, and of course for both of us the obvious comparator was the recent ballet version by David Nixon which we also saw together at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. We were in no doubt that both were amazing, but found it much harder to decide which we thought was best. In the end, obviously, you don't have to decide (though it's a fun and often quite useful way to figure out what you think of two different performances individually) - you can have both! But their takes on the story certainly were different, and would appeal to different states of mind.

Where the ballet was very romantic, with a heavy emphasis on unfulfilled longing, last night's version was much more brutal, visceral and ghoulish. As it happens, both chose to open with scenes featuring Dracula on his own, introducing their take on the character, and the contrast between those two scenes encapsulates the difference very nicely. Ballet!Dracula rose smoothly from his coffin in a cloud of mist, completely naked apart from a very small pouch, and strode with perfect poise and balance away from the audience and out through a dark Gothic doorway at the back of the stage. It was basically all about the eroticisation of a supernaturally-powerful male body. Dance!Dracula, clothed in a slightly industrial-looking cropped-sleeved black shirt and trousers, instead performed a number which had him at times revelling similarly in his supernatural strength and power, but at others lapsing into the shambolic zombie-like movements of a reanimated corpse. Meanwhile, strong side-lighting cast dramatic highlights and shadows across his face and limbs, emphasising his non-human nature as a spectral creature of the night.

So, a very different take on the character which persisted and developed throughout the show. Ballet!Dracula was tormented by his own bloodlust, approached his victims like a fairy-tale prince, and had a (cheap, stretch-velvet) billowing cape which he used to convey the batlike side of his nature. Dance!Dracula preferred a trench-coat, didn't muck about when attacking his victims, and conveyed his bestiality rather through snarls and contortions. And obviously the same logic and feel applied throughout the show - for example, in the contrast between the ballet version of the vampire brides, who moved powerfully yet fluidly in fine billowing white robes, and the contemporary dance versions, who did much more snarling and clawing and wore ragged blood-stained dresses (with the obvious implication being that they were too monstrous and inhuman to care about the stains). In fact, there was a lot more blood all round in the dance version. I'm pretty sure we never saw any in the ballet - it was all allusive and impressionistic. But in the dance, punches were thrown, victims bitten and stakes hammered home, all to distinctly gory effect.

Both productions definitely maxed out on the Gothic aesthetic, with wrought-iron arches, dry ice, and a very great deal of black. But this one played around a little more with its temporal setting. The music used was from various different eras, ranging from the baroque to the modernist, while although the costumes centred around the Victorian / Edwardian, they nodded towards something quite modern for Lucy and Mina, and (along with the music) also switched into the early 20th-century jazz era for some scenes involving the vampires. The first of these happened when Dracula caught Jonathan Harker with his brides in the castle, whereupon the audience of course expects anger and fighting, but this was actually played out by the brides handing Dracula a top hat and cane, and him dancing to what I've worked out this morning was Arthur Collins' 1905 hit The Preacher and the Bear, while Jonathan cowered in the corner. This sounds kind of ridiculous, and I wasn't quite sure about it myself at first. But it did work as a way to convey the evil of Dracula - not just attacking his guest, but toying with him via the juxtaposition between the jolly song and his own incongruously brutal appearance, and through lyrics which make it apparent that he treats hunting his human victims as a game. And it really paid off in the second half, during Dracula's attack on Lucy, when the three vampire brides could be seen dancing the Charleston in the background. By that time, the motif had really sunk in, so that the spectre of these ghoulish creatures dancing a jazz number as Lucy died horribly had become incredibly effective and properly unsettling.

There were all sorts of other similarly clever, creative touches along the way as well. Like in the scene where the team of vampire hunters find Dracula's boxes of earth in the cellars of Carfax and crumble holy communion wafers into them. Here, the three vampire brides crouched at the corners of the stage - not really 'there' in story terms, but present all the same - winding up mechanical rats and letting them loose to run across the floor. As with the jazz dancing, on paper that sounds too silly to work, but it really did, conveying the feel of a dank and creepy cellar alive with vermin beautifully. Also very good was the handling of chase scenes, which were generally conveyed by on-the-spot running which was somehow done so effectively that you almost forgot that it was on the spot, and simply embraced the sense of movement. This was done for the carriage ride taking Jonathan to Dracula's castle in the first half, and Dracula's retreat back home with the vampire-hunters on his tail at the end - no mucking about with scenes on trains or boats here, but just a straightforward on-the-spot foot-chase, which nonetheless managed to stand effectively for an epic journey through the night across Europe. In both cases, wolf-headed dancers also appeared at certain points to run alongside the carriage or the vampire Count, helping to build the sensation of a high-speed chase in the same way that Roman artists would put in eagles or hares to show that a person was moving quickly.

Then at the end, the eventual fate of the brides was to be captured by a vampire-hunter each and strung up on the wrought-iron Gothic arches of Dracula's castle, in a way which visually resembled both the impaled victims of the real Vlad III Dracula, and (as ms_siobhan pointed out) the three figures of the Biblical crucifixion scene. Dracula himself, meanwhile, succumbed to the wiles of Mina, who embroiled him into an increasingly-frantic dance as the sun rose, so that eventually he could not escape its rays and crumpled defeated onto the floor. I always have a lot of time for Dracula productions which let Mina herself kill him (as for example in the version we saw at Kirkstall Abbey last summer the one I saw in Belfast in 2005 and of course the original 1922 Nosferatu), but with or without that the ending of last night's performance was certainly stronger than the ballet version, which I noted at the time slipped into a bit of an anti-climax after its wonderful love-duet between Dracula and Mina.

As for this production's take on the story, what I've already said above will indicate that it included some departures from the novel, but on the whole it was pretty true to the outlines of Stoker's novel. This is of course for largely the same reason as the ballet version - both stories were told silently through the medium of dance, so they relied on their audience knowing the basic story already, and any major departures from the original would be confusing. Like the ballet, though, it only had a limited time to get its story across, so some trimming was necessary. The Demeter was in this time (and was very well done), as was an excellent montage of vampire!Lucy feeding on little children, but Renfield and the asylum were out, and perhaps most surprisingly of all there was also no identifiable Van Helsing figure. Of course, this being a silent drama, none of the characters had in-story names, but the vampire-hunters were represented by three men - a doctor, a priest and a flamboyant wealthy gentleman, all of whom were suitors of Lucy and all of whom took a more or less equal role in the business of vampire-despatching. Obviously, the priest was the one whipping out crosses and communion wafers, while the other two map fairly closely to Dr. Seward and Lord Godalming, but Van Helsing was neither a priest nor a suitor, and also definitely was an outsider from the point of view of the rest of the group.

The dance style itself sometimes came quite close to ballet, including things like male-female duets in which the male dancer does a lot of lifting and supporting of the female dancer, dancing on pointed toes, etc. But there was a lot else in there this time - jazz-dancing moves, as I've mentioned, gypsy dances in a village on the way to the castle, ballroom-style dancing and all sorts of leaps and contortions which I suppose come under the general heading of modern dance. Like the ballet version we saw, this one also took advantage of the strength of its male lead to show the famous scene in which Dracula crawls head-first down the wall of his castle - but although it was clever and impressive, in all honesty this was something which the ballet version did better, both in terms of how the scene had been set up and the actual execution of the move. I think that is probably representative of the general difference between the two as performances, actually. I found myself more often wide-eyed in wonder at the technical skills and grace of the ballet performers than I did the contemporary dancers. But that is simply a matter of different genres, really, and both very definitely deployed the capabilities and motifs of their formats very well indeed to tell the sorts of stories they wanted to tell.

In the end, I mainly just want to see both of them again, which unfortunately isn't possible for live performances. I missed certain aspects of the ballet in last night's contemporary dance version - especially the homoerotic tension between Dracula and Jonathan Harker, and the vampire brides' sheer exuberance in their own femininity and vampirism. But I did enjoy the visceral brutality of this performance, and the clever creative touches like the mechanical rats and the impaled / crucified brides, while its Lucy was absolutely amazing and did get the exuberant enjoyment of her own vampirism which had rested more with the brides in the ballet. The romantic emphasis of the ballet probably reflects not only the tendencies of the genre (for all that it certainly pushed the boundaries of what ballet does very hard indeed), but also the fact that it was first developed in the 1990s, in the wake of Bram Stoker's Dracula with its Mina / Dracula love-story. By contrast, the Mark Bruce Company version is more obviously a product of the early 21st century, and reflects the grungy, visceral aesthetic which horror films have taken on in the interim (Hammer's The Woman in Black springs to mind, for example). I have room in my heart for both - though not, I should stress, for Bram Stoker's Dracula itself, which is Just Rubbish.

I included a trailer video of the ballet version in my previous review, so I shall finish by doing the same here for the Mark Bruce version:

See it if you possibly can.

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I went out to Wendyhouse last night for the first time in about two years. The least appalling selfie which I took before going out is on the right, but it is physically quite difficult to press the right button on my phone-camera without dropping it or causing massive camera-shake, so I struggled to get one which showed what I was wearing without also capturing an annoyed and frustrated expression.

The Gentlemen of Leeds were obviously well-primed to make me feel good about myself once I reached the club, though, as I got several spontaneous and very charming compliments, all of which successfully steered well clear of Creepytown:

• One made a special point of saying that he had liked my dancing. Always nice to hear.
• Another told me that my outfit looked very expensive. In Yorkshire, this sort of comment can sometimes be code for "Well, you're a bit up yourself, aren't you?", so I quickly denied anything of the sort, but it turned out that he meant it in a very genuine "You look like a million dollars" sort of way.
• And a third literally walked up to me, tapped me on the arm and said "Excuse me, would you like to dance?", which I didn't think was a phrase familiar to the Youth of Today. Furthermore, when I said that actually I had been just about to go and sit down for a while because my feet were killing me (which was true), he accepted that perfectly happily, pointed out the area of the dancefloor where I could find him if I changed my mind later, and walked away. Which shouldn't be a rare and noteworthy experience for a single woman in a nightclub, but sadly it very much is. If only all chaps would follow the same approach.

As for that bit about my feet killing me, I didn't understand why that was at the time. I thought the pair of boots I'd worn were trustworthy and comfortable, but by about half-way through the evening my toes and the balls of my feet were screaming in pain, and the dancing which I'd been complimented on earlier in the night had become more or less impossible to do. I wondered if maybe it was because I've just become even less used to wearing raised heels than I was last time I wore them, but when I got home into a properly-lit environment and took them off I discovered the truth:


That mouldy-looking grey dust stuff on the floor all around them is the remains of whatever substance used once to fill the platform soles - some kind of synthetic foam-type material, I assume. I see how that would be a good filling for platform soles in the short term, as it would keep the boots relatively light compared to (say) wood, resin or plastic, in turn making them nicer to wear and move around in. But it has obviously degenerated with age since I bought the boots ten years ago, and last night was the night when it finally gave up the ghost, collapsed in on itself and began pouring out of the sides of the soles.

This means I spent half the night with the balls of my feet supported by the sorry remnants of an empty shell, rather than a nice solid platform. But because the heels remained solid and steadfast throughout, my feet were tipped forward much more than they were supposed to be, so it's no wonder that my toes hurt and the heels seemed so much higher than I'm used to than I was expecting. Today, the backs of my calves are aching rather for the same reason, and sadly the boots are clearly a total write-off.

Alas and alack for what were once a truly faithful pair of dance-floor companions. :-(

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