He was speaking at the Cannes Film Festival in May, when the newly restored print of the film was given its world premiere.

The man who directed Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Casino and The Departed proclaimed: “Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger created a vision in The Red Shoes that has never really been matched.”

Scorsese was not making an overstatement: The Red Shoes still stands as an extraordinarily cinematic achievement. Powell and Pressburger’s film about a dancer (Scottish ballerina Moira Shearer, making her acting debut) torn between her career and love is loosely based on Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytale, and it shines out from their brilliant canon of work.

It eclipses the other glorious colour collaborations of Britain’s greatest film-making partnership: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death and Black Narcissus. In recognition of its audio and visual beauty, it won Oscars for colour art design and for music. Even

by today’s digitally enhanced standards, the Technicolor splendour of Powell, Pressburger and their recently deceased cinematographer Jack Cardiff’s film continues to astonish.

Yet The Red Shoes languished in pre-restoration hell for many years. Until May, the film was only available to see on 35mm prints of variable quality. Despite it being released on VHS and DVD and playing in cinemas (as, for just one example, part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival’s 60th-edition Michael Powell retrospective), the viewing experience has been marred by old and damaged prints suffering from faded and distorted colours, scratches and other visible marks, and a loss in sound quality.

Now, at long last, The Red Shoes is finally ready to be seen as it was originally intended by its makers, thanks to a painstaking restoration project initiated by Powell’s great admirer and personal friend Scorsese through his non-profit organisation The Film Foundation.

Working in collaboration with the University of Central Los Angeles Film and Television Archive, the British Film Institute and ITV Global Entertainment (owner of the distribution rights), The Film Foundation has returned The Red Shoes to its former glory -- and Glasgow-based classic films distributor Park Circus (whose motto is “putting films back where they belong”) is ensuring it shines at a cinema near you.

When the new print had its UK premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival this June, the notes from the ­festival’s artistic ­director Hannah McGill read: “This 1948 classic is a unique achievement -- a lush, intense fable of self-sacrifice in the name of art and love, with visuals of hallucinatory beauty.

“Always recognised as one of the most beautiful films of all time, The Red Shoes has now undergone a painstaking digital restoration over 18 months, the spectacular results of which can be seen here on a brand new 35mm print.”

They certainly were. During a presentation held prior to the screening of the new print, the audience was treated to a series of before-and-after comparisons of the old print with the restored one. The difference in quality was so great that’s its hard to imagine how anyone ever watched and enjoyed The Red Shoes in recent years. The subsequent screening of the full and fully restored film was, for many, the highlight of

the festival.

One of those was Fiona Maxwell, director of operations at ITV Global, who was on hand to explain the complex restoration process. “I watched the film with audiences in Cannes and in Edinburgh,” Maxwell says, “and seeing those vibrant colours punching out of the screen seemed like a very modern experience despite the film being over 60 years old.

But what was important in this restoration was to keep the filmic look: the lovely softness Powell and Pressburger had intended.”

That involved combining new technology with old. The Red Shoes was originally printed as a three-strip nitrate negative with the three layers proving the ­colours -- yellow, magenta and cyan -- needed to create Technicolor. These layers, or strips, had faded and shrunk over the years, creating uneven fringes of colour. That was one problem. Another was how the delicate nitrate had been stored in the past -- badly, allowing it to become mouldy.

 

Nevertheless, the nitrate remained the best element to work from to restore the film, because it was the original camera negative and thus the best original source.

Because of the amount of clean-up work involved, the negative was scanned at a very high resolution and all the restoration work -- scratch removal, colour correction, sound retrieval, cleaning off the mould that had happened in storage, getting the three strips into proper registration -- was done digitally. Once this was completed, the restored images were output on to a new 35mm negative, thus preserving that “lovely softness” Maxwell talks about.

“It’s very important to restore and preserve these films,” ­Maxwell says, “because what are your assets if you don’t preserve the originals? We’ve seen all these different formats for films come and go, but the quality of a 35mm print and negative is way above any of the current high-definition technology. There is nothing like being able to go back to an original negative. If we didn’t preserve those, we might lose films forever.”

John Letham, the managing director of Park Circus, says The Red Shoes warranted and will benefit from restoration and theatrical reissue. “As a distributor we look at films and ask ourselves whether or not they will work back in the cinema,” Letham says. “Modern technology is very unforgiving and some old films no longer look right in cinemas.

“The Red Shoes certainly does still look right, not least because of the way it was filmed. It is a spectacle. And people nowadays expect a certain

quality. If a film is 60 years old and it shows in the print

quality, that’s not good. Many films deserve restoration, but few deserve restoration to the degree that The Red Shoes does.”

Classic films are benefiting from being restored and re-issued in cinemas with increasing ­frequency, and Letham is convinced there’s an audience.

“People are more responsive now,” he says. “Ironically, DVD has helped a lot, because you get a lot of director’s commentaries and other extra elements that have educated the audience [Scorsese’s introduction to The Red Shoes on the DVD and BluRay releases already out being one pertinent example]. Also, digital technology now allows us to strike new prints of classic titles in an affordable way and show them not just in arthouse cinemas but in multiplexes as well.

“Interestingly,” Letham adds, “when we do exit polls the number one reason why people come and see these films is because they’re already

familiar with them and wanted to see them on the big screen. So they want to experience something they know and like in the best way possible.”

 

The Red Shoes is back in cinemas on December 11.

 

Read this week’s Sunday Herald Arts for the behind-the-scenes story of this classic British movie.