No dance film can ever top The Red Shoes, the lush 1948 Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger film about a young ballerina torn between love of her art, an ambitious composer and the impresario who runs the ballet company. It is essentially a double telling of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes, a tale about a young woman who puts on the titular pieces of footwear and finds herself forced to dance until she dies. The film stops dead halfway through to present a 17-minute long ballet sequence that mixes virtuoso dancing (by star Moira Shearer, a ballerina before she was an actress but great at both) with fantastical camera work, as in the segment in which she dances with a man who turns into a corporeal newspaper. The second part of this unforgettable scene is excerpted above.