Action and Agency in The Red Shoes

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's ballet musical The Red Shoes (1948) is concerned with topics surrounding phenomenology, action, and embodied agency, and that it exploits resources that are uniquely cinematic in order to “do philosophy.” I argue that the film does philosophy in two ways. First, it explicates a phenomenological model of action and agency. Second, it addresses itself to the philosophical question of whether an individual's non-reflective movements – those that are not the result of deliberation or practical reasoning – are properly understood to be actions attributable to her as her own.