The Cinematheque

“[In] The Tales of Hoffmann, the music and choreography are for both the dancers and the camera … This is something that stayed with me in my work over the years; in all my films the choreography of the camera played to the music and the two are combined, complementary to each other.”

Martin Scorsese

A deliriously stylish, fantastical fusion of opera, ballet, and cinema, Powell and Pressburger’s impossibly sumptuous Tales of Hoffmann is based on the Jacques Offenbach opéra fantastique, and has been cited by Martin Scorsese as a major influence on both New York, New York and Raging Bull. Three Gothic tales of unrequited love by Romantic poet E.T.A. Hoffmann, plus prologue and epilogue, unfold in a lavish, no-holds-barred extravaganza of excess and expressionism in glorious Technicolor. The narratives, featuring Red Shoes performers Moira Shearer (whose centenary is this year), Léonide Massine, and Ludmilla Tchérina, encompass a panoply of transformations, by means of magic or technology. Ballerinas, automatons, sorcerers, ghosts, and mirrors all serve as vessels for amorous entanglements. This restored version includes the final segment that was originally excised from British release prints, returning the film to the full-length form that won a Special Jury Prize at Cannes.

“The movie that made me want to make movies … My favourite film of all time.”

George A. Romero

“The team was never as grand or as wildly sensual as in The Tales of Hoffmann … A mega-terrarium of living puppet people, greasepaint, distorted scale, dream spaces, toychest clutter, unstoppered swoonings, and free-for-all quasi-antique design.”

Michael Atkinson, Village Voice