This article is concerned with representations of artistic work and labour in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948). In contrast to previous readings, which have tended to emphasise the film’s variously inauthentic, impressionistic or ‘magical’ depictions of labour, I suggest the film offers us two much more earthly lessons about the nature of artmaking. Firstly, the film quite consistently reveals that the performance of art is not so much a supernatural or transcendent labour but one that is derived from (and visibly demonstrates) some of the material conditions and the personal and social relations necessary for its production. Secondly, the film’s seemingly archaic and stylised representations of workplace politics offer some instructive insights that resonate with more recent debates on the unequal social organisation of artistic labour – or as I prefer to term it, ‘cultural work’.
Mark Banks (Thu,) studied this question.