10 great ballet films

The 1948 edition of The Ballet Annual includes a piece by critic A.H. Franks in which he describes the International Ballet’s production of The Sleeping Princess at the Gaumont State Cinema in Kilburn, London. Franks is baffled by the presentation of a ballet in a cinema, and he bemusedly quotes an old lady sitting behind him: “Isn’t it lovely, dear? But what a pity we aren’t sitting a little nearer the stage. I haven’t heard a single word of it!”

Director Asif Kapadia sees his latest venture, Creature, featuring the English National Ballet choreographed by Akram Khan, as an exercise in “pure cinema”. That is, a return to the silent mode, of narrative told through bodily expression. The relationship between ballet, as Franks’s anecdote shows, has been a fraught one. Critic George Borodin wrote in 1946 that it would be “sacrilegious to write of [cinema and ballet] in the same sentence and class them together”.

Two years later, impresario Boris Lermontov, in Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948), objects to seeing dance at a party, because for him ballet is a religion which ought not be practised “in atmosphere such as this”. Kapadia sees no such boundary between the arts, and with Creature he combines cinematographic techniques with Khan’s choreography in a unique full-length ballet film, by contrast to the front-on filmed ballets regularly streamed in cinemas. This list looks at 10 examples from the history of ballet on film over the past century, thriving together in spite of certain snobberies.

French director Alice Guy-Blaché made some of the earliest dance films, including several ‘Serpentine dances’ performed by its originator, Loïe Fuller, to celebrate cinema’s ability to capture movement and light. As features developed, American filmmakers Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley directed the most famous prima ballerina in the world, Anna Pavlova, in The Dumb Girl of Portici in 1916. A silent opera adaptation, the film features a surprisingly minimal amount of ballet.

While Pavlova did not star in another feature, she was filmed dancing her signature piece, ‘The Dying Swan’ in 1925. Choreographed by Michel Fokine in 1905, the dance was set to ‘The Swan’ from Saint-Saëns’s The Carnival of the Animals and was inspired by both Pavlova’s affection for the swans in a Leningrad public park and the Tennyson poem after which it is named. She performed the dance almost 4,000 times and is reported to have exclaimed on her deathbed, “Prepare my swan costume!” This film has rendered Pavlova’s beauty immortal.

Director: Maya Deren

Filming ballet prior to the Second World War largely used static framing with the action solely taking place within the choreography itself. With A Study in Choreography for Camera, American experimental filmmaker Maya Deren created a dance not only through movement but also through the editing process. Deren shared a fascination with Haitian rituals with choreographer Katherine Dunham, who introduced her to one of her students, African American choreographer Talley Beatty. Known for his fusions of jazz and ballet, their collaboration aimed to use film as a means of exploring dance across cultures and artistic forms.

By cutting between landscapes and continents, Deren found a way to free Beatty’s body from any singular time or place into the space of the film itself. The short demonstrated the potential of a line of continuous movement to be drawn through cross-cuts, making the camera itself a part of the dance shown on the screen.

Directors: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

In Michael Powell’s memoirs, he reflected that during the Second World War Britons were told to die for freedom and democracy, while The Red Shoes told them “to go and die for art”. Powell termed the film’s unique fusion of music, dance and image as “composed cinema”, an ideal which led him to develop further attempts at a Gesamtkunstwerk, or ‘total artwork’, including The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) and Oh… Rosalinda!! (1955).

The film’s success at putting ballet on screen came from ignoring balletomane snobberies to cast real dancers and choreographers, especially Moira Shearer, Ludmilla Tchérina, Robert Helpmann and Léonide Massine, in lead roles. They spiral around the Svengali-like impresario Lermontov, delectably played by Anton Walbrook, who stands in for Powell pushing the art of ballet to the extremes of imagination. Not least for its spectacular 17-minute centrepiece, every film featuring ballet since owes a debt to The Red Shoes.

Director: Chantal Akerman

In 2011, German director Wim Wenders made a 3D documentary about the choreography of Pina Bausch, who died during production. The film was completed as a retrospective tribute, largely by the dancers of Bausch’s company, Tanztheater Wuppertal, featuring excerpts from her choreographies of The Rite of Spring, Café Müller, Kontakthof and Vollmond.

For a more personal look at Bausch’s methods and career, Chantal Akerman’s One Day Pina Asked… is a beautiful companion film. Akerman asks incisive questions of Bausch and her dancers, and captures the details of a fellow genius’s creative process. A most affecting scene sees a male dancer perform the Gershwin song ‘The Man I Love’ to camera in sign language, which is later performed on stage to a laughing audience. It’s a poignant moment about the varied interpretations of the audience, and how ballet can elicit wildly varying emotional responses.

Director: Frederick Wiseman

The American documentarist Frederick Wiseman has crafted a unique style of filmmaking since 1967’s Titicut Follies, presenting incisive portraits of institutions from hospitals and schools to art galleries and public libraries. He has made two documentaries about ballet, the first about the American Ballet Theatre in 1995, and the second about the Paris Opera Ballet in 2009. Both are more interested in the mechanisms of the theatres than in the dancing itself.

To achieve this wider vision of the dance industry, 1995’s Ballet not only shows rehearsals but also business transactions and board meetings unseen by the theatre’s patrons. The film runs for 170 minutes, with each segment allowed space to breathe without exposition or narration, giving a rounded impression of how ballet functions during a regular season. It is the machinations of the dance world beyond the stage that provide the source of fascination.

Director: Stephen Daldry

Ballet, like all live arts, can be broadly inaccessible due to ticket prices and location. Especially for working-class people, ballet carries an association that leads to labels of ‘elitism’ and rigid forms of gender stereotyping. With Billy Elliot, writer Lee Hall and director Stephen Daldry tackled these assumptions about ballet head-on, setting the film in County Durham during the 1984 to 1985 miners’ strike. The film did a lot to challenge the taboos of ballet ‘not being for’ certain people and, with its subsequent musical adaptation by Elton John, inspired more young boys to train as dancers.

The film’s ending sees the adult Billy Elliot dancing the role of the lead swan in Matthew Bourne’s groundbreaking 1998 production of Swan Lake. Bourne has staged and toured a number of radical productions aimed at bringing ballet to a wider audience, including several adaptations of films, The Red Shoes among them.

Director: Robert Altman

While there have been multiple successors to The Red Shoes that depict the inner workings of ballet, including Herbert Ross’s 1977 film The Turning Point, Robert Altman’s The Company is the most incisive. The film is set within the Joffrey Ballet, an American company and training institution based in Chicago and founded in 1956 by Robert Joffrey and Gerald Arpino. Their work brought ballet to a mainstream audience, with a list of classical ballet firsts to their name, including performing at the White House, appearing on US television, using multimedia, setting productions to rock music, and appearing on the cover of TIME magazine.

The film’s screenplay was collated by Barbara Turner from real stories told by Joffrey Ballet dancers, choreographers and staff, with a fictionalised version of Arpino portrayed by Malcolm McDowell. The result is a non-linear structure akin to one of Wiseman’s documentaries, including excerpts from a smattering of contemporary dance pieces.

Director: Sandra Goldbacher

The children’s novel Ballet Shoes: A Story of Three Children on the Stage by Noel Streatfeild was a huge success when it was published in 1936, inspiring generations of young girls with a love for dance. Streatfeild’s story follows three adopted sisters, Pauline, Petrova and Posy Fossil, as they navigate the early stages of ballet schooling. The book has been adapted by the BBC twice, first in 1975, and secondly as a film adapted by Heidi Thomas and directed by Sandra Goldbacher in 2007.

The film marked a break for Emma Watson away from the Harry Potter franchise, starring alongside Yasmin Paige and Lucy Boynton, and served to reintroduce Streatfeild’s beautiful books to a new 21st-century generation. The film features several ballets, including an adaptation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that highlights the uncomfortable competition that ballet often creates between young dancers. Nonetheless, it’s a rosier vision of ballet than many of the other films here.

Director: Darren Aronofsky

The alignment of ballet and horror goes back to The Red Shoes and its use of dance as a means of entering the troubled mind of Victoria Page. Jack Cardiff’s cinematography used spinning point-of-view shots to align the camera with the perspective of the dancer, in contrast to the traditional proscenium view. The same technique can be seen in both versions of Suspiria (1977 and 2018), and was used to great effect by Darren Aronofsky in Black Swan.

Starring Natalie Portman as ballerina Nina, who is cast as Odette/Odile in a production of Swan Lake at the New York City Ballet, the film takes ballet’s physical and mental drive for perfection and explodes it into a violent display of self-destruction. The final scenes, with a distorted adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s music by Clint Mansell, combine Matthew Libatique’s cinematography with intense lighting and CGI to create an even more nightmarish theatrical vision than Powell and Pressburger were able to explore six decades prior.

Director: Damien Manivel

Where ballet is combined with film, it’s often framed within a narrative in order to appeal to a mainstream cinema audience. Perhaps the greatest ballet films are those which move beyond that limitation and present ballet wordlessly and encourage viewers to engage with dance purely for itself. Documentaries about choreographers Merce Cunningham (2019) and Alvin Ailey (2021) feature extended sequences that allow their dances to stand on their own.

The best of the genre is Damien Manivel’s Isadora’s Children, which explores dancer and choreographer Isadora Duncan solely through contemporary performance. The film restages her dance ‘Mother’, which was inspired by the deaths of her two children in an automobile accident in 1913, in three very different settings, reflecting the meaning of the ballet to different women today. It’s a powerful testament to the potency of dance in expressing through movement that which cannot be spoken with words.