The Red Shoes

• Directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger

• Starring Moira Shearer as Victoria Page

• Context: A visually stunning film that follows a young ballerina torn between her career and her personal life. She is cast in a ballet based on Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of red shoes that never allow their wearer to stop dancing—eventually driving her to madness and death.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

The Red Shoes is often interpreted as a poetic warning about the conflict between art and life. Through Foucault’s lens, however, it becomes something more terrifying: a cinematic anatomy of aesthetic governmentality, where the subject is produced by institutional desires, disciplined through performance, and ultimately destroyed by the very autonomy she was trained to internalize.

The central figure, Victoria Page, does not simply desire to dance—she becomes, in Foucault’s terms, a subject constructed by the dispositif of ballet. Her will to perform is not innate; it is installed through mechanisms of praise, surveillance, repetition, and symbolic reward. Every step in her rise is conditioned by the institution’s gaze, especially by the impresario Boris Lermontov, who acts as a figure of aesthetic sovereignty—demanding total devotion and denying any division of loyalty.

Lermontov’s famous line—“The music is all that matters. Nothing but the music”—reflects what Foucault would call an ethic of absolute subjectivation. The subject must disappear in order for the work to exist. The dancer must erase her personal life, emotional ambivalence, even her own bodily limits. She is no longer a human being, but an instrument of aesthetic necessity, shaped by choreography, makeup, costumes, lighting, and narrative demand.

The red shoes themselves are not magic—they are the visual metaphor for disciplinary continuity. Once worn, they cannot be taken off. They are the apparatus made flesh. For Foucault, they operate like the modern confessional: once you enter into the regime of truth—the stage, the institution, the role—you are no longer free to exit without loss of self.

Victoria’s collapse is not madness in the classical sense. Rather, it is a breakdown of the aesthetic self, overwhelmed by contradictory imperatives: love and art, presence and erasure, obedience and desire. The institution demands purity, but also spectacle; submission, but also power. This double bind mirrors Foucault’s theory of modern power: it does not prohibit—it produces, but in ways that trap the subject in internal contradictions.

The ballet within the film—a meta-performance of The Red Shoes—becomes a stage of total knowledge. Every lighting cue, costume change, and camera angle is an act of aesthetic surveillance. The body of the ballerina is not free—it is inscribed, captured in a system of aesthetic expectations that are themselves historical, gendered, and violent. The transition from rehearsal to performance is the transition from practice to sacrament, from training to revelation.

When Victoria ultimately leaps to her death, torn between the stage and her lover, it is not personal failure. Foucault would see it as the logical end of the subject who has become indistinguishable from the institution’s demand. Her final line—"Take off the red shoes"—is not a request. It is a tragic recognition that the subject, once constituted by the institution, cannot unmake herself.

Thus, The Red Shoes is not a melodrama.

It is a filmic dispositif, dramatizing the violent, beautiful, and inescapable construction of the performing subject under the modern aesthetic regime.

The dancer does not die because she cannot choose.

She dies because choice was never structurally available to her.