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 winners Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman) and 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.
By Alex J. Berliner for Universal Pictures.
By Alex J. Berliner for Universal Pictures.
“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.”