An exclusive group of industry professionals, Oscar winners, and cinephiles gathered in Los Angeles Wednesday night to celebrate a beloved 76-year-old film: The Red Shoes.
The special screening of the Oscar-nominated Powell and Pressburger classic, about a ballerina torn between pursuing her passion for art or seeking romantic love, was hosted by the California-based Friends of the British Film Institute and Universal (who distributed the film domestically) to raise awareness and support for the British Film Institute’s (BFI) National Archive.
Studio chairman and chief content officer Donna Langley welcomed the crowd to the event, held at Universal’s new special events structure, The Commons. Langley said she was proud to showcase The Red Shoes, one of her own personal favorites. “I grew up in England and I was a dancer, and so it meant a lot to me. It also probably inspired me to give up dancing,” she joked. “But the preservation of our films is so important, as we all know, and the BFI does it better than anybody.”
The BFI National Archive is one of the world’s most expansive collections of film, television and the moving image. The organization’s chief executive, Ben Roberts, touted the millions of critical pieces of film and television history hosted in the archive, and their efforts to showcase those projects as well as involve new generations in the conservation of their collection. “Not everyone thinks archives are sexy, and I think we do. People think of them as lockups where things are going to be safe, but really, it’s about how do you bring them back to life,” he said. “We save films, we restore films, and we want to get them back in front of the public. Because there’s no point in having a collection as great as ours if we can’t get the public watching it.”
The special screening of The Red Shoes, which was restored in 2009 by UCLA Film and Television Archive, in association with the BFI, received enthusiastic applause from the audience, an exclusive group comprised of first-time viewers as well as longtime fans. Attendees included cohost Barbara Broccoli, the James Bond franchise producer and board director of The Friends of BFI; actor Danny Huston; and Oscar winner Daniel Scheinert (Everything Everywhere All at Once).
Following the screening, guests mingled at a reception where several unique items from the Powell and Pressburger collection were on display: an early draft of The Red Shoes script, an original storyboard of a scene from the film, and Powell’s personal correspondence with superfan Kate Bush. Roberts and Claire Smith, BFI’s senior curator of special collections, were delighted by the positive reactions they received and observed.
“It’s pretty reaffirming why this work matters,” Roberts said. “It’s also hard work, and it’s expensive work. Conservation specialists are an aging workforce, and that needs to be addressed, so we are very keen to tell the story of film preservation. We recently advertised [openings] for two 6-month trainee-ships and we got about 200 applications, so that gives me hope.”
Smith said that they are enjoying the process of sussing out how to showcase more archival work. “It’s a real opportunity for us to meet, to share, to connect to kind of understand what other archives and organizations are doing,” she said. “We’d love to be able to do much, much more, but we’re so happy with the emotional response we’re getting from people. Raising awareness of the archive and what archives do and preservation as an act—to mobilize it, bring it out, get it to audiences and reactivate the material in new and exciting ways.”
This story has been updated.
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