The Tales of Hoffmann. 1951. UK. Directed by Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger. Screenplay by Powell, Pressburger, based on the opera by Jacques Offenbach. With Moira Shearer, Robert Helpmann, Léonide Massine, Robert Rounseville, Ludmilla Tchérina, Pamela Brown. DCP courtesy Rialto Pictures. 128 min.
“Powell and Pressburger’s subversive, audacious take on Offenbach’s opera drew on some of the greatest film, music, and dance talents of the period. Transforming it into a phantasmagoria of feverish colours, the sensual and unsettling delights include Tchérina as a 19th-century dominatrix, a chorus of pan-sexual mannequins who appear to have raided Marc Bolan’s dressing-up box, and Shearer’s dismembered but still-blinking head” (BFI).
Digital restoration by the BFI National Archive and The Film Foundation, in association with Studiocanal. Restoration funding provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the Franco-American Cultural Fund, a unique partnership between the Directors Guild of America (DGA); the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA); the Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs de Musique (SACEM); and the Writers Guild of America, West (WGAW), The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the Louis B. Mayer Foundation and The Film Foundation.